Sales and Marketing — The Bad Guys of the Career Ecosystem
Growing up in a conservative, job oriented family had outgrown my mindset to believe that sales and marketing jobs are something you should not be in. You need to go door to door and do sales with a lot of hard work.
The article highlights on how these two skills are not what you think they are with some more insights in Marketing. (You might be also be thinking bad about these skills if you’re still deciding on your career and don’t have a proper mentor)
If you know sales you will never go hungry.
Sales employees are the last group in an organization to get fired (Obviously, you should be performing as well). This is what I learned in a startup which I worked for. Sales is hard, no doubt! But sales team is the ultimate boss in any organization because they are responsible for generating the revenue.
Any organization will first look at the revenue sheet and then cost sheet. The boss will then analyze what is stopping the organization from generating profit which are mostly the costs involved in non-revenue generating tasks. Cost-cutting will first start with non-performing assets and then the not so important ones.
So how can a skill that helps you generate revenue be bad. It is not! In fact it is the best skill to have if you can do it correctly. But yes to develop this skill you need to learn various other skills and work hard and be street smart which is something not taught to us in the Indian Education System.
Marketing is closely linked to sales. One needs to market and position their goods first before the sales happen. And as you know bad influence makes you bad as well, marketing is the victim of sales getting the bad guy label making it the bad guy as well.
Sales and Marketing are the torch bearers of any Organization
Sales bring in the revenue and marketing makes it easy for sales to achieve their goals. So how are these the bad guys? They are not and if anyone tells you the same just listen, smile and move on. But yes sales is tough and if anyone tells you do not enter sales because it is tough then you should give it a thought and analyze your personality and see if you’re the go getter in life.
Marketing on the other hand is more of a study and application of how humans react to a certain concept. It is understanding the human psychology and behavior making them more inclined towards your offering. Marketing helps to position your product in the market and makes consumer believe in your vision of the product. If you are interested in human behavior and like identifying patterns in life then marketing is one of the areas where you can practically experience studying the same. Let’s deep dive more into marketing since I have been working in this field.
The Fundamentals of Marketing
Let’s first understand why is marketing needed in the first place. Suppose you have invented something extraordinary that might drastically change human life by solving a pain point that has been in existence since many years. Now you decide to keep this invention to yourself for whatever reasons. By doing this you will never be able to help anyone with your invention and you’ll also lose potential opportunities that might come across with this invention.
Marketing is exposing yourself or your product to the audience and letting them know you have something better to offer. If the audience accepts you or your product, you or your product is a hit if not it is a miss.
Marketing a bad product will get you some momentum in sales initially but in the long run it will not sustain whereas marketing a great product in the right way will help it excel exponentially.
One important part of marketing is positioning your product i.e. making everyone understand who this product is for. For example if your product is a beautiful AI based doll then your product is positioned for kids and your target audience is Parents with kids as they are the ones who will buy your products.
If you can comprehend these basic fundamentals of Marketing then everything else are just means or methods to reach your audience. Be it the trending Digital Marketing or the old school Traditional Marketing.
Digital marketing vs. Traditional marketing
Now that we have looked upon the fundamentals of marketing, let’s discuss the means or channels of marketing. Means or Channels are nothing but places where you can find your audience. If your audience reads newspaper more then newspaper is the right channel to market your product, if your audience spends more time on mobile then mobile is the right channel to market your product.
After the existence of Digital Marketing, we can now bifurcate Marketing broadly into Traditional and Digital Marketing.
Traditional Marketing
Traditional marketing is nothing but using the traditional methods of marketing a product. These include newspaper ads, advertisement on hoardings and television ads etc.
Digital Marketing
After the invention of digital equipment such as computers and mobiles and humans being hooked to these devices, companies had to shift their focus to these means to market their products. Marketing done via these devices is Digital Marketing.
Digital Marketing vs. Traditional Marketing
Traditional Marketing is more of a mass marketing method where you advertise to larger group of people hooked to a specific mean like newspaper. With traditional marketing it was difficult to analyze the performance of a marketing campaign, plus targeting a specific audience would become difficult as traditional means won’t understand a human persona.
With computers and mobile it is now easier to understand a human persona. The likes and dislikes of a particular person are now know through mobile devices. And hence we can easily target a particular audience which fits our product. This helps us save energy being wasted on the wrong audience who are less likely to consume our product and focus on the right audience first. This was very difficult to achieve with traditional marketing.
CATT Marketing Funnel
You’ll come across many marketing funnels as you go through the journey of mastering marketing. One of which is the CATT Marketing Funnel. The funnel is coined by Digital Deepak (Based on my assumption that this is funnel modelled by Deepak Kanakaraju) and helps you understand wealth creation. It actually gives you the formula for generating wealth.
Wealth = niche^Content*Attention*Trust*Transaction
You have to decide your niche first in order to implement this funnel. You can decide on your niche by referring to the below Venn Diagram
Your niche is a combination of your talent and passion and its demand in the market. All these three must be aligned before you decide on your profitable niche. Any shortcomings in either of the three might lower your wealth score.
Once you have decided on your niche, you have to start working on it by creating good content and then grab the attention of the user by reaching him through your content. And then build trust by giving valuable freebies, once the trust is there the user will start transacting with you naturally. This process when done digitally is know as Integrated Digital Marketing. Let’s deep dive further into this.
Integrated Digital Marketing
IDM is using all available digital channels to drive traffic to you content. Refer to the below flow diagram.
It’s the effective use of all the available digital channels to drive sales. The process involves building trust with your audience by creating free valuable content, once the user gets hooked to your content, the user will naturally start transacting with you.
Trust Building by Personal Branding
What is a brand? A brand is an image of a product which people value and trust. People transact easily with a brand and that is why building a brand is very important.
So what if a person himself is a brand? Sounds strange?
A person can be a brand!
Take for example — Elon Musk.
Elon Musk in this era is the greatest example of personal branding. His followers have faith in him and they trust him that he will deliver at any cost. That’s the kind of brand image he has created for himself.
If you observe closely, his companies don’t spend even close to what most companies spend on marketing. His personal brand is enough to uplift his companies.
Below is the MassTrust Blueprint by Digital Deepak. This blueprint will help you understand the framework for personal branding.
Personal branding starts with learning a particular skill, then mastering the skill by working and gaining experience. Once you have the confidence on your skill you start blogging and solving problems for the community.
You can start consulting one-on-one after you are good at blogging and then advance to mentoring to a group.
When you reach the mentor stage, you get programmed to start your own company!
What do you think now after reading this?
Do you think sales is for you? Or are you more of the thinking guy who can convince people to buy your product through marketing?
Don’t you think sales and marketing are the driving force of any company and being a part of this team is like being in a special task force?
Let me know what do you think now about these career options. Please leave a comment and tell me your thoughts about the same :)
Like what you read? Learn more about me and the popular form of marketing called Performance marketing on this link
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