Marketing Defined

Dear Dave
I have read a number of articles over the past few months on the subject of marketing and sales and find myself getting confused trying to understand if these are two distinct activities or just two different terms describing the same thing. Can you help me understand?
GH KS

Dear GH
This is one of those areas that should you pose this question to two “experts” you’d probably get four different answers, but here’s my two cents on the subject.

Marketing is a long-term, ongoing process of creating a set of conditions and an environment conducive to generating opportunities to make sales. Using a farming analogy, marketing is all about clearing land, preparing the soil, planting seeds, and patiently tending, fertilizing and watering. Sales are the harvest. Eventually, all the hard work you’ve done marketing should “sprout” a bountiful crop of quality opportunities to make sales. The better the job we do marketing, the more efficient and effective the sales process will be. If you don’t do the work, don’t expect the reward. The yield from a well-farmed plot of land is always higher than from random foraging in the wild.

Marketing is about getting to intimately know potential clients and allowing them to likewise know us. Cicero summed up the essence of marketing and sales some 2000 years ago when he said, “If you wish to persuade me, you must first think my thoughts, feel my feelings and speak my words.”

Done well, marketing takes you to that special level.