I’m always both baffled and entertained by sales calls I receive.
You have to wonder sometimes how these guys make any money. Blabber, blabber, blabber. Feature, feature, feature.
Boring, boring, boring.
What surprises me even more, though, is how much time a sales rep will invest in me even though I’m an extremely unqualified prospect. They’d rather spend an hour with me in what seems like a one-way conversation (monologue?) rather than spend 10 minutes making sure I’m worthy and prime for their product or service. (Which, ironically, makes them more attractive. But I digress ….)
I received a tweet from a friend lately that I feel captures what many of us deal with on a regular basis. In response to something I wrote on selling and marketing not being the same thing, my friend said this:
I keep trying to explain this to Dad. As a good salesman, he thinks being good at marketing means being good at sales. Sigh.
Yep, we marketers deal with confusion over what is what all the time. I know my mom typically calls it all “promotion.” Others use the term “marketing” when they’re actually talking about “selling.” Then too many others think “marketing” is essentially just “advertising.”
Sigh.
This post is part of the weekly series Marketing Quotes by Marketing Greats, posted every Thursday at MarketingInProgress.com (beginning January 1, 2009). Read them all here. Authentic marketing is not the art of selling what you make but knowing what to make. It is the art of identifying and understanding customer needs and creating solutions [...]
