I first published this  Seizing Profitable Marketing Opportunities on Technorati.

Less than 24 hours after meeting my new client, the proposal (pitch) I drafted to clean up the Gulf Coast was sitting on the Governor of Alabama's desk.

The day was 75 and sunny, my wife and kids were out of town and I had spent the previous 48 hours resolving work backlogs. Needless to say, I had my sights on landing my first small mouth bass of the season with my beautiful custom St. Croix five weight fly rod. However, being a consummate sales and marketing professional, I took one last pass of emails on my iPad on insure all the urgent and most of the important items were out of my inbox. Hmmmm, an email I was copied on by a client caught my attention and my marketing senses went off.

My client was one of the companies involved with a consortium of companies pooling their technologies to collaborate on cleaning up all of the oil spilled into the Gulf of Mexico. So, I took the risk, not expecting anyone to take me up on my offer and said, "If anyone needs help getting this deal done, I can work today." And within 20 minutes I had six different company profiles, a list of capabilities along with a plan to keep oil from getting to the shoreline, and a plan to clean up the shoreline if oil reached shore.

I won't bore you with details, but I will say that the other marketing companies that had been on the project were doing what most traditional outbound marketing companies do. They confused actions with results and completely missed the point of marketing.

The moral of the story? Marketing needs to drive sales actions and results. Marketing needs to be intimately dialed into pull vs. push mentality, seeking to add value and become indispensable. Screw brand building, getting market awareness and the like. Be it inbound or outbound, your marketing investment should always produce a measurable sales result, period. More importantly, more marketing professionals need to get off their laurels and realize our job is to make selling easier and we need to walk in the shoes of the sales team and help them get sales results.