In business, in order for me to teach in my blogs, podcasts, masterminds, and all the things I do, I have to continue to learn, which means I have to invest time in learning how to do new things, and look at things from different perspectives. One of the ways I do this is by listening to audiobooks. I'm an auditory learner. I'm not somebody who can read a book and get a lot out of it, but if I listen to an audiobook, I get a ton out of it. That's the way that I learn. Maybe you're a reader, but my preferred method of learning is through audio. Hence, why I do a podcast, right? Make sense?

Listen Up…

I was listening to two audiobooks this weekend. Yes, I listened to two books. One of them was called Choose by Ryan Levesque. You may know him. He's also the author of Ask. I love his one-word titles. The other one was book from a LinkedIn expert on LinkedIn. Now, the difference between these two books is Ryan Levesque is more focused on marketing, while the LinkedIn guy, whose name I'm not going to use, his book was 100% on sales, and that's what he does. They both lived up to expectations. Today I want to talk about why a marketing mind is better than a sales script.

The marketing book itself, Ryan's book, gave away concepts. It gave away ideas. It really showed you a kind of a step-by-step process and was really geared towards helping you learn how to do it yourself.

Now, the LinkedIn book really did kind of the same thing. But as I was listening to it, I kept thinking, the target audience for this book is C-level people, CEOs. The concepts that they kept bringing out were that you have to do all of these steps in order to be successful on LinkedIn. You constantly heard him say, “Well, this is what our company does.” What it sounded like was, yes, here's the formula. It's really time-consuming. It's really complicated. But guess what? We make it easy. You can pay us to do it. In the long run, even though I was educational, it really sounded more like a sales pitch for his company than it did for something you could do yourself. Now, you could, if you want to invest the time. But he doesn't teach you all the other principles about how to do that. It's really just about the steps necessary to be successful using LinkedIn in his formula.

Marketing vs. Sales

Let's examine the difference between marketing and sales. Marketing is the study and management of exchange relationships. In other words, it's the business process of creating relationships with and satisfying customers.

Sales, on the other hand, are activities related to selling or the number of goods or services sold in a given time period. It's all about actually creating transactions, where marketing is more about building and maintaining relationships.

Now, both of these books talk about building relationships. But one is much more focused on how to do it from a more organic standpoint, where the other one is about how to use LinkedIn to build relationships to generate sales.

So, what's the difference? Marketing informs and attracts leads and prospects to your company. Sales, on the other hand, works directly with prospects to reinforce the value that your company's solution is to them. We have to also define what values are. We'll talk about that in a second.

Why Is a Marketing Mind Better Than a Sales Script? You have to start thinking more like a marketer, which a long-term relationship building game, versus a salesman, or a saleswoman, or a salesperson. Sales is really about cold calling, prospecting, all that kind of stuff.

The COLD Call

Right before I started this post, I got a call. It was from somebody who said, “Hey. I want to learn more about your marketing techniques.” Okay. I ended up returning the phone call because I didn't recognize the number. He was like, “Hey. We sell this stuff and you can white label our services.” He wasn't caring about anything I had to do. He just wanted to pitch me. So, I turned it around. I said, “Hey. Follow me on LinkedIn,” and I sent him a whole bunch of other stuff on LinkedIn that would educate him and market to him, so maybe he might use my services. That's the difference. He was there to sell me. I was there to educate him.

Ask

When you think more like a marketing person, the first thing you have to say is what value do you add to them? That's the key. If they find value in what you do, then they will continue to consume what it is that you present. How do you do that? Well, in Ryan Levesque's other book called Ask, that's what you do. You ask. You pull people. They vote with their eyes. They vote with their likes, their comments, their shares. They tell you what they're interested in. It can't hurt to do a survey or a poll and say, “What keeps you up at night?”

Value

How do you provide value? That's what the marketing person has to understand. Then you need to provide that value. How do you do that? Give away your best stuff. A lot of people think it's counterintuitive to give away the baby with the bath water, but you're not doing that. Why? Because people will consume what you give them, but very few of those people will act upon it and actually do something, and most of them will need your help.

Targeting

The next thing you have to do is make sure you're targeting your messages to the right audiences. I've talked about this in some past blog posts and podcasts, but the bottom line is, you may have to create multiple pieces of information to talk to multiple different audiences. So, do it.

Sequence

The other thing that you want to do is you want to think in sequences. In other words, there's something called cornerstone content. It's the big, broad brush. Then you can create other pieces of content that get down into the weeds. Sequence out each one of those steps. Define the steps in the cornerstone content, and then break it down into smaller chunks. That way, people will follow along with the sequence.

THE Goal

The last piece of this is to focus on the end goal. In sales, it's to make a sale, right? But in marketing, it's to get their permission to continue the conversations. How do you do that? Get them on your email list. Get them to a webinar. They may refer you to somebody, or they may follow you on social media. The bottom line with all of that is marketing will help you generate conversations on a mutually beneficial level.

Final Thoughts

Let me leave you with some final thoughts. Sales is about identifying prospects and getting them to listen to your pitch. Now, that can be successful, but it takes a lot of people and a lot of pitches to work. Where marketing is about educating your market so they get to know, like, and trust you enough to contact you when they need what you're selling or maybe want to refer you to other potential prospects. One is faster, but less effective, and one takes longer, but builds better, lasting relationships.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this. Comment below and share your thoughts, ideas or questions about showing the concepts presented. Have you had to overcome any of the presented concepts? What worked and what did not live up to expectations? Do you have any ideas or advice you could share?

To learn more about this and other topics on Internet Marketing, visit our podcast website at http://www.baconpodcast.com/podcasts/