Are you marketing or are you selling? I see a lot of authors and others who say they have trouble doing marketing. Yet when I see them they are trying to sell something, Now selling is part of marketing but it is not all or even most of marketing.

Marketing and selling involve two different skill sets and being good at one does not mean you are or will be good in the other. This is not to say the two are unrelated; they are quite connected, they just aren’t synonymous.  Marketing is getting your product or service in front of your market. Selling is getting them to buy it. You can be great at one and terrible at the other. For example you’re great at getting in front of your target audience but have trouble closing or you can sell ice in a snowstorm but you have trouble getting in front of the right buyers. Most people have some aptitude for both. Both can be enhanced by proper training and knowledge. However knowing one does not mean you know the other.

For myself I am much better at marketing than selling, though I’ve done both professionally.  And if you looked at my professional experiences it would just prove the point. Lol  There’s surprisingly little overlap between the two despite the strong link between the two. Lead generation could be seen as a form of marketing and end of the funnel marketing could be seen as selling but the focus and approach are usually quite different than what a traditional marketer or salesperson would use respectively. Yet, I often see the expected results of each to be as if they were the same. What I mean is that I often see the expectation of marketing to result in sales and the salesperson to create a market for his or her product. Now often the roles of marketer and salesperson are concentrated in one person or department with smaller companies and with a sole proprietor, such as a self published author in which the roles are taken on by a single person. But even if the same person is doing the role of marketing and sales that doesn’t mean they should hold the same expectation from the activity of one vs the other. It would be like expecting your customer sales activities to take care of your accounting responsibilities. Now one may influence and affect the other. And doing some customer service activities might involve some aspect of accounting (like taking a customer’s call and checking their account balance and taking payment for a bill) this does not mean customer service is an accounting activity nor would taking care of a customer complaint while taking a customer’s payment make accounting part of the customer service department.

There is a connectivity to all activities within a company, having all your departments in silos is as bad as thinking that all departments are interchangeable. As an self published author this is equal to thinking that one activity has the same effect as another, that your writing equals your marketing which equals your accounts or in the case of siloing that you can just write and let someone else take care of your accounting responsibilities and another your marketing with no involvement or oversight; this could easily lead to someone taking advantage of you and stealing your money or misrepresentation because what you think and the person doing the marketing has a different idea all together. 

If you’re marketing it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re selling and if you’re selling it doesn’t necessarily mean you have good marketing. I think that’s the biggest thing I want to get across, especially for self published authors. When you’re looking at your sales and wondering what you should be doing or if you think you suck at marketing your book because your sales suck those aren’t the same thing. It’s not your marketing you need to be looking at, it’s your selling and sales technique.  And if you’re looking to see where you were successful marketing and all you’re looking  at is sales then that’s not going to give you the best answer. Look at your sales for selling, look for your message for marketing. 

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I’m thinking of adding more to this. The idea of marketing vs selling. Marketing ideas and selling ideas especially as related to self publishing. It won’t be a regular thing and I’m no expert. It will just be my thoughts and observations. I’ll try to have some way to link the posts together. Maybe a hashtag or something. Let me know if that would be something you’d enjoy or if you enjoyed this post. Or even if you disagree, as long as you do so respectfully. Thanks.