Sales and marketing are not the same. Ever notice that most people use sales and marketing interchangeably? They aren't and it is not useful to confuse them. They are different, as noted by management guru Peter Drucker: you sell when nobody can use what you have. You market when there is overlap between what you can deliver and what the client can use. Marketing is about adding value to your clients. And their clients.

We know how to sell. Books and guides on sales and selling flood our shelves and libraries: "find the pain and promise to eliminate it." Quick, simple, and often self-serving.

Marketing, on the other hand, is both ethical and builds continuing trust relationships. And continuing trust relationships delivers both current and future success.

Making sure what you deliver adds real value to your clients (and their clients). How do you really tell if what you can deliver is really useful to the client? The answer is surprisingly simple: add value to your client and your client's clients. What? Add value . . measurable value. Doing so means defining, with the client, what is value for both them and their clients. Keep in mind that your client has the same marketing responsibility: to add value to their clients.

Adding measurable value depends on contributions to your client's success while adding value to our shared world. Yes, our shared world. If your deliverable pollutes, is unsafe, breaks down, or is dangerous, chances are you are not adding value to the client or our shared world. This is a chain of results that goes something like this (Figure 1):

EXTERNAL CLIENTS' AND SOCIETAL VALUE ADDED
 (OUTCOMES)
  ¯­­­
YOUR CLIENTS'S VALUE ADDED (OUTPUTS)
­­¯­­­
WHAT YOU DELIVER
(PRODUCTS)
¯­­­
SELLING AND MARKETING
(PROCESSES)
¯­­­
YOUR RESOURCES
(INPUTS)

Figure 1. The value chain that extends from your resources (Inputs, or ingredients) to how you go about trying to get an order (Processes) to what you deliver (Products) to the value you add to your immediate client (Outputs) to the value added for your client's clients, including society (Outcomes).

What do all these terms and concepts mean to my profit success? These words are your keys if you use them to not just make quick profits, but continued profits over time. If you focus what you and your organization delivers on adding value to your client and their clients-including society-you will market.ⁱⁱ You will truly find the overlap between what you can provide and what all the clients can really use. Nothing harmful, nothing polluting, nothing dangerous.

What is societal value? Why should I care? Simple. Societal value is defined as the kind of world we want to build for tomorrow's child. Ask any mother what that world will be like and they will be very clear about the criteria for what I call Mega Planning. They won't tell you about means or resources such as the number of beds in a hospital, the credentials of teachers or classroom size, gas mileage for their cars, or even the cost of medications; they will tell you about societal results and consequences: they want no murders, rapes, permanent disabilities, no deaths from starvation, no accidents causing loss of life or livelihood.

If this seems, at first, to be a bit impractical and not "real world," stop for a moment and think about both the ethics of what you deliver as well as how you want to be treated. Want to be sold anything harmful? Destructive? Inappropriate? Harmful? Neither does anyone else. Treat others as you want to be treated.

So? If you want your clients to trust you and your organization, shift your efforts to get an order to asking (and answering) "will what I offer to deliver add value to my client, my client's clients, and our shared society?" If the answer is "yes" than you have the ingredients of marketing . .ethical marketing. If you adhere to this, then you will build the relationship with your clients that you would like anyone else to build with you.

Shift from sales to marketing.

i Professor Emeritus, Florida State University. Email: rkaufman@nettally.com; Website: megaplanning.com

ii In my books-Strategic Thinking, Mega Planning, and Practical Strategic Planning I define the level of planning where the primary client and beneficiary is society as Mega Planning and results at that level are called Outcomes. When the primary client is your organization, planning is call Macro Planning and those results are termed Macro. And when the primary client is an individual (such as the sales person), then planning at that level is Micro and results are called Products. One best aligns these for continued success.