Marketing is creating the demand in the market while sales is fulfilling that demand. Marketing is more related with branding while sales is related with one on one marketing. For example, when you do all activities to reach mass audiences
and consumers to create demand then you are doing marketing and when you are reaching with your prospects one by one via direct calls then you are doing sales. It means sales is a direct activity while marketing is indirect activity.In small firms usually marketing and sales both are handled by the same department while in the big firms or organizations there are different departments for both the activities.
Marketing creates a brand image of the product or service while sales is only related with selling the product or service. Both the activities are interrelated at the some point of the time. When a person is doing marketing then he is doing sales on a large scale while when a person selling then at the same time he is doing marketing.
Without marketing you can not sale the product or service. Therefore marketing is more important than sales.
There is one more important difference between marketing and sales and that is the focus. Marketing focuses on long term concerns while sales is related with short term focus.
Marketing is related with educating and creating awareness of the product or service in the market. Sales is also related with educating and creating awareness but the difference is scale. Marketing does these activities on a huge scale while sales does these activities on very short scale and most of the times one on one basis. Sales is more related with interpersonal and interaction with prospects.
