Marketing ≠ Advertising ≠ Sales As a tech guy, it took me a lot longer than I like to admit to fully understand this. There is tons of money in advertising, but most of it is wasted: As the old saying goes, "I know half my advertising budget is wasted - the problem is I don't know which half!"

And for the record, the last one (sales) is what really matters. As another old saying goes, "Nothing happens until you get a purchase order."

Really aligning sales incentives with the company's goals is surprisingly rare, and seems much rarer now than it was 20 years ago becasue of digital media.