For the most successful marketers, the answer to the question "what is marketing" is radically different from the rest. That answer means that some marketers only get "OK" results, while others get fantastic results.

To understand the answer (which can be found at the end of this blog post), we first need to understand how marketing relates to sales.

What does a marketer do compared to a salesperson?

While the majority view marketing as separate from sales, successful marketers see the two functions as two sides of the same coin: Marketing and sales work together and simultaneously on the same customer, guiding the customer through a very specific buying journey that goes from experiencing symptoms to making a purchase.

But while the salesperson does this through one-to-one dialogues, the marketer does it through mass communication:

Effective marketing in different stages of the buyer's journey

All customers that all companies have have gone through these four stages:

1. Symptoms: You experience problems, whether you are aware of them or not.
2. Framed: Once you become aware of the symptoms, you need to put them in a context that explains them.
3. Connected: When you can explain the symptoms through context, you need to feel confident that your company can solve them.
4. Customer: Only after completing all of the above steps can you purchase your solution.

Good marketing continuously assesses where potential customers are in the buying journey and educates them on what they need to understand in order to move on to the next step. So what does a marketer do compared to a salesperson to achieve this?

While the sales function achieves this through dialogue, a marketer does so by reading potential buyers' digital signals, communicating in a relevant way based on those signals, and informing salespeople so they can connect with the right person at the right time.

What is marketing done by a good marketer?

The very best marketers answer the question "what is marketing" in four steps:

1. Understand exactly what symptoms your customer is experiencing before they put those symptoms into context (often even before they are aware of the underlying issues causing the symptoms).
2. Then help the customer understand these symptoms through an explanatory model that favors your own solutions.
3. Then position your company as the supplier that, based on this explanatory model, is best suited to solve the customer's symptoms or problems.
4. Then trigger a purchase, often in close collaboration with the sales department.

We will look at exactly how they carry out all four of these steps and what they mean in practice in the next blog post.