Having worked with large marketing departments, I have decided I don’t like marketing at all. It tends to follow psychological tactics to gain attention, often in deceptive or underhanded ways. You van see this by looking at the kind of features products like Hubspot offer: lots of creepy “tracking” of leads.
Contrast with sales: sales is about directly showing people your product and getting them to buy it because it helps them solve problems in their business. It’s much more honest, both the offering and the end goal.
On my current project I will be starting and finishing with sales (direct) and any content that supports that goal. Tweets, blogs, SEO and spammy landing pages? Nope.
There are all sorts of deceptive tactics used in Sales as well.
I think it all boils down to your personal professionalism and culture in the end: some people choose to go the easy route, some people don’t. Unfortunately, mass culture of both Sales and Marketing industries seems to heavily rely on deception today.
Could it be that the reason you contrast Marketing with Sales is because you’ve seen how marketing industry (and mass culture in modern marketing) works, but your sales experience was of a different kind?
I don't know. The sales dept I worked most closely with was for a utility company, which is extremely price competitive, so the hustlers who go out there to sell to people can be pretty aggressive tactically, but I still find that if you ignore the pushiness, it's mostly honest and above board. (Used cars salespeople have a bit of a different reputation on honesty I hear but I don't have direct experience there).
Whereas marketing, it's in the DNA of the whole industry to be sneaky, even creepy. The constant tracking, the bending and distortion of truths, the dark patterns and deceptive practices, it's pretty rotten. Count up all the trackers and spyware installed on the average website. Guess who pushed to get them all installed? Almost certainly the marketing department.
There are honest folk who work in marketing and genuinely care about the product, the customer, and approach their job ethically, but from what I've seen they're in the minority.
Having worked with large marketing departments, I have decided I don’t like marketing at all. It tends to follow psychological tactics to gain attention, often in deceptive or underhanded ways. You van see this by looking at the kind of features products like Hubspot offer: lots of creepy “tracking” of leads.
Contrast with sales: sales is about directly showing people your product and getting them to buy it because it helps them solve problems in their business. It’s much more honest, both the offering and the end goal.
On my current project I will be starting and finishing with sales (direct) and any content that supports that goal. Tweets, blogs, SEO and spammy landing pages? Nope.