(Sharing from Matt Lloyd)
This is an excellent question and something that any marketer or salesperson should have clearly defined in their own minds.
Simply put:
- Selling is an action that is usually done one-on-one.
- Marketing is an action done to reach many people.
I look at marketing as pre-selling. It positions the offer and conditions the prospect toward it. By “condition,” I mean that it brings the prospect into a desirable state of mind to accept the product or service.
The prospect may know nothing about the product. For the salesperson, that’s not a very desirable state for the prospect to be in. But with good marketing, the prospect gets some understanding about what the product is. They see what it can do for them. They find out the price.
Marketing allows the prospect to read or listen at their leisure, under no pressure. (Unlike how they might feel if a salesperson were sitting across from them.) So, they achieve a certain level of comfort with the offer and become less resistant to attempts at selling them.
Really good marketing makes the job of selling one-on-one much easier.
Compare that to people who do network marketing, multi-level marketing, or direct sales. They call or visit friends, family or strangers, and present their product, service or business opportunity from scratch.
Unless you’re an excellent salesperson—a “natural”—that kind of selling is very difficult to do well at.
That’s why you market first. But there’s another reason. It not only makes the one-on-one part easier, but it gives you leverage. With strictly one-on-one sales, you can only reach one or a few people at a time. With marketing, you can reach masses of people in less time and with less work—that’s leverage.
Now, how do you become a really good marketer? I would tell you to become more skilled at doing one-on-one sales. I realized this back in 2008. I was not a very good one-on-one phone salesman and I realized that, to succeed in business, I’d have to get better at it. So, I took a commission-only sales job, cold-calling customers who had left a particular phone company. If I could “sell” them to come back, I made a commission.
It was rough. Angry people, plenty of rejection all day long. After a while, I stopped taking it personally. And I started making more and more sales. That’s how I learned how to sell one-on-one.
When I started marketing to the masses—for example, writing a sales letter, crafting a sales webinar, or writing an email broadcast to send out to my list—I knew how to sell to the masses … because I knew how to sell one-on-one.
So, to fully answer the question, sales and marketing aren’t completely different from each other. Marketing is salesmanship—it’s salesmanship to the masses.
Improve your one-on-one salesmanship and you will improve your marketing skills, too.
Sharing by Matt Lloyd
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