Short Answer is they can.  The reality is that they can't stand each other.

First, Let's start with our Sales Person.  You know who you are.  You're excited you have a prospective buyer / seller in front of you and you sell.  You've got the Mike Ferry Scripts happening, you've got the contracts going back and forth, you love negotiating.  It's in your blood.  When you're selling, you're alive.  You are a wheeler dealer.  You make things happen rather then waiting for things to happen.  You are proactive.  If you don't have a client, you'll get get one.  You eat what you kill.  You know the drill...

Now let's put on the Marketing Hat: You are about Lead Generation.  You are a major Quadrant II person.  You have a plan which you review and execute against.  It's not about making the sale, it's about making the phone ring and you can do that.  You've run the ads in all the right places, your website is humming, you've got traffic and you want more of it.

Now your Business Owner Hat: You're questions are, What business are we really in?  You've got your SWAG..  I mean business plan.  It's about ROI and asking, should we even be in the real estate business?  Where can we get traction in the marketplace?  Can we adequately defend this part of the market?  What about our team?  Do we have the right people on the right seats on the bus.  Is the bus pointed the right direction?

I've transitioned over the last seven years from Sales and Marketing to Business Owner and Director and for me it was a natural transition.  It was obvious that if I was going to have some sort of sembelence of sanity in my life I didn't want to continue to be trying to make the next sale...  IMHO that would have been the path to burn out for me.  Nothing wrong with it, I just knew that for me there had to be a better way.

What I find more mentally challenging is the fact that agents generally tend to not move from Sales very well.  They are focused on finding the next customer that they never take the time to put together a marketing plan.  Generate the inbound call necessary to scale a business.

If success leaves clues.  Here's a big one: You can't scale a one-to-one sales business.  The best you can do is create a mini team, but ultimately that's about the best you'll be able to do.  Maybe get a couple of buyer's agents and a couple of assistants and then work your butt off to make sure that you make payroll every month.

Real Estate brokerages thrive on the fact that Sales People aren't good at marketing or running businesses.  They aren't even very good at protecting their paycheck.  Fortunately for the brokerage, there are a lot of agents running around making enough transactions, not scaling their business that they can simply aggregate them under one roof and call themselves a brokerage.  From time to time someone will outgrow the fishbowl, but generally speaking agents are like the elephant with the piece of string hanging off their leg.  They don't believe in their own ability to move up into marketing or business ownership that they ultimately have little to show for themselves at the end of the day.

Sure business people are competitive.  They more then most understand that the fights become more important the larger they grow, so choosing the right fights and making sure you win them is key.  But just like a begining sales person, a begining business owner has to start somewhere and there is no better teacher then failure as long as you are willing to pick yourself up, dust yourself off and give it another shot.

I remember reading The Millionaire Real Estate Agent by Gary Keller and having started a number of small businesses including a couple which I ultimately was involved in getting to the public markets, Gary simply stated the "Self Evident" principals of business and packaged them up for real estate agents.  The only challenge is that most agents didn't have past business experience to match up the book against.

Ultimately they didn't have the 10,000 hours in the business game to be able to jump in and take it to the next level.

The other challenge for sales people is that once they have the "experience" they often don't believe in that experience.  They still have emotional wounds from attempting different aspects of the business and don't realize that now they know how not to do it, so they really are prepared to fight the big fight.

The basic question still remains: Can Sales People, Marketing People and Business People Occupy the same body.

I think my answer is they can, but not at the same time.

All the Best,

Glenn Sanford
--
Founder / CEO
BuyerTours Realty LLC

Looking for a home in Bellingham Washington.  Check out our Bellingham Real Estate website http://realestate.bellingham.net/