The BIG Debate - Marketing vs Sales - which adds more value?

A major event in the CIM calendar, the BIG Debate was well attended, broadcast live via the web as well as being made available as a pod cast.

Before the fight kicked off, the audience were asked to vote on which discipline they believed added most value and marketing took pole position with 63% of the votes, sales lagging behind with only 37%.

The line up was impressive. In the marketing corner was Professor Malcolm McDonald, Author of over 40 marketing books and Chairman of 6 companies with a CV boasting the likes of Shell, IBM and Tesco. In the sales corner, Mike Southon, the Beermat Entrepreneur, Author, Financial Times commentator, Times columnist and sales man extraordinaire!

The Case for Marketing in Summary

• As Sales and Marketing Director for Canada Dry, Malcolm increased market share from 8% - 38%, the reason was marketing, sales was just a small part of that
• Marketing is a profession, sales is a life skill.
• People don't like salesmen anymore - they are perceived as aggressive and arrogant
• Tesco is currently beating Wallmart - it's marketing that does that, not salesmen
• Good marketing is about knowing your differentials and segmenting properly - not that ABC rubbish. Without good marketing the sales force are often left to sell what people don't need.
• Examples of companies that ignored marketing - Marks and Spencers and ICI. M&S failed to keep up with their customers and ICI had excellent products that they were unable to sell because of poor marketing.
• You can only sell what the customer wants, so you must know what they want, which comes from marketing.
• Marketing provides the stage from which to act from, get the stage wrong and it won't work
• Of all the elements of Marketing (7 P's included), personal selling is just one. If selling is going to be successful, all the others need to happen first - i.e. you can't have a successful sales force until you have your marketing sussed.
• The only benefit of not having a marketing strategy is that failure will come as a surprise and won't be preceded by several months of worry and anguish.
• Success these days is measured in shareholder value added, good marketing can significantly increase that.
• Marketing and sales are integrated. By being a Marketing and Sales Director, Malcolm was able to ensure that what was planned was implemented by the sales force.

The Case for Sales in Summary
(Imagine this being delivered by one of the best salesmen you have ever met!)

• Sales is more pressured - if you don't sell anything you get sacked, whereas you can make crappy brochures for a long while before anyone will sack you.
• Mike has worked with 17 start up businesses, 2 of which went public. Some went bust which came down to un-sellable products answering problems that didn't exist. (we think this sounds like a point for marketing)
• Marketers know that sales has to be done, they're just not prepared to do it.
• Sales is simple really. It's all about finding common ground, finding their biggest problem and then providing the solution to it.
• People buy from people, you can have the best marketing in the world but people won't buy from people they don't like.
• Marketing works for retail and business to consumer products but for very few business to business organisations
• Encyclopaedia Britannia invested heavily in marketing spend, which made no difference to the sales figures
• Marketing only gives you the opportunity to sell, selling is about telling the story and most importantly getting the money

After a few pertinent questions from the crowd, including a great point about where the Encyclopaedia Britannia could be if they had thought about marketing and not let the internet pass them by, the audience were again asked to vote on which discipline added the most value.

And the Result

Marketing dropped its majority to 59% and Sales maintained their 37%. The remaining 4% of voters controversially chose to vote for both - as a result sales were declared the winners as they hadn't lost any ground - not an ideal way to win, but a victory of sorts.

What do we think?

Well, unsurprisingly we voted for marketing. However, no good marketer will deny that sales is a valuable discipline and in many industries is vital to the success of the organisation. But as to which adds more value, naturally we will fight the marketing corner. Marketing creates the platform from which a product will sell, and will continue to sell for many years to come. Marketing done well will make the salesman's job easy!

But that's enough about us, what about you - what do you think? Do you agree with the audience? Take our online poll and let us know which discipline gets your vote? We are making it tough, no cop outs, you need to choose one or the other. We will publish the results in our next newsletter.