Marketing Beats Selling

My dad, 84 years old and counting, lifelong salesman, sales manager, sales trainer and independent representative speaks with open disdain about marketers. Yet, when you listen to him talk about his sales process it becomes clear that he takes a straight up marketing approach.

The first thing he does as a “salesman” is to identify companies ready to purchase in commercial volumes. Among marketers this is known as locating a market.

Next he connects with a decision maker and during the interview clarifies what problems they have. Marketers often use polls and questionnaires to discover a market’s needs, wants and desires.

Then, my dad works with one of the companies he represents, or even locates a company he has never represented before, to come up with a solution. Marketers follow the same process and if the solution is an information product either hires an expert, obtains the rights or creates the product themselves.

Finally, he goes back to the prospect company with the solution in hand complete with pricing and delivery information. It also works exactly this way for marketers.

When someone believes they have come up with what they perceive someone else needs, without their input or guidance, they then must attempt to sell it to them in order to regain their investment, personal  power and self esteem. Whenever you start with a product before you have a market you are faced with a sales proposition.

This is why marketing may be approached as a science but all sales initiatives originate in ideologies. I’ve lost count of how many people have approached me with their absolute need to sell something they just dreamed up or discovered in a bargain bin somewhere.

Science observes the natural world and creates mind maps to make sense of it. These scientific ideas never achieve closure and remain open to modification and obsolescence.

We create ideologies as mind maps to which the natural world is abused into conforming. These ideologies arrive as a package deal usually complete with a supportive all-encompassing world view.

The map is not the terrain.

Science knows the history of their mind maps and constantly compares them to the natural world so to modify the mind maps and increase their accuracy. Ideology acts as if their mind maps are the terrain while becoming proactive in manipulating the natural world to conform to the mind maps.

It speaks to the power of ideologies that this distinction between marketing and sales often seems to be the biggest conceptual challenge limiting my students. Indeed, they often insist upon just being delivered an ideology while ironically demanding that it accurately correspond to the natural world.

Offered the appearance of free choice, people seem to prefer ideologies which inevitably conflict with the natural world over science that never arrives at closure and always seems as work in progress. Ironically, successful ideologies often masquerade as science while science then comes under attack as ideology.

The weakness of science is the willingness to consider alternative solutions to real problems. In other words, the reluctance to become an ideology also becomes the weakness of science.

The strength of ideology is the high acceptance it finds for the quick and simple answers it provides to real world problems. Unfortunately, the answers are always wrong, regardless of first impressions or our desires for closure.

This problem manifests when a vendor becomes a consumer. Their consumer training to only accept the quick and easy, cheap and simple, silver bullet one-shot solution betrays them when they wish to provide products and services to consumers.

While consumers feel justified in thinking it is all about them this feeding of the ego sets up business people for failure if they cannot make the adjustment to the other side of the coin. This failure to adjust results in a selling ideology.

While a person’s ideas may be interesting and welcome as long as they are a consumer, once they become a vendor of products and services their ideas become irrelevant. The world is full of great ideas that few care about.

This ego driven need to see personal ideas accepted by other people, through deception, fraud and the threat of harm if need be, meets the definition of ideology. This also describes the underlying methodologies of many mainstream selling techniques.

Ideology and selling lack resilience.

The narrow point of view generated by a consumer perspective holds no more attractiveness to others than any other inflexible ideological opinion. This leads to the failures of businesses and the collapse of empires.

Resilience relies upon both the willingness to competently observe reality regardless of what we wish to see and the ability to modify activities accordingly regardless of how habitualized we may have become to them. A fixed belief in our own correctness, self-righteousness in other words, inevitably leads to both our unhappiness and the unhappiness of others.

That is why I do not accept students as clients who insist they have invented the next best thing, whether it be a business service, a physical device or social idea. They are always wrong and doomed to failure.

If you wish to make money, online or face-to-face, it is enough to start with that desire. When you bring your own preconceptions along you limit your resilience according to the strength of your beliefs.

Accordingly, my first question to you then is not concerning your product but concerning the market you wish to join. Identify a market first and the market will identify a successful product for you.