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Why Marketing Comes First Before Sales
Ending the debate once and for all
Every CEO will tell you that sales is essential to the business. I’d agree but not before marketing. Marketing has long been misunderstood as a “nice-to-have”, especially in the pre-Internet era. Brochures, billboards, and tv ads were great but the main activities were led by sales. Marketing is something you add once your sales are going well, right? Wrong. Marketing should be conceived from day one as the cornerstone of any business. Sadly, even today many CEOs still don’t understand the role of marketing.
Marketing is like a person standing on the mountain top calling out your name. The idea is that the entire world will hear your words. At least, we marketers have that goal. Not only to become known but to dominate the market, of course. The taller the mountain, the more impressive it is.
If a business were fighting a war (which they are in a sense for market shares), sales would be the soldiers on the ground and marketers would be the airplanes in the sky. Marketers have a much wider range of visibility and can foresee things that are coming sales’ way before they can. Marketers also can cover a lot less territory in less time.
Since marketers stay so high-level, they can map out the strategy for business growth to dominate the market.
