I’m often asked “what’s the difference between Marketing and Selling?” Isn’t it all the same thing?

The conventional answer to this is……

“Selling is part of marketing. Marketing is about seeing the ‘Big Picture’, the marketplace, the product etc…   Selling is the part about finding the customers and introducing them to the product in a convincing way so that they are inclined to buy.”

Now, I’ve always considered this ‘Marketing the Hard Way!’ It’s the way most people seem to go about their business. They come up with what they think is a good idea for a product, produce the best version of it they can and then go out to find people to sell it to. Sometimes it works, some times it doesn’t and, in any event, it proves time consuming and costly. If you can afford high profile, continuous TV advertising or the high commissions expected by ‘High Closing’ salesmen, you can probably get the sales - but will you make a profit?

I look upon Marketing as ‘Selling the Easy Way!’. The trick is to turn the whole process on its head.

Find the potential customers (the market) first, find out what they want or what they are already buying, then produce a product or service which accurately meets their requirements. Having done so, you can effectively target your message (that you have what they want) to the market you have already identified. I was recently on a teleconference where one of the speakers was a guy called Jeff Paul. Jeff is a well known US direct marketer who gained a reputation as the ‘Guy who sold thousands of dollars worth of products from his kitchen table while sitting in his underwear!’ (”Not a pretty picture”, I hear you say, and I would agree. But he does make this way of marketing sound very simple.) As closely as I can recall his words on the conference were:

“Find a hungry market, find out what they are hungry for and provide it for them!” What could be simpler?

Well, there a few caveats here. Firstly, you have to find your market, then I recommend that you qualify your market before you spend too much time analysing their needs. By qualify, I mean that you need to know if it is a market worth prospecting. The key things to look for are:

Money - do they have the ability and willingnes to pay for the solution to their needs?

Authority - are they able to make the buying decision, or do they have to check with someone else?

Need or Want - how desperately do they need the solution or how strongly do they want it?

If they can’t afford it or want it cheap of for nothing, you will struggle to sell your product no matter how good it is. If they aren’t able to make the buying decision, how strong is their influence with the person who can? That person may not see or feel the need so accutely and could be hard to convince - you will then be back to selling the hard way. Need and Want are tricky devils. Buying motivations are often driven more by want than by need. If you are a parent you will know that your kids start off saying “I want….”, but soon learn to convince you that they really “need” something. They may need some new trainers but they want new Nikes (at 4 times the price of perfectly serviceable ones!). They will try very persuasively to convince you that ‘ordinary’ trainers are simply not up to the job and they need the Nikes.

The result is that many people feel that simply wanting something is not sufficient justification for buying, so they manufacture a need to justify their purchase. Yet, except in the direst of circumstances, want is a much stronger motivation than  need. Your job is to determine whether need or want is the prime motivator for their ‘hunger’. You can then more closely give them what they really want and help them to justify it if necessary!

In the next part of this subject I’ll look at ways of finding your ‘Hungry Market’ and determining the object of that ‘hunger’.