How important is Sales in someone’s life? It is very pertinent and important for any living human species to have the ability to be able to sell itself in the market. And more importantly, as a business student (regardless of a MBA student) the quality to be able to sell is regarded just about the essential.

I see this around in my everyday life where people turn sceptics towards Marketing or Sales in general in my business school, which is something that astonishes me for the right reasons. And their cover or argument would go along the paths of what’s important for a business organisation – Finance/Cash Flows or Marketing/Sales (Everything else falls within these functions or a dimension of this), which then results in them making a decisive stand about Finance, simply because they are not comfortable with marketing (which is more related to people/consumers directly or indirectly). One of the worst decisions or arguments of any one is this!

There are three kinds of people you will find in business-schools – (1) People who clearly know what they want to do /study and they end up doing that; (2) People who discover new meaning and knowledge along the way of their study and they end up doing that; and (3) People who have no particular interests or clue in general about their interests and end up doing something for the sake of other (fringe) benefits.

It’s clearly better on the longer-run to stay within the first two for obvious reasons. But seldom, are the percentages of people falling into these brackets more. This also includes the aversion towards a business function like Sales or Marketing. At a honourable stage in my MBA I would like to conclude the following about the degree.

There are two reasons why someone should do a MBA – (1) To be able to find a “Market” or “Sell” (directly or indirectly) a company’s products or services; and (2) To be able to value a firm (including Financial Cash Flows and other related knowledge streams).

This is purely my conclusion of why someone should do a course as strategic in nature as a MBA. Opinions may differ, people may rant back, categories mentioned before may not be pleased (especially people who form the first segment), arguments will evolve and it will be such in nature that it would be as close to “Which came first – Hen or the Egg?”.

Now after having established that fact, I would like to take a deeper look at the societal impact in general regarding Marketing and Sales. I have already written about this in my previous blogpost about defining the exclusivity of “Brand-Me”. So I would not like to go deeper into that topic in trying to explore the dynamics.

Rather think about this – How many of us sell everyday? (Please take a moment and think at this stage before you read further!)

In almost every stage of our life right from the time we are born till we get a hospital-bed (to get to the grave) we sell ourselves. We want to get an admission in a good school – we sell, We want to go to a better school – we sell, We want to go to a Classy College – we sell, We want to get a great job – we sell, We want to galvanise our people (Schools, Sports teams, Associations, Clubs, Social Bodies that you are a part off, Workplace, Client-ships, etc) – we sell, We want to marry someone – we sell again! (And many more to name).

This lifecycle of Sales never ends, just the only difference being at different stages we sell different products and services, which may be you at times or someone (something at times) else.

Now having considered this, why not look at Sales as an superior business function (?), rather the only function in a business organisation which is not a Cost-to-the company rather a money making function, and get passionate or accept the reality instead of not realise to garner the benefits. Now these benefits as I mentioned may not be necessarily related to pure professional in nature.

I would like to end this by quoting "Everybody lives by Selling something".


Filtered by sambhar….

Labels: Sales