Good post from Bruce Cleveland, Wildcat Venture Partners, key excerpt:
Sales and Marketing are vastly different functions that require substantially different personalities, skills, and decades of experience to master.
Someone who is a head of Sales must have an in-depth understanding of current key deals in the sales pipeline, a deep sense of the probability of whether those deals will close, and what it will take for them to close. Sales is primarily a 1:1, short-term focus game and success is predicated upon a career of working closely with potential buyers and companies. In many cases, the sales role may require someone to travel and meet with prospects to gauge for themselves whether or not a deal is really a deal. Sales is the realm of great oral communicators.
The head of Marketing, on the other hand, must develop and maintain an in-depth understanding of the overall market and the company's brand in that market. To do this, the Marketing executive must constantly work with industry analysts, the media, execute tradeshows, develop presentations and material for keynotes, and generate content for the web and social media.
I think this is relevant to our industry as well.
