Seven Reasons to Pump Your Marketing Muscles Not Your Sales Muscles

By Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan, Organisational Provocateur

Peter Drucker once said, "Foreign managers take marketing seriously. In most American companies marketing still means no more than systematic selling. Foreigners today have absorbed more fully the true meaning of marketing: Showing what is value of the customer."

Sadly, years later the situation has not improved significantly. Companies are still hell-bent on selling more, but more of what?

It is marketing which takes care of functions like positioning, packaging and promoting your stuff. Without these elements your selling is just a haphazard unorganised random peddling.

Yes, selling has its place, but it is just a natural climax of a good marketing process. Here are some reasons why you should focus on creating a marketing gravity instead of wasting your resources on selling only.

1. Sales provides instant gratification, but it is temporary. In order to sell more, you have to hire more salespeople, and send them out to beat the pavement for new business. More people, more headache and higher overhead. Marketing takes some time to gain momentum, but then you have it, you have created a natural gravity, so people will seek you out in a competitive vacuum. Nike, Yahoo, Coca Cola did not become what they have become by sending out armies of salespeople to bring in new business. They have created marketing gravity. And in case you say you do not have the kind of money Nike does, let us remember that Nike started at founder Phil Knight's kitchen table.

2. Sales are about catching you a fish. Your business is always in the mercy of your salespeople who can come and go depending on the offers they receive from your competitors. Marketing is about teaching you how to fish and making the fish come to you. It is about helping you to build large ponds with full fish hungry for your very bait. It is about helping you to build a large fishing machine which wheels in all the fish that is ready for further action.

The difference between having a sales force and a marketing system is the same as the difference between linear income and recurring residual income. With the sales approach, every time a sale is made, you have to pay your salespeople. With marketing you pay only once for a system, but you yourself get paid over and over again. I am yet to meet a smart business owner who would forego the recurring residual income for the sake of one-time linear income.

3. Your salespeople come and go and your revenue fluctuates accordingly. Marketing is a system you own and use over and over again, giving you fairly predictable and consistent flow of qualified prospects. In contrast, using salespeople, your revenue will roller coaster according to your salespeople's quality and performance. Also, managing a sales force can eat up your whole life.

4. Your salespeople can eat up a large chunk of your revenues. Every decent sales person demands a base pay and commissions on the top. With straight commissions you end up with a bunch of mercenaries who can take you to the cleaners before you can say Jemima Puddleduck. In contrast, you can hire a good marketing person only once to help you to put together a marketing programme to position, package and promote your stuff - then the system takes over. You will have to tweak it here and there, but it becomes almost automatic.

5. Your salespeople are influenced by mood swings. They are dictated by rejections, phase of the moon and personal issues, and they will create a hell of a swing in their performance (I truly believe it - after seeing it over and over again - that underperformance is caused by personal and family issues, not by being or not being a "good salesperson"), thus in your revenue. Marketing, however, is immune to any mood swings and anything else. It does the job for you regardless of external circumstances.

6. Your salespeople can never establish your brand. Without a brand you are dead in the long-term. Yes, you can make some quick bucks, but you will never become a recognised expert in your field. If you think long-term, you can build a lasting brand, and become an industry leader. But if you think of just some short-term money grabbing, then you are a third-rate punk, thus not worth doing business with anyway. So, the rest of the industry would do a huge favour to your target market by pushing you out of business and wipe you off the face of the planet once an for all. The business world is already chronically overrun with unethical greedy bastards. Arthur Andersen was caught, but there are plenty more out there. Why would you join their ranks?

7. Salespeople can reach only a very limited number of prospects. There are only so many people your salespeople can meet in a specific time frame. The only way to see more prospects is by hiring more salespeople. However, with more salespeople you have more hungry mouths to feed. Remember, the idea is not what you make but what you actually keep. With good marketing you can reach millions of people with a lot less money.

I have nothing against sales as a business function. What I find plain, staggeringly, bottomachingly stupid of many service professionals is that, when they hire an army of salespeople and send them out to beat the pavement. These salespeople go out to drum up new business, trying to sell something nobody knows and nobody has ever heard about because the stupid ignorant business owner decided to skimp on marketing in order to save the marketing budget and lift it out of the business, then spend it on another car or vacation.

In the meantime the business is struggling but our greedy myopic business owner ignores it and enjoys his/her personal wealth. How sad, how tragic and how full of these idiots the world is.

For instance, what would you have said if a salesperson had turned up at your doorstep uninvited in 1888, offering you Internet services? Would you have paid? Probably not. You probably didn't even know what the hell the Internet was.

I bet you would have kicked him out. Of course. Someone unknown interrupts your life and tries to make you part with your money in exchange for a preposterous budgie-brained idea which bears a staggering resemblance to a well-disguised technology scam.

So, before you hire a salesperson on commission, ask some of your friends what words come into their minds when they think of a salesperson, sales and selling. You will hear words like, spineless, slimy, greedy, liar, unethical, pushy, etc.

Instead, create a good marketing programme, so potential clients can seek you out in a vacuum. You will attract the right clients by what your firm becomes through the perception your marketing creates.

Napoleon Hill wrote in his book, Think and Grow Rich...

"It is as useless to try to sell a man something until you have first made him want to listen as it would be to command the earth to stop rotating."

Either your believe this now or the world will make you believe it after you have wasted all of your money, exhausted all of your energy and accumulated a nice little stomach ulcer while chasing people trying to sell them. Do yourself and favour, stop the madness and start marketing. Your piggy bank will thank you for it and you will find the process more enjoyable.