NOT AFTER THEY READ THIS THEY WON'T...

Here's an unspoken truth - Sales and marketing professionals frustrate each other - and for good reason...

If you've ever participated in sales training, you know that the emphasis is on one-on-one selling skills. There's the Sandler Sales System, Dale Carnegie, sales trainers like Kevin Daley, Tom Hopkins, and thousands more. They teach concepts like relationship selling where it all

starts with taking a "special" interest in your customers, or Socratic selling where questioning techniques are used to "get to yes." All those programs have really great stuff, but the problem

is each salesperson has to learn it, practice it, and develop the talent. That means the value of sales training is dependant on EACH and EVERY salesperson. This is a huge burden on any company. That's why many companies don't use sales trainers. And for those companies that do make commitments to ongoing sales training and development, the reality is that even

after their best effort, it takes each salesperson years of experience to get good at it. And the icing on the cake comes when salespeople finally "arrive" as rainmakers, after years of company support and investment, and they leave for greener pastures or the promise of fatter

commissions.

Wait, there's more, the cherry on top, when, after years of "relationship building," the buyer  leaves or gets fired. Oh, and before I forget, there's one more downside to the sales paradigm - MOST salespeople never develop the talent no matter how much training they get, AND THEY ARE THE ONES THAT SEEM TO HANG AROUND FOREVER! True enough?

Sales trainers and sales professionals criticize marketers for not providing enough support to sales. I must confess, in most situations, they are right. Marketers have a long way to go when it comes to getting it right.

Peter Drucker, writing in 1988, sums this up best in his book, The New Realities, when he says,

"When managers speak of marketing, they usually mean the organized performance of all selling functions. This is still selling. It still starts out with "our products." It still looks for "our market." True Marketing starts out the way Sears starts out-with the customer, his demographics, his realities, his needs, his values. It does not ask, What do we want to sell? It asks, What does the customer want to buy? It does not say this is what our product or service

does. It says, These are the satisfactions the customer looks for, values, and needs."

And here's the kicker, the crux of the bad blood between sales and marketing professionals. The unspoken, intuitive truth. Drucker continues, "Indeed, selling and marketing are antithetical rather than synonymous or even complimentary. There will always, one can assume, be the need for some selling. But the aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous. The aim of

marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself."

Sales gurus, what say you to THAT?

So if you're a business owner or executive, and you could find a why to fix that whole deal, a way to make selling superfluous, do you think it would make a difference in your company's ability to compete? Can you imagine innovating your business to a point where selling becomes

superfluous, while your competition clings to the old sales training model? This is an opportunity that many business executives recognize. Taking advantage of it depends on a company's ability to shift from a sales model to a marketing model. Well designed marketing systems flow from the customer to the organization. Those that are poorly designed are simply

extensions of the sales discipline - a discipline that tries to figure out how to convince and close, ONE AT A TIME, rather than nurture the entire market with powerful, customer-driven, marketing operations.