Like It or Not, You’re In the Business of Sales and Marketing!

Every time our country experiences a recession, a new group of the recently downsized decides to try going into business for themselves. Regardless of the business they choose, they will find themselves in the business of marketing and selling.

As a marketing consultant and sales trainer I am clearly biased as to the importance of being able to market and sell, but I don’t think I can overstate the importance of being able to sell.  A scientist or a doctor may uncover the cure for cancer, but nobody is saved until the cure is sold to the patients who need it or the physicians who treat them. An engineer can have the answer to today’s biggest environmental challenge, but this technology dies on the drawing board if he or she isn’t able to sell it to the people who can use it.

Look at personal computers.  They have revolutionized the way we do business today, but they sat in a research center until Steve Jobs and his contemporaries took the technology developed by engineers at Xerox and sold it to the American public.  While Thomas Jefferson and this countries founding fathers crafted our nations Constitution, the real work was done by Thomas Paine, Alexander Hamilton and others who ”sold” it to the colonies and obtained their ratification.

Even if you have a world-class idea and want to give it away for the good of humanity, you will still have to sell the concept.  If you can’t sell it, you’ll be stuck with your idea, poorer for your brilliance and generosity.  It seems unfair but even freebies must be delivered with a certain salesmanship or the receiver does not perceive the true value of the gift.

As a child, you are taught a popular illusion by anxious parents and tenured professors — if you learn a profession and work hard, your future is secure and you’ll inevitably rise to the top. Like so many romantic promises, this is only an illusion.  What parents and professors don’t tell you is that the closer you get to the top, the better you must know how to sell because everyone at the top sells better.  If you’re going to the top of your profession, you must sell well too.

Our leaders in business, politics, research, and the arts have to be great salespeople, or at least they need to have great salespeople on their payrolls.  In our culture, skillful persuasion is an integral part of any successful endeavor. In the end, every successful business depends on its sales force to make it successful.  Without salespeople, most of the other jobs within a business would not even exist.

Obviously, it is important to learn and refine the skills of your chosen profession.  Unfortunately, many of these skills will go wasted if you cannot get others to see and use the benefits of your knowledge. So today you actually need two professions: the one you have studied and prepared for and your “other profession” — the profession of persuasion that allows you to make good use of all those years of education, practice and dues paying.

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