A Practical Philosophy of Marketing & Sales
Peace is a natural effect of trade.
-Montesquieu
1. Trade is the exchange of one thing for another.
2. Trade occurs when a buyer and seller make an agreement.
3. That agreement defines a price point.
4. Any trade agreement must be satisfying to all parties. If not, it will not be made again.
5. Both sides seek value through this agreement, a solution to a need, a pleasure, increased well-being. In a word, happiness.
6. Trade allows both sides to capitalize on their unique comparative advantage.
7. Trade creates a more equal balance of supply and demand between the parties involved. The result of trade is balance.
8. A business is an entity that trades repeatedly.
9. Businesses are organized to reduce friction in trade, both within the walls of the firm and through a firm’s interactions with the outside world*.
*Nobel laureate Ronald Coase develops this in a famous paper that outlines why people join together to form business firms. A firm can reduce transaction costs within the firm itself as compared to its dealing with the external market. See: Coase, Ronald (1937). "The Nature of the Firm". Economica. Blackwell Publishing. 4 (16): 386–405.
10. The purpose of marketing is to facilitate trade.
11. Marketing brings together the elements necessary for a transaction to take place.
This includes elements within a business (e.g., products), and elements outside of the business (e.g., buyers, intermediaries, the market itself).
12. One measure of the efficiency of trade for a business is profitability.
13. One measure of the scale of trade for a business is revenue. Another is volume: units sold or deals closed.
14. For trade to occur, the buyer and seller must be connected.
15. Marketing is the process of bringing together a market and a product at a price
point.
16. Bringing together the product and market produces the opportunity for sales.
Marketing does not produce sales; it provides opportunities for sales to occur.
17. A sale is a completed transaction, typically an exchange of goods or services for money. It is an event and the result of trade.
18. Selling is an activity. It is a process that occurs in time.
19. A sale is the desired result of that activity, a completed agreement to trade.
20. Taken together, the objective of both sales and marketing is to facilitate beneficial trade agreements. Trade agreements that deliver happiness.
21. And to do so repeatedly, at the greatest scale and with the greatest efficiency as possible.
22. Said differently, the objective of sales and marketing is to deliver the highest level of happiness to the market at the lowest cost.
23.This is the lowest cost for both the seller and the buyer. This will ensure regular and repeated trade.
24. Over the long-term, increased profitability for a business comes from increasing the happiness of its customers while increasing its own efficiency of delivering it.
25. Marketing can increase both the volume of trade and increase a business’s efficiency at facilitating trade.
26. Marketing can thus increase happiness.
27. Marketing does this through connecting things together, most importantly buyer and seller. It also connects many processes within firms and across firms.
28. Marketing partially relies on these processes and other departments within the firm to be successful, including sales. All must be in balance to promote long term growth.
29. Sales also relies on marketing for its success. Their fates are forever intertwined.
30. We must expand our definition of marketing, if we hope to be successful over time.
The process of marketing must take into account everything both leading up to and stemming from the bringing together of product and market.
It is everything from production to delivery, and beyond.
This includes the design and production of a product, its introduction to the market, the processes and channels by which it is promoted and delivered, and even the ongoing service and re-selling of that product.
31. This is all made possible by marketing’s ability to repeatedly create that magical moment when product and market become one through a closed sale.
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