Beyond the Transaction: Unveiling the Power of Marketing vs. Selling in Business Success

Many people mistakenly believe Marketing and Selling to be the same. They think Marketing is all about selling. Especially during the holidays (like now), we see endless adverts trying to get us to buy lots of stuff. But I believe Marketing has nothing to do with selling. I believe Marketing is a lot simpler and a lot more integral to our quality of life than most of us believe.

What is marketing? Good. Marketing is the act of communicating that we have something of value to share. Full stop. No mention of selling or anything else. Marketing is simply an act of communication. The education we gave to my internal customer this morning is marketing. We are losing money right from the gate. Our security man if well-armed with product knowledge would be regarded as a marketer. Our office assistant has great potential to practice marketing if we can equip them and if they are eager to learn. Marketing is not selling 20 products and receiving a certain percentage. That is Exploit. Like every other functional area of business, marketing has a department whose aim is to educate and promote a company brand through sound education.

It is also good to know that without marketing society cannot flourish. We humans need stuff. Without stuff, we are cold, hungry, bored, and homeless. If we don’t know where to get our stuff, our quality of life suffers. So, if a business has something of genuine value to offer, it does no good to anyone if they keep it all to themselves.

Marketing circulates information about things that can make life better. Defined this way, marketing is not only important…it’s beautiful.

Selling is the act of exchange of goods for currency. It doesn’t have an intrinsic connection to the way I am defining marketing. But old-school advertising meshed `marketing and selling` so pervasively, that many people see them as the same.

When the primary purpose of marketing becomes sales conversion, it corrupts the quality of our communication.

As a Customer care representative product knowledge is one good quality we need to possess. Our product knowledge is our marketing. Our ability to utilize this knowledge with the business application available at our disposal is called selling. So marketing is what you need to know before you sell.

Dear CCR, what are the tariff plans that we have? What are the SME innovations available? How well do you know about roaming? How about the devices and their prices? How well do you know about our competitors in the telecommunication industry? If you know all these, can you educate my customer accordingly? No knowledge is a waste. This is marketing. The moment my customer is satisfied with all your talk and purchased VTU and CCR make use of NVP to activate data plan selling has taken place. Selling is an ongoing process.

Thank you for reading this article from us today.

Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.