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Comment by davemel37 | Hacker News Reader

A few notes... Marketing for large enterprises is a different challenge than promoting a product on your own, so insights from working at SUN might not translate into street level marketing.

1) marketing is not sales - This is absolutely incorrect. Marketing is any communication that touches a prospect or customer. Copywriting is salesmanship in print. Sales is absolutely a key ingredient of marketing!

2) Marketing is about perception - Partially true... Branding is about perception, marketing is about much more than just perception.

3)Marketing is Ubiquitous - This time you got it right!!! Marketing is influencing every possible touchpoint with consumers.

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I feel like this comment might sum up the difference between high traction B2C and slow and steady B2B. At no point do you mention the closing or cashing the check. Your approach is perfectly valid for most B2C stuff, but as a B2B guy, this looks completely foreign. Definitely a learning experience for me at least. As a B2B, this approach would IMHO fall on its face miserably, but I can totally see how this would be effective when more users == more value and sales-guy-on-a-phone is not scalable. That said, for B2B people, I would be highly skeptical that this approach would work. When your market is small, you had better have closers on the line to ring the bell.

To be fair, at the time Sun had exactly 4 products, the Sun 3/50, the Sun 3/75, the Sun 3/160, and the Sun 3/280. But you are absolutely correct that Enterprise marketing is different than start up marketing. I was fortunate to be at Sun through the transition.

We'll have to disagree on your characterization of Marketing as Sales, I see them as two very different types of communications. That said, I know people who flip back and forth between the two, and people who are really stuck in one side or the other.

Marketing is about matching up the right message to the right market through the right media...

Sales is a marketing tactic. The salesman is the media, the sales pitch is the message, and the prospect is the market...

The pitch and process might be different, but thats because its a different form of marketing than print or tv or internet,etc...

But... your sales team should be under the umbrella of your marketing department... otherwise you will have the classic conflict of bad leads vs. bad salesman, a classic environment where people can easily shirk responsibility and shift blame instead of recognizing that they are all part of the same process.

Wow... this was truly a great, insightful post. I definitely learned something.

Thank you sir. Added your blog to my bookmarks.

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