Unlearning Sales to (Re)-learn Marketing
Why we need both - and why we need to learn, unlearn, and re-learn to grow a business in 2024
Sales Departments in companies are overrated - just like money is in our lives.
“Uh? What is that supposed to mean?” you may say. Let’s take a step back - here’s a cool story.
I have recently founded a company and I am currently working towards the product launch after 3 months of beta testing and customer-led development.
In “regular people speech” this is the equivalent of “We are building an app and -because we want to make sure it is actually useful - we pester people all around the world to use it and push them to tell us why it’s not good enough. Sometimes, we don’t even tell them it’s a beta.”.
Yeah, that pretty much sums it all up. Some tough months indeed.
But what really changed me is the realization that, as a founder, the need to wear as many hats as possible is painfully strong. So much so that I had to get back to studying what I had already studied some years ago: that’s right - Marketing!
After graduating in Marketing Management, I started my career in sales because no matter who I talked to, sales seemed to be “The profession” that entrepreneurs and CEOs would swear by if you wanted to learn how to do business.
Needless to say, I was quickly entrapped into the most modern cult of the 21st century. Salespeople are convinced (and I was convinced, too) that no other profession adds as much value as theirs to the company because “they are the ones paying your salary with every sale they make.”.
Yeah…no.
I am a master cold caller, an amazing cold email writer and I am able to manage huge pipelines, even when I am not feeling 100% (yes, this matters, a lot - because sales is a mental game). Also, I love training salespeople,: there’s nothing like teaching these skills to a young professional who wants to do business. Even I swear by sales, if you want to learn the hard truth about (again) “doing business”.
Yet this is reductive, at best. Organizations are born everday, and while selling makes operations sustainable, it is not the reason companies exist.
Why do Companies exist?
I was taught at school that companies “exist to generate profits”.
Oops - I disagree. I want to use a re-adapted definition from my marketing studies here, because it sounds so much better.
Companies “exist to create value for a limited number of stakeholders”.
Ok, ok - I am using corporate speech here, but the difference is clear. If companies existed only to generate profits, they would try to do so at any cost, even if they don’t create real value. Sadly, this is the case for a lot of organizations out there - not only do they not create any value, but they simply make profits by (for example) restricting the supply of a particular, necessary good.
If companies exist to create value, it is clear that Sales Departments are the stars of Value Transfer. Value is created inside a company (shoes) and then transferred to the customer (a stakeholder) thanks to a *wink wink* shop assistant!
Yet what happens when the shoe looks terrible? Or when nobody knows the brand? or, even better, when there is no after-sales assistance available and the customer inquires about it (“can I return the shoes if they make my feet sore the first day I use them?”)? Yeah, a sales becomes a lot less likely.
Salespeople can transfer value, but they cannot create it by themselves. Even if they are convinced they can, they can’t (sorry guys, we need to be honest about this - my advice is to not let the cult-like mentality of sales take the best of you).
An organization needs to do several things to create value and then transfer it, here’s a barebones list:
Create Value (Product/Service Development)
Make your Value understandable (Communications)
Understand who your best customer is and why (Strategy)
Make your value known to the right stakeholders (Marketing)
Transfer your value to new Customers (Sales)
Continue the Value transfer Process after the purchase (After-sales/Customer Success)
Make the above processes possible and compliant (HR, IT/Digital Infrastructure, Legal)
Point 7 is not a catch-all clause: also, the main stakeholder in companies is always the State. Always and forever. This means that, as an organization grows, not only some parts need to be built keeping compliance in mind, always.
As a founder, I need to wear all of these hats. And, for this reason, I have one, huge problem: I was only given ONE head!
Why I had to unlearn Sales
I was the first Outbound Sales Development Representative at a French Fintech Scale-Up for Italy. I helped pave the way for a SaaS Fintech service (a simple, consolidated, cash-flow managmeent tool) that is becoming increasingly successful in Europe (and they are even expanding to the US now). I was then promoted to Account Executive. Then, I moved to Amazon UK to work a similar job. I was so in love with sales that the new job seemed so slow (it was indeed a business development job, far away from the land of pure sales where everyday the phones keep ringing and bells are supposed to follow)! Chasing the next customer would prove to be a remarkable adrenaline fix for me. I was devouring sales books at an incredible pace and all I thought was: “How does this thing work at scale? How many salespeople does an organization need to scale? How do I convert more prospects? How do I convince that-guy-from-Florence to schedule a meeting with me?”.
I had forced myself to enjoy a very demanding occupation that i later learned to look at with much more rigor and rationality. Sales is a very cool way to make a living - and lucrative! - but there’s more to that, and it is important to understand this when launching a startup.
Perhaps not surprisingly, I learned the hard way that exceptional sales skills cannot compensate for a faulty, incomplete, or confusing products and lack of communication and awareness.
In the early days of development, no matter how convincing I sounded, the first users became confused - they were interested in the service we provided but also disappointed in the quality of the user interface or the lack of colors ( we used a B/W schema to ease development).
So I stopped punishing myself for not contacting enough potential users to pitch them and I went back to every “Non-Sales” aspect of the thing that I was building.
What I did after
Did I mention that I am also a software architect? I’m not top of the class, don’t get me wrong, but good enough to put together a web app and have it run in production mode (it’s geek speech for “Make your app available to users”).
Eventually, I believed that my focus should shift to making a name for the platform I was building. Of course, generating revenue is an important objective and thus we worked backwards from the moment of potential “Sale” for our product.
I thought to myself: “Where does the customer journey for a marketplace even start?”
Thank God I had worked at Amazon Marketplace up to a few months prior! So I did what Amazonians love to do: I wrote a doc. Somebody put this article together if you wanna know more about Amazon docs.
And the doc really helped me take two important decisions to make usability much better. All I needed was to rework the feedback I was receiving by potential users and transform it into application pieces to be developed. It was clearly not the right time for marketing, my gut feeling finally agreed.
Because I was spending considerable time on product architecture, I realized: “Hey we do not have any notifications, we don’t tell the user where to go and what to do to setup their account. What the hell are they supposed to do? Learn by themselves? Learn about a service that nobody knows, all by themselves?”
Quickly, I understood that communication was a big problem ad we needed a big solution, fast.
I was pretty quick to explain the whole thing in person, but I could not scale my complex explanations (I was spending considerable time on Google Meets with potential users and guiding them through the whole experience, one by one).
I designed a simple notification system and our main developer came up with an elegant solution that would keep the UX’s ease of use untouched. It was a success, users could finally complete the onboarding process autonomously. No more pressing need for onboarding calls.
Marketing woes
My solution for the onboarding problem was successful enough, but I had not solved what i had set out to solve in the first place.
I often wondered: “Let’s assume that the product is almost ready. How do I make it visible to as many in-target users as I can without resorting to paid ads?”
There’s this misconception in the Outside-of-marketing-world that marketing is “a campaign and ROAS”.
Yikes.
Painful sales processes taught me to love good marketing. Sales is the engine of the company, but even the best of engines cannot run without some good oil. Marketing is the lubricant that makes the sales machine work.
(Re)-learning good marketing
Salespeople and Marketers tend to have very dfferent objectives. This is particulary evident in larger organizations.
If I had a dollar (I’d say penny but inflation is a big meanie) for every time I heard the phrase “These leads from marketing are s**t” I wouldn’t be writing about this stuff.
Marketers also have a hard time making themselves understood by Sales. They know that time is sometimes all that is needed for campaigns to start working. But Sales departments. have quotas to reach and an unbearable pressure to deal with. Time is, quite literally, money.
To the struggling salesperson that spent 2 hours vetting leads generated by a marketing campaign, Marketers look like impudent, lazy, paycheck collectors.
On the other hand, marketers grow frustrated with Sales because they do not bother to comprehend the dynamics of online marketing, message creation, the marketing ‘Mix” etc.
To the marketer that spent 20 minutes listening to the advice coming from an Account Executive, Salespeople are competent, determined, energetic, but lack the basic understanding of what marketing really is.
Marketing is much more than Lead Generation, it does shape every aspect of the buyers’ journey, even (and especially) before the prospect decides to turn into a customer.
Making sense of marketing as a founder
I am going to go straight to the point here:
Study and understand SEO. SEO is free. It does not cost money. It costs time, energy, and effort. But these are things that can be gathered easily at first. Pick a way to publish content easily. Research keywords. Make some noise.
Read books about marketing that are simple and valuable: New Power, Story Genius, On Writing Well, Cashvertising. These are some of my favorites.
Read books about communication and psychology: Made to Stick, A theory of cognitive dissonance. (the latter is currently my favorite book)
Speak to your customers and understand what they are seeking, then wrap this up into your marketing message. Remember to speak to them. Do not read feedback. Actually make an effort and talk to your customers!
Do not be “salesy”, but learn when to be so, even in crafting your marketing message. There are several stages of the buyers’ journey and different messages are meant for different points. Do not push to conversion too early.
Yeah that’s about it.
Is Marketing better than Sales?
No, of course not. Marketing and Sales are both needed for operating a company well. And by this I don’t mean you need two huge teams. But the two things need to be separate and be able to “communicate” with each other. Keeping them in isolation will only create problems for the customers.
After all, companies exist to create value, profit only makes this objective sustainable over time! :)