[MUSIC] [SOUND] Hello, again, I'm Cesar Rodrigues. We are starting a new journey today. Our course number four in our Strategic Sales Management Specialization. I hope you're as excited as I am to discuss the sometimes challenging interaction between sales and marketing. If you're a sales professional, you have had continuous engagement with marketing, and also the other way around. We have discussed extensively sales, selling and salespeople in the previous three courses. Now we move to dissect marketing in all its intricacies and idiosyncracies as well. Of course, marketing is a very extensive topic. Just in Coursera, by mid 2017, there were 456 courses that dealt with marketing in the English language alone. So if you want to deep dive on the marketing discipline, you have plenty of choices. What I mean here is that our focus will be clearly on where sales and marketing meet. Collaborate, fight, celebrate, blame each other, so on and so forth. I will start with a story we already talked about in our course number one, about our dear poet, writer, and friend, Ralph Waldo Emerson. I would like to revisit his well-known phrase, or at least a phrase that's attributed to him. Before you ask, no, I'm not obsessed with Emerson, I only find that his famous phrase is remarkably instructive, and here it is. Build a better mouse trap and the world will beat a path to your door. In other words, the product will sell itself, people will go to your house and beg to buy it. He was talking about progress, innovation. But there are important implications from his statement that make me consider Ralph Waldo Emerson the worst marketing in history. So, about his phrase. The first implication is for you to build a better mouse trap, you don't have to ask your potential customers what, for them, a better mouse trap is. As a matter of fact, you don't even need to know if your potential customers are happy with the mouse trap they already have. So, the first implication is that customers do not matter and they have no input whatsoever in the product. The product is the first P in the four Ps that the famous author, Philip Kotler, describes. So, mouse trap lesson number 1, product and customer are fundamental. Let's suppose now that, okay, the new mouse trap is actually better than the old ones. Customers will be pleased and will definitely buy it, right? Not so fast, it depends on the second P of the four, price. The product, the mouse trap, is great, but guess what? It costs ten times more than the old one. I'm not sure how many customers will buy it, right? Mouse trap lesson number 2, no matter how good a product is, price will also determine its success. Okay, okay. Let's suppose now that besides the mouse trap being better than the old one, it's reasonably priced, just 10% more expensive. So product and price are right. Now we have a successful product, right? Not so fast, customers have to know the product exists besides how much it costs. So lesson number 3, if the third P, promotion and advertising are not activated, no one will buy it. I have some good news, we just heard the mouse trap inventor told his friends and neighbors about it. And he even made some fliers and distributed them at church on Sunday, so we're good. Nope, we just heard that our inventor sells the mouse trap from his house. There's one point of sales, which is the fourth P from Kotler, point of sales or place. Just one small detail, Emerson lives on the top of a rocky hill, there are no roads, and at some point, you need ropes to just climb there. So, although it's a good product, it has the right price. And if target customers will reach by promotion, the place, the point of sales is wrong. Lesson number 4, distribution, point of sales, place, is also a pillar for the success of a business and of a product. Our inventor friend may sell one or two units of his new mouse trap, probably for rock climbers. But the bad news is, the world didn't beat a path to the inventor's door. The lesson is clear, you need to get all the four Ps, product, price, promotion and point of sales, just right to be successful. Why are we telling this long story? First, I love storytelling. Secondly, because I think the concept will stick to your mind forever, hopefully. And thirdly, in order to deconstruct the mouse trap myth and highlight the crucial role of marketing in any business venture. Sorry, my friends, this is the end of our lesson for today. But before that, some good news. I just heard our inventor friend got the village store to sell his mouse trap. And now he hired salespeople that are taking his mouse trap to other towns and villages. So the fourth point of sales is now right. It seems our friend the inventor is being quite successful. And he's now busy working on mouse trap version 2.0, I hope he learned his lesson. I hope to see you next time. [SOUND]