Last time, we talked about whether you should outsouce marketing. We concluded that it's better to have a truly outside perspective on your company. But what about sales? I think of marketing as fundamentally "understanding your company" and then, of course, communicating about it. I think of sales as fundamentally "being your company". Just as it's not possible to know yourself fully, it's not possible for someone else to be you fully. And this is why outsourced sales efforts always feel, well, outsourced. The sales person who shows up in your office "representing" some other company—a company s/he is not really part of—always sounds sort of false. And this is because you can't get a "feel" for that company through this person. You can't really learn about what kind of a company you'll be dealing with. The outsourced sales person doesn't know how to be like someone from that company. So, the next question is important. Does it matter that I get a feeling about a company? Yes, it does. It does because of importance of branding, which we'll discuss next.