Hello again. Welcome back. In today's lesson, we will further explore the conflicts of sales and marketing. We will start with the marketing viewpoint, and what are the main beliefs? To begin with, let's go back some lessons ago and look at the definitions of sales and marketing as described by Theodore Levitt. So sales or selling is about getting people to exchange their cash for your offerings. Marketing is about satisfying the needs of customers by means of a product or service. Now, let's remember how Philip Kotler defined marketing, he's had some saying like this, "Marketing is not the art of finding clever ways to dispose of what you make. It is the art of creating genuine customer value." That's all fine. Those are definitions from great marketing thinkers, and they are right. The problem is the implication many marketers make out of them. Marketers may say, "Aha. Sales is about pushing things to the customers. Marketing is about finding the real needs of customers and providing that product or service that will address those needs," so marketing appears to be much more glamorous. Of course, this way of thinking is not right. Sales may have to occasionally unload excess inventories in order to generate cash for the company. It's a matter of survival. In the great majority of the cases though, sales is making it possible to provide value to the customer by uniting the less links of the supply-demand chain. Let me explain. At the given point, marketing must hand off the products or service to the sales department. They have to say, "Pass the ball to continue to play." In the sales team, we'll take the ball and run to score. They will interact with wholesalers, retailers, and consumers to ensure the product has the chance to be purchased. In the case of B2B, business to business, sales is directly interacting with the end of the chain and also making sure the service designed by marketing has a chance to be considered by the client. No matter how great the product is, how attractive the price is, how convincing was the advertising and promotion, if the product doesn't go through the distribution chain, it is dead. Given this interdependency marketing sales, why the conflict? That can be explained by factors of two types: economic and cultural. First, economic factors, the origin of this conflict begins when small companies become big and create a marketing function. Marketing now fights for money with sales. The advertising and promotion of budget must come from somewhere. It generally comes from sales. Marketing has resources, but it is hard to show return on investment. It's hard to measure the effectiveness of tactics, strategies, and advertising and promotion. Remember John Wanamaker's quote, "Half of what I spend in advertising has no effect. The problem is I don't know which half." Then it's no surprise then that marketing group is responsible and protective of the product being out. If their targets are not delivered, their marketing spend will be challenged by general management. So marketing is watchful about their profit margins, trying to make sure no one is giving too many discounts. They think sales, when low prices, just to make their jobs easier. Now, what are the cultural factors? There is an issue of time horizon. Marketing concentrates on building long-term competitive advantage that might take years to come true. So when these long-range plans carefully built for quite a while don't go exactly right, marketing blames the sales force for poor execution of their brilliant plan. The work of marketers is more project-oriented; new product launches, new promotional campaigns, creating the marketing plan. Marketing people deal with customer clusters and market segments. They know customers through analyzing market research data. Marketing believes the sales force is myopic, too focused on individual customer experiences, insufficiently aware of the larger market and blind to the future. Marketing is concerned about releasing products whose features have broad appeal. In short, the marketing view is shaped by a need to think long-term and to approach customers as groups and not individuals. Coping with return on investment uncertainty and the need of a rather technical background complete this picture. What about sales? In the next meeting, we'll talk about that.
