Recently I had the great pleasure of having a long and relaxing breakfast at The Yale Club with sales expert, Jill Konrath of Selling to Big Companies.   Though Jill and I have known each other for a very long time, this was our first-ever face to face meeting.  We had a wonderful and relaxing breakfast together — great food and great company.

Ironically, as I was discussing similarities I see between marketing and military history — I noticed the famed history author David McCullough sitting just three tables away, eating with his family.  Jill thought that was quite an ironic discovery.

If you don’t know him, Mr. McCullough is the recipient of two Pulitzer Prizes in history — for Truman and John Adams, and has authored books such as The Path Between the Seas, Mornings on Horseback and The Great Bridge.  As an avid student of history, I found this a great thrill!

Not only was seeing David McCullough a thrill, but I also had a fascinating conversation with Jill.  As one of the world’s foremost experts in sales, I was shocked when Jill agreed with the title of this blog post.

Sales has become trivial next to marketing — but most B2B sellers have not yet realized it.

I told Jill that one of the lessons of military history is that all wars start by fighting the last one.  The Civil War started with Revolutionary War tactics.  World War II started with Nazi Panzer tanks speeding around the troops using the slow, plodding approach of World War I.  I explained to Jill that I see far too many businesses using tactics of the last “war” in business, such as relying on sales Rolodex and cold calling for lead generation.

My hypothesis was further validated in a conversation with Barbara Dondiego, the Chief Marketing Officer of Level 3 Communications.  Barb agreed with me that the robustness of the Internet, combined with high speed connections, has severely reduced the influence of salespeople.  In addition, my white paper, How to Find New Customers, explored this fundamental change and explained the need for Marketers to engage early and build relationships.

In fact, Jon Miller, VP of Marketing at Marketo said that his company’s salespeople do zero outbound cold calling, yet they have higher sales per rep than Salesforce.com.

There is a profound lesson for all marketers here.  Your role and importance has grown while the empire of your VP, Sales is fading.    Seize the day and embrace the opportunity.

What do you think? We love comments and people who share.

Jeff Ogden is President of Find New Customers “Lead Generation Made Simple” Check out the online show every Friday at 11am ET, “Laugh and Learn with the Fearless Competitor.” Find New Customers is one of few lead generation companies in New York.

Find New Customers helps companies like yours (with 50 to 5,000 employees and complex products) implement lead generation programs to improve the way you find and acquire high quality sales leads using best practices in online lead generation. Quality leads matter. In fact, a recent study found that sales teams with fewer, high quality sales leads closed more than sales teams with more leads of dubious quality.

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