Nobody likes to be sold.
But everyone likes to buy.
Salespeople are loathed, so companies disguise these people as account managers, business development executives and the like.
Last I checked, if they’re asking for your money in a one-way deal, it’s not a partnership.
I’ve heard that sales is a subset of marketing– that marketing drives the 4 P’s (Product, Price, Place, Promotion), while sales acts upon leads with the marketing collateral.
Maybe in enterprise B2B or narrow verticals where traditional blunt force marketing still reigns.
But deeper than decoy, real marketing begins from the heart.
People can sense if you’re authentic and passionate, the precursor to deep knowledge or vice-versa.
Mark Twain once said that the secret to being successful is to be genuine.
Fake that and you’ve got it made.
I heard yesterday that selling is when it’s all about you.
But marketing is when you make it all about them.
Closer, but if you’re not doing something you truly love, that affect the quality of what your business offers.
The fanatical, missionary-like zeal that you see from the producers of products you love shines through.
Liz Azyan owns an agency, Digital Matchbox, and has built her own tool to do social media management.
Her story shows that passion produces product, like an oyster produces pearls.
In her own words:
Do you know that saying, “When you turn your passion into a job, you start to lose your passion.” In some ways, that is how I see marketing. If your job is to promote, how do you expect people to listen? People hate being sold to and in turn, you’ll start to hate doing it! But if your job is to continue to do what you love doing and you’re creating more time to perfect it, then the benefits of what you have to offer, will speak for itself.
o you know that saying, “When you turn your passion into a job, you start to lose your passion.” In some ways, that is how I see marketing. If your job is to promote, how do you expect people to listen? People hate being sold to and in turn, you’ll start to hate doing it! But if your job is to continue to do what you love doing and you’re creating more time to perfect it, then the benefits of what you have to offer, will speak for itself.The idea of the CCS triangle (Content> Checklist > Software) is that when you’ve done something enough times, you can write rules to execute.
And these checklist rules can eventually turn into software.
So repeated hands-on experience in doing X will lead you to eventually creating the best software for X.
And the usage of the tools by others rallying to the cause creates word of mouth marketing, which drives sales on its own.
This is where personal branding at the user level rolls up to content marketing at the company level.
And this content marketing is what drives inbound requests, turning into sales.
Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, said that advertising is the price you pay for having a crappy product.
That’s mostly right to say that if you’ve activated your fervent customer base, nothing is stronger than their endorsement– not even a pile of ad dollars.
The best sellers never sell– and the best marketers never overtly market.
How about you?