WHY SALES BEFORE MARKETING?

Marketing is what fascinates many PGDM and MBA students, yet majority of them fear the ‘sales’ aspect of Marketing. Here, it becomes evident to answer- Why should one go for sales before marketing in the corporate sector?

So, to start with we should have a basic idea of what sales and marketing really are! Sales is nothing but the simple selling of the goods and services, which will in return generate revenue. Marketing on the other hand is the strategy used to develop and increase these sales of the goods and service. Marketing creates perceived value for sales, it creates interest and positions the product in the mind of consumers. It acts as a trigger element for sale and hence, ‘sales’ lie at the canter of all ‘marketing’ activities.

Coming back to answering the question posed at the beginning, how I see the importance of sales and what brings it as an essential prerequisite to any other marketing activity is that sales is the main whole and sole part of any organization, which means that if there are no sales, the organization cannot survive.

Sales is what brings the continuous revenue to the company whereas marketing generates the leads for it, hence acting as a supporting feature for the former. Both the aspects go hand in hand but still, sales remain as the bottom line. And when you decide to enter the ‘marketing domain’ of the Corporate World, one can only understand how to generate the leads, when the field practical knowledge and experience exists. This is because, only when one knows by experience what problems and struggles arise when a salesperson steps in the market, he can really design the effective strategies required to lessen the burden on the sales personnel and make the customers walk to the brand rather than the sales team putting unnecessary and unproductive extra efforts in making the brand reach to the customer.

Sales is the inner most element and marketing revolves around it. Marketing’s main aim is to generate and increase the sales of the goods and services by various strategies. Every element is dependent on sales, so one should learn and must go for sales first, before experimenting other dimensions of marketing. Sales being the centric and core element, gives every information required for the other marketing activities, especially the market research, such as- market data, consumers’ feedback, what consumers think about the product, and more, which can later be used by marketers and increase the sales.

At the end, one must always remember- Though sales are a short phenomenon & marketing a long one, but without the short one’s existence, the use and essence of the long one dies!