Sales and Marketing are finally going to get married and raise a bunch of little Prospects.
Posted by Frank Belzer on Thu, Oct 07, 2010 @ 08:53 AM
This has quite clearly been the week of "inbound marketing". The Hug Conference, the IMS conference and a multitude of conversations related to that at all of these events. We are currently helping a bunch of Value Added Resellers get better at the selling portion of their business and the combination of these events, my conversations, the presentations and working with these VARS has been pretty enlightening as to the changing roles and on a bigger scale the changing world.
Some folks are of the mindset that "inbound marketing" will replace sales. That is not true and even thought leaders like Brian Halligan, Darmesh Shah and Byron White have all addressed this misnomer. Inbound and Different styles of marketing ARE replacing existing methods of Marketing and they are certainly changing the way sales people sell, but all the Inbound Marketing experts I speak with still hire, train, develop and have sales people in their own organizations. If they didn't believe in sales then why do they have sales people? Why are the VARS (experts) getting our help selling?
Selling though is changing. We know have better qualified leads - that's great! But does that mean they are easier to sell? NO. They are also Better Educated. They are tired of the old style of selling which some by the way continue to pitch as the "new way" although I first heard the Submarine lecture almost 25 years ago. (If that is new then i'm still a teenager)
Sales people need to work with Inbound and Neuvo Marketing. They need to be more educted and aware of the tools and how to use them. Marketers need to change too and this is what I have loved about this week - marketing is finally becoming more sales centric thanks to companies like Hubspot, IdeaLaunch and Social Media tools. Isn't this Great?
Of course there is always one spoiler, someone that would love to jump on a discussion like this and say that "sales is dead" - A false prediction that I have heard many times before. But that's not it. I think we are more alike than now than we have ever been?
