Marketing vs Sales

Alan Weiss, noted management consultant, said that "… marketing is the creation of need, and selling is the providing of an alternative to meet the need. If your marketing is strong enough in professional services—in other words, you create strong brands—selling is unnecessary because the buyer already wants you. He or she is convinced that you fill the need. That’s true brand equity."

He continued by saying "… In commodities, price will always be a factor, since there are hundreds of alternatives to fill the perceived need, though a strong brand there, too, can make a difference (Mercedes, or Bulgari, or Armani).

The ultimate brand is your name, which should never be a commodity (though Tom Clancy has come perilously close to losing his identity in a commodity, crying all the way to the bank, I guess).

If you’re trying to forge relationships which lead to trust and conceptual agreement where value is everything and price doesn’t matter, then techniques to manipulate the buyer are dumb and ineffective, since they are the antithesis of trust. That’s why I’ve always felt that superficial applications of body language, or NLP (neurolinguistic programming), or the laughable "right brain/left brain" stuff, are disingenuous and dangerous. On an amateur level, they are attempts to manipulate, not understand. ("Hey, ignore him what do you expect from an INTJ?")

Categorized in: Marketing