He might have been clever about some things, but when it came to the importance of selling to business, the late Peter Drucker was so clueless that it’s amazing anybody took him seriously. In his book Management: Tasks, Responsibilities, Practices Drucker wrote that “the aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous” and that “the right motto for business management should increasingly be ‘from selling to marketing.’” That crock of egregious BS has totally screwed up thousands of companies, and it’s still wreaking havoc, as evidenced by the decline and fall of GM.
The main problem with Drucker’s thesis is that it’s completely contrary to both common sense and human nature.
Selling, as a human behavior, predates recorded history. Anthropologists have noted bartering behavior among non-literate cultures and even non-human primates. As such, Drucker’s prediction that selling will become “superfluous” ranks on the “that ain’t gonna happen” scale right up there with Saint Paul’s notion that celibacy will replace sexuality and Lenin’s concept that the state will wither away.
Selling is business, and business is selling. If selling isn’t taking place somewhere, there isn’t a business. Period. Sure, there are some buying situations (like retail consumer goods) that don’t require the physical presence of a sales rep. But even in those situations, there’s always a sales rep in the background, representing the manufacturer, making sure that the product gets to the outlet.
Unfortunately, Drucker’s silly idea has taken root inside MBA programs, almost all of which basically ignore selling or see it as an appendage to marketing. IMHO, it is insane that MBA programs can pretend to teach “business” without spending at least a third of their time on the most important function that any business has, which is SELLING.
Selling takes place EVERYWHERE inside a business. People have to sell their ideas, they have to sell themselves as the right person for a job, they have to sell their colleagues on working together. Even when you’re not actually selling to customers, selling STILL is what business is all about. Business without selling is like reading without words or eating without food.
Even so, Drucker’s weird anti-selling, pro-marketing meme has infected the business world so thoroughly that companies and executives repeatedly focus on marketing issues, when their real problems lie elsewhere.
GM is a gigantic case in point. In obedience to comrade Drucker, the company focused on brand marketing rather than fixing its two real problems: 1) lousy products, and 2) a sales culture that antagonized buyers. (See “What Killed GM? Brand Marketing“)
If GM had fixed those two problems in the 1970s — right when Drucker was spouting his worst nonsense — the company would be sitting pretty. The Japanese companies would never have been able to gain traction simply by having superior products. And they never would have been at a competitive advantage if GM’s management had figured out how to make car buying a pleasant experience.
I could cite dozens of other examples, but it’s probably wasted pixels. The sad truth is that there are no lack of people in today’s business world who have drunken the Drucker Kool-Aid, if only after it’s been filtered through the intellectual digestive track of some other over-rated academic.
These misguided souls really think that marketing should not just replace sales, but should be running the entire company. Just check out some of the comments to these two posts:
Incredible, eh? It’s like some cult where the members are impervious to logic and common sense. Absolutely insane.
