Salespeople Aren't Marketers!

When sales leaders and senior managers push their sales teams to “market” on behalf of the organization, something is wrong. Salespeople aren’t marketers, and successful marketing doesn’t require salespeople
to step into a marketing role.   

Professor Peter Drucker, widely regarded as an extraordinary thinker on business and management,
regarded marketing and sales as antithetical. In fact, contrary to popular thought, he did not consider
them synonymous or even complimentary. 

According to Drucker, the aim of marketing is to know and understand the company’s customers so
deeply that when they see the company’s product or service offering, it so clearly fits what they want
that they are ready to buy. There is no need for traditional selling in this scenario – there is only a
customer ready to buy and a company that either stands in the way or facilitates the purchase. In an
ideal world, where marketing functions optimally, selling becomes superfluous. 

In the business-to-business environment, the job of the marketing group is to fill the top of a company’s
sales funnel with high quality, bona fide prospects that are ready to become customers.

Assuming your products and services meet the actual needs of your customers, failure to fill the top of
the sales funnel points directly at a problem in the marketing department. The marketing folks may not
truly understand what their customers want and need or the marketing messages may not directly
impact what customers want to accomplish, fix or avoid.

When the marketing department does its job successfully, selling, in the traditional sense, becomes
superfluous, as Professor Drucker states. Does highly effective marketing, then, portend the end of
professional selling? Hardly.

The good news for the sales professional is that successful marketing changes the role of the
salesperson in an organization. Unburdened with marketing tasks, the professional salesperson can
concentrate on developing skills that uncover hidden sales opportunities and that help facilitate and
grow customer loyalty.

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Copyright © 2006 Selling Up™.  All Rights Reserved.

About the author: Steve Chriest is the founder of Selling Up™ (www.selling-up.com), a sales consulting
firm specializing in revenue and sales improvement for organizations of all types and sizes in a variety of
industries. He is also the author of Selling The E-Suite, The Proven System For Reaching and Selling
Senior Executives and Profits and Cash – The Game of Business.   You can reach Steve at
schriest@selling-up.com.