Salesman eats own head!

Sales is no longer sales. It's marketing.

There’s been a lot of talk about cold calling being “dead” in the last year or so.

This undeniably populist movement proposes that prospecting is now about face to face networking, referrals, the use of blogs, writing articles and whitepapers, pod and video casts, a presence on social networking sites, and other ways to contribute value to and build credibility in your target market. Like cold calling, if done well, I am sure these methods are effective.

But amidst the clamour of excited sales reps glimpsing some light at the end of the cold calling tunnel, can I just quietly hold up my hand at the back of the room and say, “Errr, all that stuff, that’s not sales, that’s “marketing.” ”?

Well, so what if it is marketing? If it works, why not do it? What worries me is that Peter Drucker, heavy weight management guru once famously said, “The purpose of marketing is to make sales superfluous.”

See what I’m getting at? We’re doing it for them! Oh my God, we’re eating ourselves!!! We're going to be superfluous!

Bonus section!!! How to decide which prospecting methods to use :

• Think of a prospecting method (cold calling, blogging, etc)
• Try it
• If it works, keep doing it
• Repeat process until you have a number of methods of getting quality prospects

Remember you heard it here first ;-)