What Comes First - the Chicken or the Egg?

What comes first – the Chicken or the Egg?

I thought I would start my first blog on this site, with a familiar age old question: What comes first – the Chicken or the Egg?

What a bizarre thing to write I hear you say, and what does this have to do with Business?

Well, recently I have been delivering some talks around Effective Marketing and why people don’t always see the results that they should from their Marketing efforts.

What has come from the feedback of participants is a lack of clarity as to what Marketing is and in particular its role alongside the sales function of a Business.

Does Sales come first and then Marketing, or is it Marketing first and then Sales follow up?

Someone in the States undertook some research with the top 75 Business Leaders, asking them for their take or definition of Marketing. Guess what? All 75 answers were different and personal to each persons Business.

My definition of Marketing is this: “Marketing is communicating with people, to make a connection, that leads to a relationship!” For most people in Business this relationship is a sale or new client.

When I started to then look at the role of Marketing alongside Sales, it soon emerged that most people in the workshops I was presenting at were seeing Sales as the goal of the Business and coming before Marketing.

Indeed if we look at most organisational charts, job descriptions and Business Cards presented to us in Business, the majority of them refer to a Sales and Marketing Manager, Department etc. Our terminology in Business often puts Sales before Marketing.

However, going back to my definition of the role of Marketing, if Marketing is designed to communicate and make a connection then surely the outcome of successful Marketing is a pipeline of leads and referrals which can then be passed to the Sales team to develop a relationship with, which then leads to a sale / client?

If most Businesses are reversing that process and trying to sell to people, without establishing a connection that leads to a relationship, could that be a cause of poor sales and conversion rates within Businesses?

People buy from people, and unless you connect with people, get a response that allows you to form a relationship, then your Sales efforts will continue to be construed as being “Hard Sell – Aggressive and Un-welcomed”, and you are in danger of causing great long term harm to your Business.

However, if you allow your Marketing to do its job, communicate, connect and harvest a response, then your sales team will have warm leads, good relationships and natural conversions to sales / clients and your Business will grow.

I hope these thoughts have helped you in looking at growing your Business, and who knows, one day we might be able to develop an answer to ” What comes first – the Chicken or the Egg!”

This was first posted on 14 February 2013 on:

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