I asked that question of David Meerrman Scott, author of 10 books with the most popular being the classic,The New Rules of Marketing and PR: How to Use Social Media, Online Video, Mobile Applications, Blogs, News Releases, and Viral Marketing to Reach Buyers Directly. This book is now in its 5th edition and nearing 1 Million copies sold. David is my podcast guest next week and what a way to kick off the new year but with a set of New Rules.
Joe: In the book, you take some updated thinking maybe concepts of marketing and PR, and discuss it in a sales and service concept now, are the same rules applying? Is this kind of all meshing together?
David Meerman Scott: I think that there is some convergence between what traditionally we would call marketing and public relations and what we would traditionally call sales and service. I wrote a book called The New Rules of Sales and Service as well. There’s a chapter in the new edition, the 5th edition of The New Rules of Marketing and PR about how that convergence is happening and how sales is now much more aligned with marketing than it used to be. I mean it used to be, for example, back in the day, I used to be a bag carrying sales person at several different technology companies, and it used to be that marketing was about generating leads and then sales people were about closing leads at B2B companies. 
I don’t think that’s the case anymore because I think marketing can create content that will drive people into an organization. But, that content that marketing creates can serve as a tool to help the sales people do their job going forward. I think the real difference between marketing and sales today is that marketing is about reaching many people at once, whereas, sales is about reaching one person at a time. Yet, both of those endeavors on the web use great content and use the tools of electronic communications, and so many of us now are doing our buying products and services on the web.
Maybe at some point, you meet with a human being but a lot of that process, a lot more of that process happens online than it ever did. I think that conversions become you’ve got one set of people or one set of tools that are reaching many people at once, and then another set of people are or and another set of tools that are reaching people one at a time, yet both of them are still content driven, both of them are still web-driven, both of them are still about how you can relate to your buyers.
About DM Scott: The New Rules of Marketing & PR opened people’s eyes to the new realities of marketing and public relations on the Web. Six months on the BusinessWeek bestseller list and published in more than twenty languages, New Rules is now a modern business classic. He has a popular blog and participated in hundreds of speaking engagements around the world give him a singular perspective on how businesses are implementing new strategies to reach buyers.