Reasons To Pump Your Marketing Muscles Not Your Sales Muscles

by Tom "Bald Dog" Varjan

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 hasn't 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 haphazard unorganised random peddling. Basically, marketing is the goose that lays the golden egg. And anyone whop grew up on a farm knows how to look out for the goose's welfare. Unfortunately, far too many people haven't had the farm experience, and try to get to the eggs by killing the goose and ripping it open.

And what do they find? Nothing. precisely dick.

Yes, selling has its place, but it is just a natural climax of a good marketing process. It's basically the moment when the goose actually lays the egg. Before that, the egg is growing inside the goose. You can't see it, but you know that you'd better take excellent care of the goose, otherwise the eggs will suffer.

So, here are some reasons why you should focus on creating a marketing gravity (faithfully taking care of the goose) instead of wasting your resources on selling only (cajoling and threatening your goose to lay the egg).

Just compare the marketing-sales continuum to the dating continuum. It takes a bit of time to go from the first date to the wedding reception. You can't just walk up to a person a say, "Hey, wanna have sex with me?"

But if you think about it, this is exactly what most companies do. They don't want to invest in growing the relationship from the ground up (going out for tea, and then for dinner, bringing her flowers, bringing him something memorable). No. They just want to get the order and then move on to the next victim. (Let's go to bed and then we both can move on with our lives).

So, let's see why it makes sense to invest in your marketing, instead of jumping the queue and trying to sell right away.

1. Selling provides instant gratification, but it is temporary. In order to sell more, you have to hire more sales people, 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 didn't become what they have become by employing armies of salespeople to bring in new business. They have created marketing gravity, so people sought them out for business. And in case you say you don't have the kind of money Nike does, let's remember that Nike started at founder, Phil Knight's kitchen table.

The interesting thing is that many business owners regard themselves as the proverbial gurus in their industries, and then hire a legion of salespeople, come down from the mountains and start chasing disciples in the hope of converting them to the new gospel. It is your marketing that establishes you as the guru, and attracts people, so they come to listen to you and do business with you. You can't chase people and beat them into buying your stuff. You can but people will curse your name and lynch you at the first available opportunity.

2. Sales are about catching you a fish. Your business is always in the mercy of your sales people who can come and go at their hearts contents and depending on the offers they receive from your competitors. Rest assured, if they are good, your competitors are hunting for them. You slip once, and they are out, quite likely to take some of the clients and customers with them. And this is not even slander. They have one-to-one relationships with those people, so it is understandable that people follow them. And there is not a sausage you can do about it.

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 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 a pretty penny to your sales people. With marketing you pay only once for a system, but then you get paid over and over again for what the system brings to your table. I am yet to meet a smart business owner who would forego the recurring residual income for the sake of one-time linear income.

Here is one more snag you are facing with putting your faith into salespeople. Every decent sales person demands a base payment 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.

Why? Because they don't care about your business' success. They come when the cream is rising and go when shit hits the fan. The average annual salesperson turnover in companies is 43%. And as I said earlier, they often take their clients and customers with them.

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 your system takes over. You will have to tweak it here and there, but it becomes almost automatic.

Don't get me wrong. Depending on your industry, you still need a sales force. But if you expect 5,000 lbs of commission-based warm meat with pulse beat to perform miracles for you without proper marketing, then you are more naive than you need to be.

3. Your sales people 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 professionally competent), thus in your revenue.

Your marketing system, however, is immune to any mood swings and anything else. It does the job for you regardless of external circumstances. It doesn't go on strike, doesn't demand pay increase, doesn't fall ill, doesn't suffer from a broken heart or broken leg and doesn't need vacation.

4. 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. Either way, people will talk about your business. It is up to you to manage this message as well as possible.

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 you 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?

5. Sales people can reach only a very limited number of prospects. There are only so many people your sales people can meet in a specific time frame. The only way to see more prospects is by hiring more sales people. However, with more sales people you have more hungry mouths to feed, more mood swings to accommodate. 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 d with a smaller sales force.

I have nothing against sales as a business function. What I've found plain, staggeringly, bottomachingly stupid of many business owners is that, when they want to increase their profits, 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 retarded, 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 fancy car or exotic 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.

For instance, what would you have said if someone had turned up at your doorstep uninvited in 1888, offering you Internet services? Would you have paid? Probably not. You probably did not 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, unethical, pushy, aggressive, etc.

Is this the brand you want to build: "XYZ Widgets Inc, a bunch of spineless, slimy, greedy, unethical, pushy, aggressive con artists".

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 selling madness right now and start marketing and make them come to you. Your piggy bank will thank you for it and - unless you are a masochist - you will find the process more enjoyable.

And remember! Don't sell harder. Market smarter. Both you, your employees, your clients and prospects will find it more enjoyable, profitable and attractive.

Recommended Tools And Resources...

• Infoguru Marketing Manual by Robert Middleton
• Information Library byBob Bly
• Dan Kennedy's Magnetic Marketing

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