One of the great myths of marketing is that it’s possible to replace a sales force by using marketing to create demand. That’s absurd, however, because even the stuff that comes out of a vending machine (i.e. with no sales person present) involves all kinds of sales activity.
I’m not talking about the “demand creation” part of marketing. Yes, that plays a factor, but no matter how far a product category is deployed in the retail channel, there’s always a significant wholesale effort behind it. And that’s where the B2B selling is taking place.
Even products that are completely commoditized, like soft drinks, have sales forces. They don’t sell to the end user, though. They sell to restaurants and other places where people buy soft drinks. Such sales environment are often quite competitive, and involve all sort of interesting problem solving.
Swim upstream further, and you’ll find that there is an entire supply chain of material, each of which involves some kind of B2B transaction and which probably involves hundreds of competing sales reps.
The “demand creation” activities, far from “driving sales”, are actually just an attempt to make the sales process easier at the wholesale level. It’s easier for a B2B sales rep (like a wholesaler) to move product through a distributor if the distributor believes that there will be some pull through the channel.
But saying that demand creation marketing is “replacing” the sales function is just silliness. It’s based upon a complete misunderstanding of how the business world works. Once a retail product has gotten into a self-serve market (like an e-commerce website), the “selling” has already taken place. Even if the retailer gets stuck with unsold inventory, the company that manufactured that inventory usually gets paid.
In addition, many so-called “self-serve” channels have some kind of sales force to help customers make purchases. E-commerce web sites, for example, frequently have telephone sales groups. Heck, even vending machine companies have sales reps to help find advantageous locations for their machines.
Marketing can never replace Sales. If you remove the selling function from one point of a supply chain, the selling function simply becomes more important somewhere else in the chain. Make it possible, for example, for people to buy consumer electronics online (for example) and suddenly you’ve got thousands of sales reps working for semiconductor firms selling products to consumer electronics manufacturers.
So the answer is to my question “Do You REALLY Need a Sales Force” is: Of course! That sales force might not work for you directly, but if there’s not some selling going on somewhere — with human beings doing the selling — there isn’t really any business going on. Kapeesh?
READERS: I challenge you to describe a business model where some kind of human-to-human selling isn’t taking place, somewhere along the line.
