The Shared Mission

In simple terms: What we propose to our clients is the reinvention of their marketing efforts away from Product Marketing and toward what might be called customer-usage marketing.

The core enabler in this reinvention process is the Customer Focused Selling Solution Formulator, to be explained in subsequent chapters. Once the theme of customer usage replaces the traditional emphasis on product features, all kinds of good things can start to happen across multiple marketing vehicles. These include, for example:

• Prospect and customer correspondence

• Product development

• Advertising

• Success stories

• White papers

• web site

• Trade-show strategies

• Demand-creation strategies

• Buyer training

• Sales training

• Professional-services training

When Marketing becomes focused on customer usage, it shares a mission with Sales: helping buyers discover how they can achieve their goals, solve their problems, and satisfy their needs through the use of their company's offerings. For companies without this shared mission, CEOs will continue to lose sleep at night, knowing that the forecast consists of the opinions of sellers who each developed their own boiled-down version of what they're selling.