Agile Business Development

A nephew of mine recently joined the Air Force and selected bomb demolition as his occupation. One of the trickier munitions he learned to defuse was based on smart weapons technology. These munitions are delivered to the vicinity of a target via a missile or other delivery vehicle, then smaller sub ordinances are released which perform the actual target sighting as well calculating aim points for maximal kill effect. This led me to think about an analogy with selling - how marketing organizations create programs to identify suspects then drop sales people in to engage with these potential customers, much in the same way that the missile gets the smart munitions into the battlefield for engagement with the suspected targets.

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Last night I had the pleasure of hearing marketing strategist and author David Meerman Scott speak at the Association for Strategic Planning’s fall kick-off in Boston. You may be familiar with David’s work if you have read his hit new book World Wide Rave or his previous well known The New Rules of Marketing & PR.

I get out to a lot of events and seminars which gives me exposure to a wide range of presenters, and I have to say that David is probably the best presenter I have seen in the past several years, and certainly in the top five or ten of all time for me. Based on the reaction he received from the crowd last night, I believe I was not alone in my assessment.

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I have never worked for a company that did not seem to welcome the idea of teaching their salespeople more about the company’s products and how to become better at time management, qualifying, managing the sales process (i.e., overcoming objections) and closing. However, I have never worked in or for a company that felt the same way in regards to instructing their sales force in marketing skills.

Why is that? Aren’t sales people by definition ‘outbound marketers?’ Aren’t they actively involved in the direct promotion of goods and services for our companies? The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines marketing as “the process or technique of promoting, selling, and distributing a product or service.” Sounds like sales to me!

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