One of the best definitions of marketing I’ve heard is from Peter Drucker:

“the aim of marketing is to make selling superfluous.

The aim of marketing is to know and understand the customer so well that the product or service fits him and sells itself”

The core tenet of good marketing & sales is being customer-obsessed.

Everyone knows and understands how to segment their market to find their specific client by industry, revenue size, title, position, yadda yadda…

But a critical marketing exercise I see so many miss is:

knowing where your ideal client is psychologically.

• Do they even know they have a problem?
• Do they know there’s a solution out there?
• Do they even know you exist?
• When does your solution matter in their lifetime?
• What’s their cognitive load to make a decision or come to a conclusion? Who else is involved?

There are a lot of buzzwords that define this exercise: “client journey”, “buyer journey”, or “customer map”.

It doesn’t matter what you subscribe to.

What matters is that you know your ideal client’s experience in their quest to address their problem.

Pro tip:

As you dive into being customer-obsessed, see if you can quantify the true cost of your ideal client staying the same and NOT have their problem solved.

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