How Marketing Strategy Can Solve Your Sales Challenges

Patrick McFadden • August 9, 2017

A Free Guide on Using Your Marketing Strategy Effectively

The way small business owners think about marketing strategy is broken. Email marketing, sale presentations, websites, advertising, search engine optimization, social media, you know tactics seem to dominate their marketing strategy thoughts. Truth is, for any set of tactics to work they must appeal to someone, which inevitably comes back to strategy.

This post will dive into some of the ways your marketing strategy can solve sales challenges.

If you’re ready to make marketing strategy a real, engaging, and effective tool for your business, keep reading.

For Any Set of Tactics to Work They Must Appeal to Someone

One of the most important elements of a marketing strategy is the development of an ideal target customer profile. Understanding who makes an ideal customer allows you to build your entire business, message, product, services, sales and support around attracting and serving this targeted customer group.

The secret to increasing your ROI isn’t more marketing—it’s targeting. Don’t squander half your marketing budget and hundreds of hours generating leads that go nowhere. Find your ideal customer from the outset, and everyone wins.  Learn how to discover your ideal customer here.

Listening is the best way to develop strategy

Everyone knows they should develop a marketing strategy before diving into to every tactical marketing effort they can. The problem is, few can tell you how to do this because any real marketing strategy is highly personal and involves your:

  • customers
  • market
  • competitors
  • suppliers
  • products
  • services

The best way to approach discovering a strategy for your marketing, and perhaps all of your communications, is to listen really, really well.

Customer feedback interviews are one of the greatest listening tools on the planet. Your customers are telling you about what’s truly important, they’re telling about what they like about your products and dislike about the competition, they’re telling you what they wish someone would make — and now you can hear it.

Effective sales decisions

What products and services to offer, how much to charge, where to advertise, what timing triggers to look for, what value from our offering most appeals to our ideal target market — all should be based on customer feedback. After all, you’re not going to boost sales if you don’t offer something customers want to buy and show up in the pathway that they purchase.

Get better and plug gaps

What kind of feedback should you get from customers? There’s no limit — it can be any kind of information that would help you get better and plug sales and marketing gaps. Get started with these 5 questions:

  1. Why did you decide to hire us or buy from us in the first place?
  2. What’s one thing we do better than others you do business with?
  3. What’s one thing we could do to create a better experience for you?
  4. If you were to refer us what would you say?
  5. Can you tell me about three other companies that you love?

Far too often businesses create campaigns around irrelevant pain points and features, referral programs that don’t create referral motivation, and optimize their websites around industry specific jargon and terms when their ideal customers really pay attention, engage and respond to other communicating factors.

Remember, asking for feedback is indispensable, but it’s just the first step. To truly help your sales and marketing strategy, make sure you listen to customers’ responses and find ways to implement their suggestions.

Don’t skip this listening (strategy) step for tactics!

Insight into the top sales challenges from a Selling Challenges Study:

  • “The ability to identify triggers and sales signals that indicate issues that sales can resolve.”
  • “Creating value and insight during client conversations.”
  • “Competing against a low-cost provider.”
  • “Finding ways to add relevant value.”

These challenges are really symptoms of the same painful problem, which boils down to not clearly defining your marketing strategy. Don’t worry … it’s a fairly common ailment.

Challenge: Ability to identify triggers and sales signals that indicate issues that sales can resolve

Solution: One of the most important elements of a marketing strategy (and getting sales on track) is developing your target market or ideal customer profile. Understanding who makes an ideal customer allows you to build your entire sales efforts around attracting and converting this customer group. Read how to develop your ideal customer profile here.

Once you have a profile of your ideal customer, you should start analyzing the common characteristics they share. Start asking yourself or your sales reps some questions about these people: what industry are they in? where are they located? what size is their organization? what do they read? what do they listen to? what challenges do they face? how do they buy? and most importantly what triggers them to start looking for a solution?

This is the key information needed in order know how to increase sales . Most B2Bs have a need triggered soon by some type of business cycle change, calendar event, budget refresh, office relocation, etc. (Hint: focusing on identifying what these triggers are with your current clients is the best way to immediately grow share of wallet.)

The answers to the questions above are not always available, but thinking about them in correlation to your ideal customer may allow you to narrow your niche and sell aggressively to it.

Challenge: Creating value and insight during client conversations

Solution: So what are the companies that are bringing in new customers and growing their sales doing that’s different?

They’ve infused value creation and insight into the tactical delivery of their marketing and sales strategy. In fact, 74% of B2B buyers choose the salesperson who was first to add value and insight in their buying process.

I believe that any business owner, consultant or sales person that attempts to work with an organization, regardless of size, can greatly increase the value they bring to a conversation by helping a customer or prospect dissect their own customer journey. Provide value and insight by researching every stage of the customer journey an organization uses to interact with and move its prospects to customers.

  • What do they do to create awareness?
  • What do they do to educate prospects and customers?
  • How do they build trust?
  • How does someone sample their solution, expertise or offering?
  • How do they convert prospects to paying clients, and generate referrals?

Challenge: Competing against a low-cost provider

Solution: The secret to take price out of the equation is to offer a product or service with some remarkable and desirable element that can’t be compared. Until you can firmly offer a solid reason for why a prospect should buy from or hire you over the competition, you’ll compete on price or shall I say a low-cost provider.

When B2B business owners and CEOs solution sell and respond to RFPs they basically make every business look the same and make price the primary issue.

Working with your marketing/sales team or a strategic marketing consultant can help identify what service or product element really nails the buyers pain-point or desire. Working together marketing and sales efforts can communicate a unique way of doing business that will demonstrate a premium pricing value proposition.

Examples:

  • First Responder Cleaning. There are very few one-of-a-kind commercial cleaning services. They offer a 30 minute response time
  • Punctual Plumber.  We’re on time —offers to pay commercial customers $5 for every minute they’re late up to $300
  • Attorney’s are notorious for not returning phone calls in a timely manner —  one attorney offers a Return Call Guarantee. If clients’ calls aren’t returned in one business day, they’ll take $500 off the client’s next invoice
  • Contractors frequently overbid projects and rely on the power behind their license as a justification — G uarantee your work to pass Building and Safety inspection or you will fix it for free
  • Customer support doesn’t really care if you find a solution or not —  offer a No Hang Up Guarantee “We don’t hang up until you’re happy”
  • Marketing agencies and firms are known for unclear deliverables, lack of results and using jargon —  one marketing firms offer a very detail “proof of concept” with a set project price, clear deliverables, a results review and education process.

Challenge: Finding ways to add relevant value

Solution: Educate Them on Their Reality  – Though modern customers can glean a lot of the information online, they still crave the insight of an expert—someone who knows the territory and stays up on the latest industry news.

Here’s a framework that forces you to get the right answers to questions that will educate prospects and clients on their reality.

  • What’s going on inside the company?
  • What’s happening with notable parties outside the company — competitors, suppliers, etc.?
  • Who do the buyers you’re working with report to, and/or who are the influencers in the company?
  • How does this company “keep score” metrics-wise, and how do you help them in what they do?

Small business owners continue to face significant hurdles in the marketplace. This can be a glass-half-empty or glass-half-full scenario. There has never been a better time to adapt, change, and leverage the new selling tools available in today’s digital age. You have unprecedented access to CRM systems, competitive data, social selling tools, web alerts, and real-time analytics. With the right help, business owners can hone their knowledge and skills to help them prepare like never before and truly differentiate themselves to buyers.

The Missing Layer in AI: Why Judgment, Not Just Data, Will Define the Next Era of Intelligence

By Patrick McFadden • May 2, 2025
Everyone is scaling outputs. Almost no one is scaling judgment.

Everyone Talks About AI Judgment. We Built It.

By Patrick McFadden • May 2, 2025
Ask anyone in tech where AI is headed, and they’ll tell you: “The next leap is reasoning.” “AI needs judgment.” “We need assistants that think, not just answer.” They’re right. But while everyone’s talking about it, almost no one is actually shipping it. So we did. We built Thinking OS™ —a system that doesn’t just help AI answer questions… It helps AI think like a strategist. It helps AI decide like an operator. It helps teams and platforms scale judgment, n ot just generate output. The Theory Isn’t New. The Implementation Is. The idea of layering strategic thinking and judgment into AI isn’t new in theory. The problem is, no one’s been able to implement it effectively at scale. Let’s look at the current landscape. 1. Big Tech Has the Muscle—But Not the Mind OpenAI / ChatGPT ✅ Strength: Best-in-class language generation ❌ Limitation: No built-in judgment or reasoning. You must provide the structure. Otherwise, it follows instructions, not strategy. Google DeepMind / Gemini ✅ Known for advanced decision-making (e.g., AlphaGo) ❌ But only in structured environments like games—not messy, real-world business scenarios. Anthropic (Claude), Meta (LLaMA), Microsoft Copilot ✅ Great at answering questions and following commands ❌ But they’re assistants, not advisors. They won’t reprioritize. They won’t challenge your assumptions. They don’t ask: “Is this the right move?” These tools are powerful—but they don’t think for outcomes the way a strategist or operator would. 2. Who’s Actually Building the Thinking Layer™? This is where it gets interesting—and thin. Startups and Indie Builders Some small teams are quietly: Creating custom GPTs that mimic how experts reason Layering in business context, priorities, and tradeoffs Embedding decision logic so AI can guide, not just execute But these efforts are: Highly manual Difficult to scale Fragmented and experimental Enterprise Experiments A few companies (Salesforce, HubSpot, and others) are exploring more “judgment-aware” AI copilots. These systems can: Flag inconsistencies Recommend next actions Occasionally surface priorities based on internal logic But most of it is still: In early R&D Custom-coded Unproven beyond narrow use cases That’s Why Thinking OS™ Is Different Instead of waiting for a lab to crack it, we built a modular thinking system that installs like infrastructure. Thinking OS™: Captures how real experts reason Embeds judgment into layers AI can use Deploys into tools like ChatGPT or enterprise systems Helps teams think together, consistently, at scale It’s not another assistant. It’s the missing layer that turns outputs into outcomes. So… Is This a New Innovation? Yes—in practice. Everyone says AI needs judgment. But judgment isn’t an idea. It’s a system. It requires: Persistent memory Contextual awareness Tradeoff evaluation Value-based decisions Strategy that evolves with goals Thinking OS™ delivers that. And unlike the R&D experiments in Big Tech, it’s built for: Operators Consultants Platform founders Growth-stage teams that need to scale decision quality, not just content creation If Someone Told You They’ve Built a Thinking + Judgment Layer™… They’ve built something only a handful of people in the world are even attempting. Because this isn’t just AI that speaks fluently. It’s AI that reasons, reflects , and chooses. And in a world that’s drowning in tools, judgment becomes the differentiator. That’s the OS We Built Thinking OS™ is not a prompt pack. It’s not a dashboard. It’s not a glorified chatbot. It’s a decision architecture you can license, embed, or deploy— To help your team, your platform, or your clients think better at scale. We’ve moved past content. We’re building cognition. Let’s talk.

We Found the Missing Layer AI Has Been Waiting For

By Patrick McFadden • May 2, 2025
In every era of innovation, there’s a silent bottleneck—something obvious in hindsight, but elusive until the moment it clicks. In today’s AI-driven world, that bottleneck is clear: AI has speed. It has scale. But it doesn’t have judgment . It doesn’t really think . What’s Actually Missing From AI? When experts talk about the “thinking and judgment layer” as the next leap for AI, they’re calling out a hard truth: Modern AI systems are powerful pattern machines. But they’re missing the human layer—the one that reasons, weighs tradeoffs, and makes strategic decisions in context. Let’s break that down: 1. The Thinking Layer = Reasoning with Purpose This layer doesn’t just process inputs— it structures logic. It’s the ability to: Ask the right questions before acting Break down complexity into solvable parts Adjust direction mid-course when reality changes Think beyond “what was asked” to uncover “what really matters” Today’s AI responds. But it rarely reflects. Unless told exactly what to do, it won’t work through problems the way a strategist or operator would. 2. The Judgment Layer = Decision-Making in the Gray Judgment is the ability to: Prioritize what matters most Choose between imperfect options Make decisions when there’s no clear answer Apply values, experience, and vision—not just data It’s why a founder might not pursue a lucrative deal. Why a marketer might ignore the click-through rate. Why a strategist knows when the timing isn’t right. AI doesn’t do this well. Not yet. Because judgment requires more than data—it requires discernment . Why This Is the Bottleneck Holding Back AI AI can write. It can summarize. It can automate. But it still can’t: Diagnose the real problem behind the question Evaluate tradeoffs like a founder or operator would Recommend a path based on context, constraints, and conviction AI today is still reactive. It follows instructions. But it doesn’t lead. It doesn’t guide. It doesn’t own the outcome. And for those building serious systems—whether you’re running a company, launching a platform, or leading a team—this is the wall you eventually hit. That’s Why We Built Thinking OS™ We stopped waiting for AI to learn judgment on its own. Instead, we created a system that embeds it—by design. Thinking OS™ is an installable decision layer that captures how top founders, strategists, and operators think… …and makes that thinking repeatable , scalable , and usable inside teams, tools, and platforms. It’s not a framework. It’s not a chatbot. It’s not another playbook. It’s the layer that knows how to: Think through complex decisions Apply judgment when rules don’t help Guide others —human or AI—toward strategic outcomes This Is the Missing Infrastructure Thinking OS™ isn’t just about better answers. It’s about better thinking—made operational. And that’s what’s been missing in AI, consulting, leadership development, and platform design. If you’re trying to scale expertise, install judgment, or move from tactical to strategic… You don’t need a faster AI. You need a thinking layer that knows what to do—and why. We built it. Let’s talk.
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