Nothing Happens Until The Sale Is Made?

'Nothing happens until the sale is made.'

I have heard this one before. It is a comment refecting the importance and obvious personal pride of many sales professionals. Yet, I am left with a question. Is it really true?

They're the one's creating the opportunities and closing the sale through superior techniques, training, personal selling skills, etc. Of course, there is more than a little truth to this. Much of what we associate with corporate value, the company's intrinsic worth, can be boiled down to a magic number called sales. And many companies are completely lost without the dilligence and effectiveness of personal selling in all its forms.

Yet it leaves me wanting for more, as it does many others who concern themselves with marketing. Harvard's Ted Levine puts the counterpoint in succinct terms: "The goal of marketing is to make sales obsoete." Which sounds a little harsh (even to me). Must these two points of view exist in such stark polarity? Sales... Marketing... Sales!, etc. Each proponent quietly suggesting the other needn't make so much of itself. In many companies the two disciplines fight it out during every budgeting.

My own take on it is to say that we all exist on a vast ocean of economic activity which contains many fish, many shades of coloration and type. Lots and lots of species and organisms, thriving or not depending on the conditions of the hour. One such company completely depends on sales activity to generate its bottom line; anothr seeks it through effective marketing with far less attention paid to having a salesforce to differentiate itself. There are so many ways to see this happening, in the vast expanse of so many companies, selling B2B or B2C, through intermediaties and channel partners, with high tech goods and services which require a lot of presentations to simple products offers sold direct. Way too many fish to categorize so easily.

Yet sales can be misplaced in making the point of emphasis that nothing happens until a sale is made. Because it is the outcome that everyone wants, it becomes a fixed center in how the thinking is done, where the thinking starts and how people imagine their 'sales and marketing.'

I have come to appreciate Ted Levine's famous line, i.e. marketing if done effectively will sell the product so well you won't need a sales force. The product sells itself.