MARKETING VS SALES
THE DIFFERENCE SMALL BUSINESS OWNERS KEEP GETTING WRONG
If you've spent the last six months posting content, tweaking your captions, and adding a call to action to every single post, you'd be forgiven for thinking you're "doing sales." You're not. You're marketing. And there's a very good chance that's exactly why you're not making enough money.
This came up again and again in our recent HoLT workshop, Sort Your Sales Before September, run by Alex Coward and Hannah Walker. Room full of freelancers and small business owners, all working hard, all convinced they were "trying everything," and almost none of them were actually selling. So let's clear it up properly.
What's the actual difference between marketing and sales?
Alex put it simply: marketing is advertising, and sales is negotiating. Two different jobs. People conflate them constantly, telling themselves "I'm doing loads of sales, I'm selling all the time," when really they're just marketing, and marketing on its own doesn't pay the bills.
Hannah's test for telling the two apart is even more useful. Ask yourself: is this a one-to-one thing, or a one-to-many?
Posting on social media, sending an email to your list, adding a call to action to a post: that's marketing. One message, sent to many people at once.
The moment someone clicks that link, replies to your DM, or gets on a call with you: that's when sales actually starts. One conversation, with one person, moving them towards a decision.
Marketing gets you seen. Sales gets you paid.
Why we all default to marketing instead
There's a reason so many small business owners pour their energy into content and avoid sales conversations altogether: marketing feels safer. It's one-to-many, so there's distance. Sales is one-to-one, direct, and, as Hannah put it, it can feel genuinely confronting.
Add in years of "gurus" telling us that if we just post the right thing with the right caption, our dream clients will slide into our DMs and throw money at us, and it's no wonder marketing feels like the whole job. It isn't. As Hannah bluntly reminded the room, that inbound-only fantasy just doesn't happen in the real world.
The shop window analogy
Think of your business as a shop. Your marketing, your social media, your emails, your content, is the front window. It's the beautiful display that gets people to stop and look.
Sales is what happens once they're standing at that window, or better still, once they've stepped inside and you're having a conversation with them. Nobody buys anything just by looking through the glass. Someone still has to open the door, greet them, understand what they need, and close the sale.
Inbound vs outbound: the ratio nobody wants to hear
Hannah split sales activity into two types:
Inbound sales: someone sees your marketing and comes to you. As Hannah put it, "inbound sales is marketing wearing a fancy hat." It still relies on people finding you, and on most platforms only a tiny slice of your audience ever sees your content in the first place.
Outbound sales: you go to them. DMs, sales calls, follow-ups, outreach. The (often) uncomfortable stuff.
If you're currently struggling to make sales, the ratio Hannah recommends is roughly 20% inbound, 80% outbound. Uncomfortable to hear, but it's the bit most people skip, and it's also the bit that actually moves the needle.
Why you need both
Alex summed up why neither one works alone with a quote worth pinning above your desk: "A sales problem you have today is a marketing problem you had three months ago." Your marketing builds the awareness and trust that makes future sales conversations easier. But without the sales conversations themselves, the awareness never turns into income. You simply can't have one without the other.
A quick self-check
Before you write another piece of content, ask yourself two questions Hannah uses with every client, because everything else is just marketing:
What problem does my ideal client have, right now?
How much money do they have to solve it?
Then look honestly at the last 7 to 14 days. How many actual sales activities have you done: outreach messages, DM conversations, sales calls, follow-ups? Not posts. Not captions. Actual one-to-one conversations.
If the answer is "not many," that's not a personal failing. It's simply a sign nobody's ever properly shown you the difference between the two. Now you know it.
Where to go from here
Marketing and sales are both essential, but they're not the same job, and doing more of one won't fix a shortage of the other. If you've been marketing hard and wondering why the sales aren't following, it's time to start having the one-to-one conversations that actually convert.
This is exactly what we dug into inside the full Sort Your Fkn Sales Workshop masterclass with Alex Coward and Hannah Walker, available now for HoLT members in the resource library.
You can join The HoLT here, and learn new skills every week in our expert masterclasses, alongside 500+ friendly, generous small business owners and solopreneurs.
