TABLE OF CONTENTS "Marketing Spreading the corn so the ducks will want to come to your field. Sales Taking a gun and shooting the sitting ducks. If the ducks are not sitting in your field, don't blame sales!"
In most companies today, you will not find marketing, according to my definition. Instead, you usually find a host of tasks such as sales support, sales training, advertising, collateral development, promotion, and others. Labeled as marketing, these tasks do not come close to accomplishing the vital role of marketing. Further, if the real problems of the markets are not addressed, the company ends up wasting its sales effort.
About 70 percent of companies today are constrained by the market. This means that if the organization had more orders, the supply chain capacity exists to fulfill them. If there are not enough ducks sitting in your field, you must look deeper than your sales training, advertising, and promotion programs. Successful marketing should bring a lot of ducks into your field, with glue on their feet! Why are not enough customers in your markets attracted to your corn?
Even for those companies who have enough orders today, think about how easy it is for competitors to copy or leapfrog technology today. Consider how horribly misleading many industry sales forecasts have been in the past...
