Marketing is transforming an organization from an internal, self-centered focus to a customer focus to ensure that you have what people want and will buy.

You develop and grow an organization best by involving everyone in marketing and getting the whole organization to be customer-focused. You take a whole systems approach. To be competitive, every person and function must be market-focused.

If your salespeople are very focused on the customer but your service department is not, how far will you go and how fast will you grow in this fragmented condition?

Marketing is anticipating and meeting the wants and needs of present and future customers. So, marketing is everybody’s job. Sales is a subset of marketing. Effective marketing is the creation of a culture in every function that is focused on the customer. It’s changing the organization so that it has what people will buy. Once you do marketing, then you do sales, meaning you get the stuff out the door. You contract and deliver your product or service.

From Internal to External Focus

How do you change from an internal focus (where people are concerned about politics, promotion, possessions and pay) to an outward focus (anticipating and meeting customer needs)?

If you are burdened with politics, you face a major obstacle to marketing and sales. To bring about the change from internal to external focus, you’ve got to gather and share information on the economy and industry and share intelligence about market competition. This means opening up your structure, style, and systems. Your employees can then add value, because they understand the context, culture, and competition.

Either everybody becomes a marketer and you grow the company, or everybody becomes a miser and you downsize and then kill the company.

Some people wonder: How can you be mission driven and market driven at the same time? They argue that being driven by an internal vision and mission works against a customer focus.

Your mission statement must be broad in its concept and language so that you have the freedom and flexibility to do whatever it takes to provide what the customer ultimately wants and needs. If you build relationships of trust with your customers, you can move from dealing with their wants to dealing with their needs. Through customer intimacy, you can develop a creative synergy. In fact, you may understand your customers’ needs as well or better than they do. And if you have a high emotional bank account with them (built over time by making deposits that are meaningful to them), they will trust that you are an “outsider” who is really an insider and who deeply cares. When they are myopic about their short-term picture, you may be their greatest resource person.

It does little good to come up with brilliant feasibility studies and strategic plans if the culture does not or cannot sustain the vision and plan.

Marketing Cycle

The best organizations use a four-step marketing cycle.

1. See. Have eyes to see the opportunity not only to make a sale but to cultivate and capture a market segment. Everyone needs new eyeware to correct for tunnel vision. The best catalyst toward eagle-eye, 360-degree vision is 360-degree feedback. Even in failure, you can see fresh ways to involve people in the sales cycle. You look beyond domestic markets. You create a network of proactive people. Over time, you work out of prospecting because you’re so involved in higher-leverage tasks.

2. Seize. Salespeople have to be on the cutting edge of win-win deal making, empathic listening, and synergistic communication (Habits 4, 5, and 6 of my Seven Habits) because they are the information conduit of the company; they are tapping into the needs and wants of customers in a very direct way; and they are the ones most directly seizing opportunity.

3. Grow. How do you grow the supplier-customer relationship beyond the initial sale into an alliance? The key is Habit 5, empathy, seeking first to understand. Empathy is the “Miracle Grow” of sales. Prospects and customers have to feel that you understand their situation as well or better than they do. This makes the difference between transacting with them as a supplier and transforming them. Such empathy naturally leads to synergy, where you create better solutions for them because you create solutions with them.

4. Renew. If synergy becomes a reality, everybody will see ways to expand or renew the relationship with the customer. Renewal springs from synergy, because synergy is the creation of something that was not there before—new opportunities, new resources, and new ideas on how to exploit market opportunities. Then comes the bonding that renews the relationship and culture.

Synergy requires both parties to be somewhat vulnerable to each other. When both are at risk, new ideas emerge. To be vulnerable in this way, you must have principles at the core. Only when you are principled at the core can you risk being vulnerable on the surface. You need a changeless core to afford a flexible face.

Leaders create conditions that foster total market awareness. They don’t try to control conditions, minimize uncertainty, eliminate discomfort, or cure instability. When people move into doing something new, they will be uncomfortable. If you want a comfortable organization, you don’t want a healthy, growth-oriented, market-focused organization. SME

Stephen R. Covey is author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Simon and Schuster) and vice chairman of Franklin Covey. 801-377-9515.

ACTION: How might your marketing and sales people become more proactive?