Marketing Studies

Note: The following is a summary based on Nikola Grubisa's upcoming book "Selling From the Inside Out".

One sales and marketing myth needs to be addressed. The myth is: Mass marketing eliminates (or replaces) the need for personal, one-on-one sales.

Few marketers realize that sales and marketing are built on the firm foundation of successful ?one-on-one? sales of the product, in which the sales representative is selling ?in-person? to the customer standing before him. This is the essential element and often the real missing link in marketing.

Successful one-on-one sales give the marketer the information that is needed to implement a complete marketing campaign. They help establish a process or a system that can eventually (taking in to consideration the product/service and the actual business circumstances of the business in question) lead to successful sales even without the physical presence of the sales representative or the customer.

Not knowing what critically influences the prospect to make the buying decision makes any marketing approach or medium useless.

The key is in knowing how the prospect will respond when standing in front of the sales representative during a sales presentation. Only after this knowledge is acquired can it be applied to all other means of delivery of the actual message.

This needs to be done: identify and apply a process we can clearly define, support and maintain, re-establish, upgrade and duplicate every possible way, all the time, at every place, with anyone.

Successful marketing originates with a sale. Once you know (based on the experience of selling in-person) what influences your customer's decision to contact and buy from you, you simply send this message through various media into space.

Summing it up: Yes, you can run your business successfully without physical ?one-on-one? selling, but you usually can?t establish a consistently successful process of selling (even with a great marketing strategy) without first knowing the ?one-on-one? process.

Or you can ? but it won?t be based on an actual process, but rather on ?blind luck?. This means, you can?t use this knowledge to reestablish or copy your success, because circumstances ? customers, competition, market etc. ? will probably change and you have to know not only what is going on ? but also why.

That?s why everything begins and ends with the one-on-one experience.