Stop Random Acts of Marketing

1. 1Define the question before the metric. For each marketing or sales effort, write what you want to measure, why, what you will do with the result, and how you will act on the outcome. If you cannot answer those, drop the metric.
2. 2Map metrics to all three funnel stages: top (reaching the right people), middle (moving them to prospects), and bottom (turning them into customers who must be nurtured). Assign at least one metric per stage so no stage goes unmeasured.
3. 3Read the funnel end to end, never a single point. Set a lead rate beside the close rate for the same segment before deciding where to put effort. A strong top-of-funnel number is not evidence of a win rate.
4. 4Add customer-reported measures to the funnel data. Survey customers with direct questions ("On a scale of one to ten, how professional was our customer service agent?" or "Did you get an answer in a timely fashion?"). Run NPS for satisfaction. Contact customers a year or more into ownership to ask how the product is working and what they want next.
5. 5When a score is low, run a root cause analysis, fix the cause, and close the loop with the customer who gave the feedback.
6. 6Once or twice a year, run a win-loss review. Sample recent wins and losses, use an independent third party so buyers speak openly, and ask why they chose or rejected you, how the opportunity emerged, who was involved, and how much price and features mattered. Do not rely on sales-team anecdotes, which show only the tip of the iceberg.
7. 7Run an internal check as well. Use the anonymous 3-3-3 method (three strengths, three weaknesses, three things you would do as CEO) to bypass middle-management filtering. Set up work groups to act on the results and report progress back to employees.
8. 8Sort every effort by measurability. Prioritize measurable efforts and be selective about less measurable ones such as branding. Treat an effort with no way to measure it as a candidate for elimination, because every dollar spent on it is a dollar that could have been validated.

CenterBeam outsourced lead generation tracking to PointClear, an Atlanta-based agency, while targeting law firms across many verticals. PointClear found a 17 percent lead rate, which is impressive. If CenterBeam had stopped at that number, it would have concentrated its outreach on law firms and assumed the win rate would match. Instead, it examined data further down the funnel and found it had never won a single law firm in the company's twelve-year history. The strong top-of-funnel metric was hiding a dead end at the bottom. Reading the full sales cycle let the company redirect marketing and sales effort rather than keep funding a segment that never converted.

• If a metric looks strong at the top of the funnel, then check close or win rate for the same segment before committing more spend.
• If you cannot name the action you would take from a result, then do not collect that measurement.
• If an effort has no way to be measured, then you probably shouldn't be doing it; if it is a less measurable effort such as branding, keep it only selectively.
• If customer scores come in low, then run a root cause analysis, fix the issue, and close the loop with the customer.
• If the sales team's account of why deals are lost differs from what buyers say, then trust an independent third-party win-loss review over the anecdotes.

• Stopping at one flattering data point. Tell: you can quote a lead rate but not a win rate for the same segment.
• Collecting feedback without activating. Tell: the SWOT, survey, or 3-3-3 results exist but no work groups, owners, or follow-up communications do. In the passages, nearly every CEO had done a SWOT and almost none had acted on it.
• Not monitoring customers at all, so strengths and weaknesses stay hidden. Tell: flat revenue despite hard work, as with the environmental services firm that had never run customer satisfaction monitoring and did not know its NPS was in the low 80s.
• Relying on sales-team anecdotes for the voice of the customer. Tell: lost deals are explained as "price," yet win-loss specialists find price decides less than 15 percent of the time, and the rep's follow-up log disagrees with what the prospect says.
• Letting middle management filter frontline signals. Tell: executives learn of a tool problem only when the CEO sits with an agent and sees how glitchy the customer service program is.

• ▸Effort/channel: name the marketing, sales, or product activity being tracked.
• ▸Funnel stage: top, middle, or bottom.
• ▸Metric and source: the specific number (e.g., lead rate, close rate, NPS, survey score) and where it comes from.
• ▸Why it matters / decision it informs: what you will do with the result and how you will act on the outcome.
• ▸Downstream check: the metric from further down the funnel for the same segment that confirms or contradicts this one.
• ▸Review cadence and owner: how often it is analyzed and who is accountable.
• ▸Latest result vs. threshold: the current reading and the level that triggers action.
• ▸Root cause and fix: if the result is low or contradictory, the cause found and the change made.
• ▸Keep / fix / eliminate: decision; mark unmeasurable efforts as elimination candidates.

1. 1Run a loss analysis before you act on what sales reports. Interview the customers who chose a competitor and ask how they saw the two products side by side. Sales hears 'price' as the reason; the interviews surface the actual one.
2. 2Probe for personal and career risk, not only product gaps. In the Dell loss, IT staff reported to CIOs and could not make the wrong choice, so they picked the safer, less-featured option. Ask what would have made the decision feel safe to defend.
3. 3Build a buyer persona that names three to five comparison factors, the perceived barriers to doing business with you (for example, overwhelm at product complexity), and the trigger events (for example, a cybersecurity breach). Feed NPS comments in and refresh the persona as expectations change.
4. 4Commission an outside customer survey to test your assumptions about what customers value. CenterBeam assumed answering calls within sixty seconds mattered most. Customers said fast resolution mattered most. Act on the finding and say so in your messaging.
5. 5Measure customer satisfaction with NPS and use the score as a trust proof point. Take it into your messaging and your pricing conversations. A score in the low 80s, against Apple's 71, was a competitive advantage the company had never used.
6. 6Make each vertical's message specific. Learn the industry's priorities and use its language. For healthcare, that means showing how you help deliver better patient outcomes. Where you lack industry proof points, use IBISWorld reports to speak with insight, and refine one core message per vertical.
7. 7Answer buyer questions and objections in your content. Ask sales for the top ten objections and use them as the content list. If trust is the objection, answer why a brand-new customer should trust you, for example with customer testimonials.
8. 8Make the home page state what you do, whom you serve, your market position and why you are different. Remove jargon and vague headlines. Check it against a first-time visitor's ability to answer those four things.

A client selling a cybersecurity solution was losing deals to Dell. Sales insisted price was the problem and the company began considering a price cut. Instead of cutting, the consultant ran a loss analysis and interviewed customers who had chosen Dell. They learned that IT staff did not pick the client because it lacked a well-articulated product roadmap, which made it look like the riskier choice. Dell had a clear roadmap for staying ahead of cybersecurity threats. The buyers never told sales this directly. Further conversation showed the buyers feared losing their jobs: they reported to CIOs, could not choose wrong, and would take a less fully featured product if it felt safer long term. The fix targeted perceived risk, not price. A persona capturing that fear would have let marketing and sales address it earlier.

• If sales says 'we lose on price,' then interview lost customers before changing price. The stated reason and the real one often differ, and the real one may be perceived risk.
• If prospects hesitate on trust, then add proof to the content (testimonials, client comparisons, vertical insight) rather than more feature claims.
• If you are entering a vertical without industry proof points, then lead with the industry's own priorities and language, drawn from sources like IBISWorld, and refine your core message for that vertical.
• If your assumption about what customers value has never been tested, then run an outside survey and restructure operations around the result, as CenterBeam did with level-two engineers.
• If you cannot say who your ideal customer is ('anybody who wants a widget'), then analyze win rates by segment and narrow the persona before writing more messaging.

• Treating the sales cycle as the whole picture and pitching features. The tell: a strong sales team makes many calls and the numbers do not move, as with the environmental firm that landed one customer for its new service.
• Taking prospect objections at face value. The tell: you are about to cut prices while no one has talked to the customers you lost.
• Using broad, horizontal messaging for a specialized offer. The tell: visitors cannot tell what you do or whom you serve, as on the crime lab's original home page with 'the care your case deserves.'
• Not measuring customer satisfaction, so you hide your own advantage. The tell: flat revenue despite hard work, prices unchanged for years, and no NPS data.
• Letting a persona go stale or never building one. The tell: messaging ignores buyer triggers and barriers, and marketing and sales disagree on who to target.

• ▸Target segment/vertical: name the specific group, not 'anybody who wants a widget.'
• ▸Top 3–5 comparison factors: list what this buyer uses to compare options and decide.
• ▸Perceived barriers: list what makes them hesitate to work with you (complexity, size perception, unfamiliarity).
• ▸Trigger events: list the events that start their search (for example, a breach).
• ▸Stated loss reason vs. real loss reason: record what sales reports and what lost-customer interviews reveal.
• ▸Perceived risk to the buyer personally: note career, safety or defensibility concerns behind their choice.
• ▸Trust proof points: list the NPS score, testimonials, client comparisons and vertical insight you can show.
• ▸Top-ten objections from sales and your content answer: pair each objection with the page, asset or message that answers it.
• ▸Industry language and priorities: list the terms and goals this vertical uses, with the source for each.

1. 1Quantify the stakes before you fund anything. Cite the research in the passages: acquiring a new customer costs up to six times more than keeping one, and a 5 percent increase in retention raises profits by 25 to 95 percent (Reichheld, Bain). If you run an annuity business, give churn the most attention, because managed services churn can reach 50 percent.
2. 2Pick your focus accounts. Retention effort goes to top accounts first. Assign one executive as the main point of contact for each, and tell everyone internally who that executive is so problems route to them immediately.
3. 3Build deep and wide relationships. Do not rely on one sales rep or one contact in the customer organization. Add relationships across the account so personnel changes do not put it at risk, and so you get better coverage to find more opportunity.
4. 4Act as conductor, not hero. The executive owns the relationship but does not have to resolve every issue. Bring in the right resource as needed: the CTO for a technical update, the VP of call center operations for an operations review of help-desk services.
5. 5Get ahead of problems. Make sure you are informed the moment something breaks, such as a server going down. Call the client's CEO before they know there is a problem, say you are on it, and give a fix window (the passage's example: ninety minutes).
6. 6Be reachable and respond fast. When a client contacts you with a serious issue, even on a Saturday morning, respond right away, as they expect you to. This accumulated trust makes it hard for them to cancel or go elsewhere without engaging you first.
7. 7Measure loyalty continuously with NPS. After an order completes, send the one question: "How likely are you to recommend ABC Company to a colleague?" Use a 1 to 10 score with optional notes. Read the comments, because they carry more insight than the score. Aim the survey at specific things, such as on-time delivery or satisfaction with the buying process.
8. 8Close the loop on what you hear. Ask happy customers for social posts and publishable quotes. Contact detractors and fix what they raise. Turn customer requests into product advantage, as when a focus account asked for reporting by geography and the resulting feature became a competitive advantage in the IT service.
9. 9Fund loyalty explicitly. Check whether you have a specific plan and budget for customer loyalty, and ask how you will cross-sell other products or services to existing customers.

At CenterBeam, a managed IT services company, the author ran a Focus Executive program and had virtually no churn, in a sector where churn can reach 50 percent. The only customers lost were those sold to a larger entity or those that ceased operations. One focus account was the Colorado University Foundation, worked with over eight years. Its CFO called her one Saturday morning with a serious issue, and she responded right away, as he knew she would. As point person, she brought in the CTO for technical updates and the VP of call center operations for help-desk operations reviews. Because everyone at CenterBeam knew she owned the account, she was informed when a server went down. She could then call the client's CEO before he noticed and promise a fix within ninety minutes. The passage states the result: this kind of relationship builds trust and loyalty, grows revenue, and protects against churn. Canceling would have been difficult without first engaging her to remedy the situation.

• If the account is a top account, then assign a named executive as the point of contact and build multiple relationships in the customer organization, not just one.
• If you run an annuity or managed-services model, then treat churn as a first-order metric, since churn there can reach 50 percent.
• If an issue arises that is outside your expertise, then bring in the right internal expert (CTO, VP of operations) while you stay the owner of the relationship.
• If an incident occurs, then tell the customer's executive first, with a specific resolution time, before they discover it.
• If an NPS comment or client request reveals a gap, then act on it and consider building it in as a competitive advantage, as with the geography reporting feature.

• Single-threaded relationships: one sales rep or one customer contact holds the account. The tell is that a personnel change on either side puts the account at risk.
• Treating retention as an afterthought to new-customer acquisition. The tell is a budget for acquisition but no specific loyalty plan or budget.
• Executive as bottleneck: the executive tries to solve every issue personally. The tell is that technical or operational problems wait on the executive instead of getting a CTO or operations lead.
• Learning of incidents from the customer. The tell is that the client calls you before you call them, because nobody internally knows who owns the account.
• Running NPS but ignoring the comments. The tell is that you track a score without reading notes, following up with detractors, or collecting quotes and referrals from promoters.

• ▸Account name and annual value: identify which top account this plan covers.
• ▸Executive point person: name the one executive who owns the relationship and is told first about any issue.
• ▸Relationship map: list each customer contact (deep and wide) and the internal person who covers them, so no account depends on one contact.
• ▸Expert resources on call: name who you bring in for technical updates and operations reviews (e.g., CTO, VP of operations).
• ▸Incident protocol: state how you are notified of a problem and the proactive call and fix-time commitment you make to the customer's executive.
• ▸Latest NPS score and key comments: record the score for this account and the main themes from the notes.
• ▸Open customer requests: list requests (such as new reporting) that could become a competitive advantage, with owner and date.
• ▸Expansion and cross-sell opportunities: note other products or services this account could buy, found through broader coverage.
• ▸Referral and testimonial status: record whether the account has agreed to be a reference, give a quote, or refer others.

1. 1Name the plateau in the author's terms before acting. The passages list 'Stuck at a revenue number,' 'Constrained by sales,' and 'Current customers are stalled' as growth challenges. Write which one you have, then check whether you are running 'random acts of marketing': activity chosen without a definite plan, purpose, or pattern.
2. 2Separate running from growing. Running the company optimizes inside the four walls; growing aligns to outside forces: competitors, economic trends, technology evolution, consumer expectations. List one finding in each of the four external categories. If you cannot, you lack the market insight a growth plan needs.
3. 3Build the roadmap from data and market insight before any execution. Do not hand the problem to an agency. Agencies execute a well-thought-out plan and can add a communications strategy, but they do not build the growth strategy.
4. 4Turn your SWOT into action. Take each opportunity it identifies and assign an activity, an owner, and a metric that ties to getting more business. The test: 'Have you activated against it?' A SWOT that is only filed counts as not done.
5. 5Capture the voice of the customer, including prospects who chose not to buy. Ask what concerned them, what they were looking for, how they evaluated you against other options, how they made the final decision, and who the stakeholders were and what each cared about.
6. 6Rewrite the story from the buyer's point of view and put what matters most to customers first. Give sales the new messaging. Do this before adding calls or headcount.
7. 7Narrow to an Ideal Customer Profile from the insight. Write explicit market characteristics (size, installed base, spending history, geography, service needs, cost sensitivity) and redirect sales effort and resources to the verticals you can close.
8. 8Measure every funnel stage (top, middle, bottom). Track win rate with NPS and win/loss feedback, and when win rate moves, such as from 40 percent to 70 percent, find out what drove it. If something cannot be measured, question whether you should be doing it.

A $14 million environmental services firm launched a strong new service and landed only one customer. It had a superstar sales leader and a talented team, and the call volume did not move the numbers. The author reviewed how the team described the service and found nobody had asked the voice-of-the-customer questions. Interviews with prospects who had declined showed the messaging was confusing. One said, 'It doesn't do emergency response, so we couldn't consider it,' even though the service included emergency response. The story was told from the vendor's viewpoint, in terms the vendor found compelling. The firm changed the messaging to put what mattered most to customers front and center, and within weeks the sales force gained traction. The lesson is that the plateau came from the marketing story, not from sales effort.

• If revenue is flat despite a strong sales team and high activity, then audit the message and the buyer's view before adding calls, reps, or spend.
• If you are considering hiring an agency, then first have a data-based growth strategy in hand; an agency executes the plan but will not build it.
• If win rate jumps or drops sharply (for example 40 to 70 percent), then investigate the cause through customer and prospect feedback before you replicate or fix anything.
• If you cannot measure a marketing activity, then stop it or redesign it until it is measurable at a funnel stage.
• If a segment will not close (the author's legal firms at CenterBeam), then move resources to the segment that does close (manufacturing) and codify it in the ICP.

• Checking the SWOT box without activating: everyone has done a SWOT, almost no one has acted on it. The tell is a SWOT document with no owners or funded actions.
• Pushing sales harder as the only lever: calls rise and numbers do not move. The tell is lots of activity and no change in the revenue figure.
• Selling in vendor language: features and benefits the company finds compelling. The tell is prospects who describe the offer wrongly or reject it for a capability you already have.
• Outsourcing strategy to an agency and expecting a fix: you pay a premium for execution with no plan behind it. The tell is a campaign with no insight-based strategy to point to.
• Treating marketing as unmeasurable: leaders say 'we're not measuring anything in marketing.' The tell is that you cannot name a metric for each funnel stage.

• ▸Plateau symptom: which challenge applies (stuck at a revenue number, constrained by sales, current customers stalled, not sure where to start).
• ▸Current revenue and win rate: the baseline numbers you will move.
• ▸External forces: one finding each on competitors, economic trends, technology, and consumer expectations.
• ▸SWOT opportunities activated: list each opportunity, its owner, and the action taken (blank means not activated).
• ▸Voice-of-customer findings: what lost prospects said about concerns, criteria, evaluation versus alternatives, and decision process.
• ▸Stakeholder map: each buying stakeholder and what they care about.
• ▸Rewritten message: the one-sentence story with the customer's top concern first.
• ▸ICP characteristics: the traits of the customers you can close, and the segments you will stop pursuing.
• ▸Funnel metrics: one measure each for top, middle, and bottom of funnel, plus NPS and win rate.

1. 1Set the decision first. Write down the strategy or message choice the insight must inform (for example, how to position a new service). The source order is fixed: market insight informs strategy, and strategy drives execution. Do not send messages in ads, at tradeshows, or in sales presentations until you know they resonate with your target audience.
2. 2Look outside the four walls. Running a company optimizes the inside, and growing it means aligning to outside forces such as competitors, trends, technology, and customer expectations. List what you currently know only from internal opinion, and mark it as unverified.
3. 3Segment your current database before you ask anything (geographic, demographic, and so on). This shows where you already win and lose, so you know whom to interview and which segments may need different answers.
4. 4Interview customers and, above all, prospects who chose not to buy. Ask the same five questions each time: What are you concerned about? What are you looking for? How did you evaluate us versus other options? How did you make the final buying decision? Who was in the buying process, and what did each stakeholder care about?
5. 5Record the buyer's exact words and compare them with your sales story. A statement like "It doesn't do emergency response, so we couldn't consider it," about a service that does include emergency response, shows the story is failing, not the product. Treat every mismatch between what you say and what they heard as a finding.
6. 6Map the buying process as the buyer lived it: the steps, the options considered, the stakeholders, and each stakeholder's concern. Shift your focus from your sales cycle to the buyer's cycle.
7. 7Test your position against competitors. Run a SWOT on your own company, then the same SWOT on your main competitor, and read the results next to the customer interviews. Look for strengths to grow into and weaknesses to exploit.
8. 8Prioritize and activate. Rank findings by what matters most to customers and put those items front and center in the messaging and plan. Change the story, then watch for traction in the pipeline (the environmental firm saw it within weeks). Measure ROI so the insight turns into action and not a completed exercise.

A $14 million environmental services firm launched what it saw as an incredible new service and won only one customer. It had a superstar sales leader and a talented team, and no number of calls moved the results. The sales team's pitch listed features and benefits in terms the vendor found compelling. Nobody had asked what customers were concerned about, what they were looking for, how they compared the service with other options, how they made the buying decision, or who the stakeholders were. Karen Hayward's team began talking with prospects who had chosen not to buy. They found the messaging confusing: prospects could not see the full picture, and one said, "It doesn't do emergency response, so we couldn't consider it." The service did include emergency response. The team rewrote the story to put what mattered most to customers front and center. Within weeks the sales force gained traction. The fix was to speak at the customer's level, and the product and sales team did not change.

• If sales activity is high but results are flat, stop adding calls. Interview lost prospects and test whether your story matches what buyers heard.
• If a prospect cites a missing capability that you actually have, treat it as a messaging failure and rewrite the story before touching the product or the sales team.
• If customers describe a need your offer only meets through a workaround, as Xerox customers did with converted data streams versus native IBM data, build or position around what they say they want. The Xerox controller became a multimillion-dollar business.
• If wins and losses vary by location or demographic, segment first and build a separate plan for each segment. One-size-fits-all plans fail, as the four-park franchise showed.
• If a SWOT is complete but nothing has changed in the market, you have not activated. Assign each opportunity an owner and a customer-facing action before closing the exercise.

• Telling the story from the vendor's point of view. The tell: your pitch lists features you find compelling, and prospects repeat objections your product already answers.
• Treating SWOT as a box to tick. The tell: everyone has done one, and almost no one has acted on it.
• Jumping to execution in a dash for results: agencies, email blasts, and more calls with no insight work underneath. The tell: tactics change monthly while the revenue number stays stuck.
• Talking only to happy customers and ignoring non-buyers. The tell: the feedback is all praise and cannot explain why deals are lost.
• Skipping stakeholders. The tell: you can describe one buyer, but you cannot say who else was in the decision or what each of them cared about.

• ▸Decision to inform: the strategy or messaging choice this research will shape.
• ▸Segment and source: which database segment the interviewee comes from, and whether they are a customer or a non-buyer.
• ▸Concerns: what they were worried about, in their exact words.
• ▸Needs and criteria: what they were looking for, in their exact words.
• ▸Alternatives considered: how they evaluated us versus other options, and how they perceive each competitor.
• ▸Buying decision: how the final choice was made, and the steps of their buying process.
• ▸Stakeholders: each person involved in the decision and what each cared about.
• ▸Message mismatch: anything they believed about us that is wrong or unclear compared with our actual offer.
• ▸Action and measure: the messaging or strategy change this triggers, its owner, and the traction or ROI signal you will track.

1. 1Separate running from growing. List the outside forces named in the source (competitors, economic trends, technology evolution, consumer expectations). Score each one for its effect on your revenue. Inside-the-walls efficiency work does not count as market insight.
2. 2Instrument your market position before you theorize. Install a basic measurement such as Google Analytics so you can see website traffic and how you perform against competitors online. The $4 million SaaS CEO had neither and could not see the easy wins.
3. 3Run a competitive SWOT. Write strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats relative to named competitors, not in the abstract.
4. 4Convert the SWOT into activation. For each opportunity, write one action that gets more business. Pick the two or three most important elements and attach a marketing plan line to each strength you intend to use. A SWOT with no activation is only a checked box.
5. 5Collect the voice of the customer and the voice of the employee. Send an NPS survey after each completed order (one question, 1 to 10, plus comments). Run a 3-3-3 with employees: three strengths, three weaknesses, three things they would do as CEO, submitted anonymously.
6. 6Test your story against how buyers talk. Compare your messaging with the words prospects use in objections. If they reject you for lacking something you actually offer, your story is wrong, not your product.
7. 7Check pricing and customer profile as part of positioning. Do a competitive pricing review, note when you last raised prices, and identify segments where a strategic increase makes sense. Build a current profile of your best customers.
8. 8Only then trigger execution. Send messages in advertising, at tradeshows and in sales presentations once you know they will resonate with the target audience. Insight informs strategy, and strategy drives activity.

Karen Hayward worked on a service offering whose prospects kept saying, "It doesn't do emergency response, so we couldn't consider it." The service did include emergency response, so the signal was that the story was wrong. The company told it from the vendor's point of view, in terms the vendor found compelling, and had skipped establishing the right story and its real competitive advantage. The team changed the messaging to put what mattered most to customers front and center. Within weeks the sales force gained traction with prospects, because it was now speaking on the customer's level. A second case from her Xerox Canada years shows the same outside-in method. The team listened to customers and identified a need for a native data stream to compete with IBM. Xerox printers put bank data on three-hole-punched 8.5 x 11 paper that fit in a binder and cost less to mail, unlike IBM's 11 x 17 fanfold output. With few deals available in Canada, they had to win a very high proportion of them.

• If your SWOT has been done but no opportunity has an owner, action and date, treat it as not done and activate before launching new campaigns.
• If prospects reject you for a capability you already have, rewrite the message around what matters most to customers before touching the sales force or tactics.
• If you cannot see your web traffic or performance against competitors, set up measurement before debating growth theories.
• If your focus is the sales cycle, then reframe around the buyer's cycle, because prospects now self-inform online before they meet a salesperson.
• If a list of opportunities exceeds what you can fund, pick the two or three with the biggest growth impact and defer the rest.

• Checkbox SWOT: everyone has done one but almost no one has activated against it. The tell is no marketing or sales action traceable to a listed opportunity.
• Inside-the-walls thinking: the CEO focuses only on operations and inside sales and cannot say why growth stalled. The tell is no data on competitors, traffic or market trends.
• Vendor-point-of-view messaging: the story uses terms the company finds compelling. The tell is prospects citing missing features you actually have.
• Outsourcing strategy to an agency: expecting it to fix growth. The tell is a large agency spend with no roadmap, since agencies execute a plan but do not build growth strategies.
• Random acts of marketing: activities launched in a dash for results that skip the insight and strategy steps. The tell is activities with no definite aim, plan or pattern.

• ▸Named competitors: list the 2 to 4 you actually lose deals to.
• ▸Outside forces: for each of competitors, economic trends, technology, and consumer expectations, write the impact on your revenue.
• ▸Strengths versus competitors: each strength with evidence, such as customer comments or NPS notes.
• ▸Weaknesses and threats: what buyers or employees (3-3-3 responses) say you lack or fear.
• ▸Opportunities: each opportunity stated as a business outcome that gets more business.
• ▸Customer-voice evidence: NPS comments, objections heard, and the wording buyers use.
• ▸Message check: does current messaging match what matters most to customers? Yes or no, and the rewrite.
• ▸Top 2-3 activations: action, owner, budget, and date for each chosen opportunity.
• ▸Measurement: the metric and tool, such as analytics or NPS, that will show the result.

1. 1Start from strategy, not activity. Before any ad, tradeshow message, or sales deck goes out, confirm it rests on market insight and the voice of the customer. Run a SWOT, then run the same SWOT on your main competitor. Convert each identified opportunity into a named activity with an owner. The source test: of CEOs who completed a SWOT, almost none have activated against it.
2. 2Define the target segment before you write copy. Name who the message is for and who it is not for. Every message, channel, and piece of content then traces back to a segment (Part II opens with segmentation for this reason).
3. 3Write the home-page answer to four questions: what you do, whom you serve, your market position, and why you are different. A new visitor must get all four quickly. Replace jargon walls with one plain statement of position.
4. 4Build content from objections. Ask salespeople for the top ten objections and make each one a content asset. If pricing is the barrier, build a pricing calculator that walks the client through current costs, then your cost, then the difference. If trust is the barrier, publish customer testimonials.
5. 5Write blog and site content to follow the buyer's journey. Cover the questions a prospect asks while researching your product category, and answer them. Plan around the buyer's cycle, not your sales cycle.
6. 6Choose channels deliberately and keep the message consistent across them. Use a hashtag only after confirming it is unused, apply it on all social media, and monitor how others use it. Treat video as one more channel: an iPhone and a basic tripod are enough unless video is a core method.
7. 7Instrument the channels. A company with no Google Analytics cannot see website traffic or performance against competitors. Install measurement first, so you can spend on what matters most and measure ROI, then iterate.
8. 8Review the whole set quarterly against one check: is each message, channel, and asset tied to a segment and a strategic opportunity? Cut anything that is not.

A forensics laboratory had a home page whose headline read "the care your case deserves" and mentioned synthesis, services, and laboratory. New visitors could not tell what the company did or whom it served. Chief Outsiders made four moves. They renamed the company Forensic Analytical Crime Lab, so the name states what it is. They designed a DNA-based logo. They set market position as a crime lab for complex cases. They replaced the technical-jargon wall of text with one message: "Forensic Analytical Crime Lab distinguishes itself with expertise in multiple disciplines. Your case will be reviewed by one or more experts in DNA, criminalistics and/or pathology for the complete story." The result answers what the company does, whom it serves, its position, and its difference in a couple of sentences. A second case shows channel choice. CenterBeam had a complex technical solution that only its CTO could explain, and a limited budget. The team filmed short iPhone interviews with the CTO, each opened by a simple prompt such as "Tell us why this is so relevant for the mid-market CIO today." They cut the footage into snippets, uploaded them to YouTube, and embedded them on the website. The cost was a small amount of time.

• If a message cannot be tied to a named target segment, do not send it.
• If visitors cannot state what you do, whom you serve, your position, and your difference from the home page, rewrite the page before spending on traffic.
• If a pricing or trust objection recurs in sales conversations, build content that answers it directly (calculator for price, testimonials for trust).
• If video is not a core communication method, produce it in-house with a phone and tripod rather than commissioning a $10,000–$15,000 production.
• If you have completed a SWOT but no opportunity has an owner and an activity, you have not finished the SWOT.

• Random acts of marketing: activities launched in a dash for results that skip insight and strategy. Tell: no one can state the aim or segment behind a given campaign.
• Outsourcing strategy to an agency. Agencies execute a well-thought-out plan but do not build the growth strategy. Tell: the agency is briefed on tactics, with no roadmap or insight behind the brief.
• An inside-out message that describes the company rather than the buyer. Tell: the home page uses jargon and generic phrases like "the care your case deserves" and visitors cannot say whom you serve.
• Running marketing blind: no web analytics or competitor benchmarking. Tell: the team cannot say how traffic or online performance compares with competitors.
• Overweighting the sales cycle and ignoring the buyer's cycle. Tell: investment and content follow the sales steps, while prospects research and shortlist vendors on their own beforehand.

• ▸Target segment: name who this effort is for, and who it excludes.
• ▸Insight source: record the SWOT opportunity or customer voice evidence that justifies the effort.
• ▸Four-answer statement: write what we do, whom we serve, our market position, and why we are different, in two sentences.
• ▸Top buyer objection addressed: list the objection from the sales team's top ten and the content asset that answers it.
• ▸Buyer-journey question answered: state the research question a prospect asks and where we answer it.
• ▸Channels and consistency: list each channel (site, blog, social hashtag, video, tradeshow) and confirm the same message is used.
• ▸Measurement in place: name the tool and metric that will show performance, such as web analytics versus competitors.
• ▸Owner and date: assign one person and a review date.
• ▸Keep, fix, or cut: after review, decide, and note which segment or opportunity the asset serves.

1. 1Define your ideal clients first. Write down who they are before you examine any deal, so the review is anchored to the buyers you want more of rather than every closed sale.
2. 2Pull the last fifteen to twenty deals with those ideal clients. Build one row per deal and one column per step actually taken to close it. Use what happened, not what the playbook says should happen.
3. 3For each deal, reconstruct the buyer's journey: what led to the purchase, and what didn't work along the way. Record the dead ends, because they show what to remove from the process.
4. 4Count the steps that appear in nearly every win. In the source's illustration, a demo occurred in all twenty deals, usually at step three. Every deal also began with an inside sales touchpoint, followed by a one-hour introductory call with a sales engineer or product specialist.
5. 5Treat any step with no exceptions as required. If you never won a deal without a demo, that is critical data: the demo is a mandatory stage and cannot be skipped by a rep who is in a hurry.
6. 6Write the sequence down as the sales process, with the order, owner (inside sales, sales engineer, product specialist) and purpose of each step.
7. 7Choose one focused methodology and train the whole team on it, so every rep approaches deals the same way and results stop depending on individual style.
8. 8Check the process against the buyer's cycle, not only your sales cycle. Ask prospects, especially those who chose not to buy: what concerned them, what they were looking for, how they compared you to other options, how they made the final decision, and who the stakeholders were and what each cared about. Revise the story reps tell until it matches what buyers say matters.

A $14 million environmental services firm launched a new service and could secure only one customer. It had a superstar sales leader and a talented team, yet the numbers would not move no matter how many calls were made. The team walked the consultant through the features and benefits they pitched, but they had never asked about customers' concerns, evaluation criteria, buying decision, or stakeholders. When the consultant spoke with prospects who had declined, they learned the messaging was confusing and gave no full picture of the service. One prospect said, 'It doesn't do emergency response, so we couldn't consider it,' although the service did include emergency response. The fix was to change the story and put what mattered most to customers front and center. Within weeks of the new messaging, the sales force gained traction. The lesson is that rigor in the sales process starts with what buyers say, and effort and talent do not substitute for it.

• If a step appears in every won deal in your fifteen-to-twenty-deal review, then make it a required stage. If you never won without it, treat it as non-negotiable.
• If activity volume is up but results are flat, then stop adding calls and go to the buyers. Interview prospects who declined and compare what they heard with what your reps said.
• If a prospect's stated reason for passing contradicts what the product does, as 'no emergency response' did, then the problem is the message, not the prospect. Rewrite the story around what the buyer cares about.
• If your process is built only from internal opinion, then rebuild it by looking backward at actual deals and the journey each ideal client took.
• If reps close deals through different, unrepeatable approaches, then adopt one methodology and train the whole team on it. Predictable revenue needs consistency.

• Randomness in sales: each rep runs deals their own way. The tell is that no one can name the steps every won deal shared.
• Relying on a superstar leader or talented team instead of a process. The tell is that heavy call volume produces no movement in the numbers.
• Telling the story from the vendor's point of view, in terms you find compelling. The tell is prospects describing your offering inaccurately or saying it lacks a capability it has.
• Building the process from belief rather than evidence by skipping the look back at past deals. The tell is a process document containing steps that don't appear in actual wins.
• Optimizing the sales cycle and ignoring the buyer's cycle. The tell is that prospects arrive pre-informed and your steps don't match how they actually buy.

• ▸Ideal client definition: describe the buyer profile that the deals in this review must match.
• ▸Deals reviewed (15-20): list each won deal, one row per deal.
• ▸Steps taken per deal: for each deal, list the ordered steps (e.g., inside sales touchpoint, intro call, demo).
• ▸Steps present in every win: list the steps with no exceptions and note the typical position, such as demo at step three.
• ▸Never-won-without list: name any step absent from zero wins; these become required stages.
• ▸What didn't work along the way: note dead ends, delays, or steps buyers found unhelpful, to remove or fix.
• ▸Step owner and purpose: assign the role (inside sales, sales engineer, product specialist) and the buyer need each step meets.
• ▸Buyer-voice check: record from declined prospects their concerns, evaluation criteria, decision process, and stakeholders.
• ▸Message mismatch found: write any gap between what reps say and what buyers heard, plus the rewritten message.

1. 1Declare one owner of the growth strategy. Hayward's position is that sales is the execution of a marketing strategy, a subset of marketing, not a separate function with its own plan. Write down the strategy first (target, positioning, messages) and state that sales runs it. If sales is running on its own pitch, you have a see-saw with sales in the air and marketing underweight.
2. 2Move both teams from the sales cycle to the buyer's cycle. List how your buyers actually go through buying: their options, who the stakeholders are, what each stakeholder is concerned with, and how the final decision gets made. Sales steps then map to those buyer steps rather than the reverse.
3. 3Collect voice-of-customer evidence jointly. Marketing and sales together ask prospects, starting with those who chose not to buy, what concerns them, what they were looking for, how they evaluated you against other options, and how they decided. Both teams hear the answers directly, not through a summary.
4. 4Build one messaging framework that both teams use: a positioning statement (including primary target and subtarget job titles), three key messages, proof points matched one-to-one to each message (testimonials, proven customer results, awards), a value proposition, and 25-, 50-, and 100-word copy blocks. Sales presentations, tradeshows, and advertising all draw from this single source.
5. 5Define one shared funnel with a metric at every stage: traffic, leads, prospects who want to consider you, entry to the sales process, win rate, then turning customers into loyal customers. Marketing and sales review the same funnel, so neither can claim a success the other cannot see.
6. 6Set trigger thresholds and act on them. Hayward's example: a proposal win rate below 30 percent means it is time to gather insight on how to improve. Low organic traffic means building a blog strategy. Decide in advance which metric triggers which joint action.
7. 7Decide horizontal or vertical message depth together. Speak to the whole industry (horizontal) or to a segment (vertical), then give sales the segment's own terminology. Siebel configured its platform one vertical at a time with industry language. CenterBeam used different messaging for nonprofits than for for-profits.
8. 8Convert strategy into activity. Hayward notes nearly every CEO has done a SWOT and almost none have activated against it. Pick the opportunities your insight identified, assign marketing and sales actions to each, and check them against the shared funnel.

Hayward was called into a $14 million environmental services firm that had launched what she calls an incredible new service but could secure only one customer. It had a superstar sales leader and a talented team, yet no volume of calls moved the numbers. She had the team walk her through the features and benefits they pitched, and saw nothing from the customer's voice behind them. She then spoke with prospects who had chosen not to buy. They found the messaging confusing and could not see the full service, with comments like, 'It doesn't do emergency response, so we couldn't consider it.' The service did include emergency response, so the story was the problem, not the offer. The story was told from the vendor's point of view in terms the vendor found compelling. The fix was to change the story and put what mattered most to customers front and center. Within weeks the sales force gained traction. The misalignment was not sales effort. The sales team had skipped the marketing work of establishing the right story and understanding the competitive advantage.

• If sales activity is high but results do not move, then interview prospects who did not buy and test the messaging before adding more calls or reps.
• If a lost prospect cites a missing capability you actually have, then rewrite the story around what matters to the buyer and put that point first in every sales and marketing asset.
• If your proposal win rate is below 30 percent, then stop pushing volume and gather insight on why proposals lose, using the funnel to locate the weak stage.
• If you target a specific industry or segment, then adapt the same platform with that segment's terminology and different messaging, as Siebel did and as CenterBeam did for nonprofits, so prospects believe you understand them.
• If you are tempted to hire an agency to fix growth, then first build the strategy and roadmap. Agencies execute a well-thought-out plan; they do not build the growth strategy.

• Treating sales as the main revenue lever and marketing as an afterthought. The tell: investment and attention sit on the sales cycle, and marketing consists of 'random acts' with no method, plan, or aim.
• Pitching features from the vendor's point of view. The tell: prospects who declined describe your service inaccurately, for example saying it lacks something it includes.
• Checking the SWOT box without activating. The tell: a completed analysis exists but no marketing or sales action maps to its opportunities.
• Launching messages in ads, tradeshows, or sales decks before confirming they resonate. The tell: activity is triggered while the insight and strategy steps were bypassed.
• Giving the two teams different pictures of performance. The tell: marketing reports traffic and leads, sales reports calls, and no one owns a funnel-wide view or win rate.

• ▸Growth goal: state the single revenue goal that both marketing and sales are accountable to.
• ▸Buyer's cycle: list the steps buyers actually take, the stakeholders involved, and each stakeholder's main concern.
• ▸Voice-of-customer sources: name who you interviewed, including prospects who chose not to buy, and the date.
• ▸Positioning statement and target: write the position you want to hold, with primary and subtarget job titles.
• ▸Three key messages and proof points: list each message with the one proof point that supports it.
• ▸Horizontal or vertical: record which segments you address and the terminology sales will use for each.
• ▸Funnel metrics: record the current figure at each stage, from traffic through leads, prospects wanting to consider you, sales process entries, and win rate.
• ▸Trigger thresholds: write each metric trigger, such as proposal win rate under 30 percent, and the joint action it sets off.
• ▸Owner and review date: name who owns each action in marketing and in sales, and when you next review the shared funnel together.