Comments on: Marketing vs. Selling

By: Becky Nommensen

Becky Nommensen — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 14:38:26 +0000

I am trying to help my team with a marketing approach that is well thought out. We have systems for our process of financial planning for people, but our marketing systems are not focused on a target market.

By: Realtor

Realtor — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 00:10:01 +0000

Thank you for another great post.
I look forward to many more entries with high quality info.
I’m a marketer myself and your information always seems to get my business brain going!!

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By: mvh

mvh — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 17:20:59 +0000

Great questions, Sean!

These are worthy of a separate post, so I’ll answer 1 and 2 that way. For #3, I’ll elaborate on what I said above:
When I say sales is “hard” I mean psychologically hard. Many small business owners, including me, have hired someone to help with marketing and sales, and the person we hire ends up doing a lot more marketing than selling. And it’s true for the owners as well. I would much rather write articles or design flyers or go to networking meetings than actually call prospects about doing business with me!
Those who actually enjoy selling and are good at it are rare, and thus command high pay. But even these folks face daily resistance.
Thus the owner must assume the sales manager role: give guidance and training, set goals and targets, insist that activity and results are tracked and reported on, hold sales people accountable for target results, and continually do debriefing and coaching.
Sales management is tough for us owners. I’ve had many clients who hire a sales rep and give them a monthly draw to get them started. Six months later the rep is still not earning enough commissions to replace the draw! But the owner keeps the rep on even so. “Well, he’s improving. Times have been tough. If he’s not out there selling, then I have to do it all.” Etc. We end up excusing and subsidizing poor performance.

That’s why one of my cardinal rules is, “Hire slow and fire fast.” Make sure you hire the right person for the job, and if they don’t work out, replace them.

By: Sean Murphy

Sean Murphy — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 16:32:23 +0000

Mike, I had a couple of questions:

1. How do you tell if you have a marketing or sales problem? Or, how do you tell if you should invest more in marketing or more in sales?

2. Do you have any guidelines on how to balance the time and money you should spend on both kinds of activities?

3. You say “Selling is harder than marketing and this is why good sales people get paid a lot of money” but many jobs are hard. Isn’t a more a function of the impact of the function on your business and what the labor market is for the position?

Very thought provoking post.