To illustrate the momentous shift in our understanding of sales, consider this line from the late Theodore Levitt’s Marketing Myopia, touted as a “Harvard Business Review Classic” from 1960: “The difference between marketing and selling is more than semantic. Selling focuses on the needs of the seller, marketing on the needs of the buyer. Selling is preoccupied with the seller’s need to convert the product into cash, marketing with the idea of satisfying the needs of the customer by means of the product and the whole cluster of things associated with creating, delivering, and, finally, consuming. Selling concerns itself with the tricks and techniques of getting people to exchange their cash for your product. It is not concerned with the values that the exchange is all about.”
The Five Questions
To illustrate the momentous shift in our understanding of sales, consider this line from the late Theodore Levitt’s Marketing Myopia, touted as a “Harvard Business Review Classic” from 1960: “The difference between marketing and selling is more than semantic. Selling focuses on the needs of the seller, marketing on the needs of the buyer. Selling is preoccupied with the seller’s need to convert the product into cash, marketing with the idea of satisfying the needs of the customer by means of the product and the whole cluster of things associated with creating, delivering, and, finally, consuming. Selling concerns itself with the tricks and techniques of getting people to exchange their cash for your product. It is not concerned with the values that the exchange is all about.”