Sales professionals don’t necessarily make good marketers!

Do sales guys make good marketing professionals? Alternately, is it necessary for marketing guys to have a sales stint to be successful? This is an evergreen debate.

The FMCG industry in India has traditionally preferred marketing professionals who have had a reasonably long sales stint. Most brand and product managers are encouraged to gain significant sales experience before embarking on a marketing career.

The sales stint, it is believed, helps them understand the market and field realities better. The white goods industry too follows the same route. Of late, the Information Technology has started rewarding good sales professionals with marketing roles.

But is sales the best route to marketing?

To get a better perspective I put this up as a question on LinkedIn. As expected there were many responses and almost 90 % felt that sales professionals, unless exceptional, do not make good marketing professionals. Did I read that correctly? Sales guys don’t make good marketing guys?

Then why do industries like FMCG, white goods and now IT, insist on a sales stint for their marketing professionals? Let us look at a historical perspective of how marketing has evolved over the years.

In 1953 Neil Borden in his presidential address to the American Marketing Association coined the term ‘Marketing Mix’. It was actually a refinement of a concept given by James Culliton in 1948 who described a marketing manager as a ‘Mixer of Ingredients’, like a chef who mixes the right ingredients in correct proportions to create an excellent dish.

Jerome McCarthy in 1960 proposed the 4 Ps of marketing, which is generally accepted as the correct ingredients of the marketing mix. The concept was popularized by Philip Kotler, widely accepted as the father of marketing, through his book ‘Marketing Management’. The four Ps are Product, Price, Place, and Promotion.

To be able to understand the 4 Ps, one would need to have cross functional expertise and working knowledge of many functions (please see table below)

4Ps	Knowledge required
Product(or service)	Market research, engineering, design, project management and analytics
Price	Finance and statistics
Place	Operations, supply chain and distribution
Promotion	Advertising, communications, public relations and market research

The table above is not an exhaustive list and there can be other areas where knowledge is required depending on the Industry and the type of marketing followed. In the internet era a lot of business is transacted over the internet and with the coming of age of social media, the skill sets need to be further upgraded.

But I am not the only one who feels this way, when I put this question up on LinkedIn I received this response from Jay Kaiser a Marketing and Sales professional from New York

“Sales people might become good marketing professionals, but the disciplines are quite different. Marketing requires quite a different skill set than sales. Skills such as analytical, financial, creativity, project management, team leadership, market research, advertising, messaging and more are required in marketing. Sales people generally don’t have these skills but they can be learned. “

In conclusion a good marketer needs to have cross functional knowledge, like a jack of all trades. Sales expertise is one of the ingredients. There are many other areas and a good all round experience makes a good marketer.

I was into sales earlier before I became a marketer. I also had stints in project management, operations and market research. Does that make me a good marketer, well I guess it’s too early to tell but it definitely makes me an effective one.