Sales and marketing

I've always found that I like to sell by "marketing", not through "outbounds". This is my own hypothesis on why this is the case

I’ve always considered myself to be much more of a marketing guy than a sales guy. Whenever I have to sell something (could be my consulting service, the product I was building, or just getting a job), the instinct for me has always been to let demand come to me, rather than go in search of it.

In fact, if I were to think of my company Babbage Insight, one reason I struggled in sales was that the marketing wasn’t effective enough. I wrote sufficiently on the blog and LinkedIn, even hired a professional to write posts for us, but nothing ever got traction.

And so pretty much all sales was outbound. And I struggled. There would be the odd enquiry here and there, but they were mostly odd. Having to talk to someone and explain stuff “from zero” was always a challenge to me, and that was one reason why I think I couldn’t sell as effectively as I would have hoped to (in my previous stint running my own thing (2011-20), almost 100% of the business came through inbounds and referrals, and I just had to “convert”. That had been far easier)

So I started thinking about what makes someone or some brand (or company) sales-driven or marketing-driven. Back in B-school, I remember that some (consumer goods) companies were classified as “sales-driven” while others were “marketing driven”. Since I wasn’t looking to apply to those for jobs, I hadn’t thought through what makes someone sales or marketing oriented. Now that I’m thinking about this from my own perspective, I have some thoughts.

What makes you sales or marketing oriented, I think, is how much clarity you have in what your value prop is.

In my own case, either for myself or the company that I have run, I have defined my value prop in terms of a bunch of “capabilities”, and then kept things open. Both for myself and my company, I’ve struggled to articulate what exact kind of opportunity is ideal, though like what the old American judge said about obscenity, I know an opportunity is good when I see it.

I know precisely what I, or my product, can do, but cannot easily translate that into a precise set of “deliverables” that benefit someone. Hence, when I go through an outbound sales campaign, there is a lot of error (the hit rate is low), as I make mistakes trying to figure out who can use it, and how. And in an outbound sales “motion” (that phrase never fails to crack me up), you end up going with what you think is a fairly precise value prop; and if that doesn’t exactly fit what the buyer is looking for, you don’t have a sale.

Since I’m good at articulating my “capabilities”, marketing works well for me since that simply allows people to map their needs to what I offer (or the other way round). Since the offerings are at a more general level, a wider variety of people get in touch with me than those I would have directly targeted. And this increases the chances of getting a deal done.

With my company, I don’t know if it was the fact that I couldn’t articulate the “capabilities” effectively, or if simply none of the posts we put out went “viral” to any degree - but I found myself without the support of marketing, and having to do all outbound sales. And I didn’t enjoy the process at all.

In any case, my job hunt has taken to a different trajectory over the weekend after a random LinkedIn post I put on Friday got a fair bit of traction. Suddenly I’m having a whole bunch of interesting conversations, at a very different level to what I got when I was doing mostly “outbounds”.

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And then I got thinking about why I always prefer “marketing” to “sales”, and this post is my rationalisation.