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Marketing

🥋 Ready, Fight: Sales vs Marketing

Sales is just bad marketing.
Marketing is the most important thing in the world.
You want to know the best strategy to get more customers and increase sales? Focus on marketing so that your customers actually come to you.

- Gary Vaynerchuk

Well, that's a bold statement if I've ever heard one.

In the same keynote, Gary goes on to say,
"Marketing is the biggest driver to business results in the world".

So what is Sales? What is Marketing?
Let's quickly break it down and see what we can learn from the distinction between them.

Sales - the act of converting an interested lead into a customer
Marketing - the act of promoting solutions to people with a specific problem

Marketing
➝ Product focus
➝ Introducing solutions through storytelling
➝ Bring them to you (inbound)
➝ Long-term goals
➝ Can lead to exponential gains
➝ Results take a while to show up on the scoreboard

Sales
➝ People focus
➝ Introducing solutions by asking questions
➝ Go to them (outbound)
➝ Short-term goals
➝ Usually linear gains
➝ Needs to put points on the board quickly

I may be biased, but I agree with what Gary said - now I wouldn't say it that way, but if I had to pick one over the other, I'd go with marketing all day.

Now keep in mind that certain industries pretty much have to have a solid sales team.

For instance, life insurance - when does anyone ever buy life insurance without a representative guiding them toward the sale? Pretty much never.

Although marketing may be able to cover more bases and even do a lot of the selling on its own, a good sales effort is what takes your business from good results to great results. And the opposite becomes true if you look at this from a long-term perspective.

If you want to win, bring your marketing and sales efforts closer together. Marry the two if you want to be at your best.

Like an alley-oop, marketing drives the ball down the court and sales dunks it.

Want to crush in business now while also plotting for gains over the next 10 years?

Market to people with a problem.
Sell to people who want their problems to go away.

Mindset

💰Earn While You Learn

In 2019 I was your average underpaid employee.
Today, I run a six-figure one-person business.

Here is the one thing that I did differently...

In 2019, (right before covid) I was working on the creative team for a church and was essentially the head of the music dept for a bit. I showed up, gave my best on some days and coasted to 5pm on other days.

My salary was $36,000 which I aggressively negotiated to $39,000. Mind you, living in Sarasota, FL with a mortgage, wife, toddler, and a baby on the way...

Money was incredibly tight.
Truthfully, I was scared to death.

I knew that staying put in this job would only delay the inevitable future success I felt destined to achieve. Success in what exactly? Who knows… But the current job was affording me just enough food, shelter, and the time I needed to figure out what the next chapter could be. (side note... we ran a tight budget and were still pulling from savings every month of which we had very little.)

I’ll share why I chose marketing another time, but that’s what I went with.
The next question was, do I attempt college or the freelancing route?

I did both.

I created an upwork (an online freelancing marketplace) profile as an email marketer and set my rate at $50/hr, while taking online classes at a local community college. It was a lot to pile on top of my current family and W-2 responsibilities.

Several weeks passed...I got a gig on upwork!

So we set up a discovery call - I was nervous as hell.
I didn't know what I was supposed to know in order to get the gig.
I didn't know what questions to ask the potential client.
I didn't know how to do a discovery call - at all.

With a notebook folded back on the tiny Ikea desk and a pen in my shaking hand, this was a massive moment - I could feel it.

I knew that this was the start of a new chapter in my life.
This man on the other end of the phone was offering me a first-class ticket to a new life.

On the call, he asked me all sorts of questions and pry'ed for intelligent feedback related to his current struggles, of which I had none to give.

However, I knew that...

If I could just get him to like and trust me enough, I could learn how to do the things he needs behind the scenes when no one's looking.

Long story short, I got the gig which was a one-time project relating to custom fields and automations inside of the email marketing software mailchimp. I spent the next week and a half learning like crazy and implementing. Because I was charging hourly, I didn't clock the time spent researching cause of ethics and trying to be a decent human.

10 days later, I was paid $583.34 and got my first 5-star review.

"I'm officially an email marketing freelancer! It freakin worked!"

Not long after that, I dropped out of college (again) and leaned into the education system called real life.

I learned while I earned.

We'll end the story there for today, but here's the takeaway...

You cannot fully learn, until you begin.
You cannot begin without making first moves.
Your first moves won't be made with complete confidence.
You cannot gain confidence until you learn your craft.
You cannot fully learn, until you begin.
*tweet this

You do not need to learn before you can earn.
More today than ever before, you can do both at the same time.

My question to you is...
What would you love getting paid to do?

Now begin.

Until next time ✌️

Ev