Marketing is creating noise. Marketing is puking on Twitter and other social networks.

Sales is about relationships. Never forget: people do business with people. Sales is also about product knowledge. How can you be a Trusted Advisor if you don't know the first thing about what you are selling? How can you ask intelligient questions? How can you answer them?

Right now the marketing buzz around CLOUD is huge. But it's just marketing. Most sales people (agents and direct) don't know what they are selling or why. Having spoken to a few executives at carriers, I'm not certain they know what they are selling either. If you can't explain it to me, how do you explain it to your prospects?

A recent study shows that "The real challenge seems not to be marketing the Cloud, but rather selling it." One-quarter of IT executives surveyed don't believe that salespeople are knowledgeable and only about a third feel that sales reps are prepared to answer their questions. OUCH! It reminds me of VoIP just 2 years ago.