The Seven Steps to Marketing Success – How to Build a Marketing Process

Patrick McFadden • July 15, 2013

This may be hard for you to come to grips with but “marketing is a process, not an event.” It can be compared to breathing.  You can’t live very long from a single breath. It takes many breathes, one right after another. Marketing is the same. You will not attract, obtain , and keep customers with one marketing action. You keep breathing to stay alive. You keep marketing to generate leads,   make the phone ring, cause people to ask for your product, visit with you, request for more information or try a test run.

To understand how to approach marketing for your business, it may be helpful to understand my definition of marketing:  Marketing is getting someone who has a need to first become aware of you and then trust you enough to buy.

Below you will find the seven essential steps that address today’s marketing and sales challenges for organizations and small businesses. I’ve developed these 7 steps for creating marketing success from working and having discussions with businesses owners and CEOs over the years.

1. Focus on Vision Before Strategy

Vision and strategy are both important to your marketing success. But there is a priority to them. Vision always comes first. If you develop a clear vision, you will attract the right strategy. If you don’t have a clear vision, no strategy will save you.

Once you get clear on what you want, the how will take care of itself.

Most business owners don’t take the time to ask, “What is my vision for the business?, What do I want my business to be?, or What do I want to be known for?” Devoting time and energy during this process is the most important of any successful business. We ultimately end up with creating a picture of your business as it exists in the future.

2. Make Customer Experience Your X Factor

Nothing matters more to a business than how they make customers feel. How the customer feels determines whether your business survives or sinks. The secret to every businesses growth is word-of-mouth marketing, not the marketing done in the pages of a magazine, newspaper, trade publication, on TV, or other media outlets.

Word-of-mouth is generated because you made the customer experience referable. If someone chooses to refer your product or service, I then call that a  “referable experience”  because that’s what we share, our experiences with a product or service. (Products includes your blog, podcast, newsletter, online radio show, and more.)

3. Become the New Media Company

Today you must commit to creating content much like a publisher might. Not just any content though, you need to create content that works as marketing.

The Internet has disrupted the traditional sales process, allowing the prospective customer or client to begin on their own terms via search and social media. This means savvy business owners or marketing departments must adapt to the information-empowered prospect in a fashion that more resembles courting than it does selling.

The best way to produce content that works as marketing is to have it focus on the problems and desires of prospects and customers. It’s all about delivering independent value with content before you attempt to make the sale.

4. Create an Online to Offline Presence

Even if you do the majority of your business offline and in person, in today’s world, you must have an online presence. The majority of today’s purchase decisions involved some amount of research online. Your business must be easily found online, easily engaged online, and easily communicated with online. This requires a focus on:

  • Content Marketing,
  • SEO and
  • Social Media participation.

The smart way to approach this is to treat content marketing, social media and search engine results as aspects of a holistic strategy necessarily centered around content.

Of course, this also means integrating your online presence and activity into every offline business function.

5. Educate to Generate and Close Leads

Don’t think of yourself as a salesperson but as an educator and partner to your prospect. This healthy mindset improves both your perspective and your chances of closing.

Today’s shift in buying now demands a very tangible way prospects can experience your offer. Continuing to build trust through demos, audits, trail offers, samples, assessments, etc. is such an essential element of buying. Really this is an audition and it’s where you need to educate more than anyone could possibly consider doing.

Prospects want to be able to sample your expertise, product or service and it’s the easiest way to move people to actually buying all-in, particularly in highly competitive and highly priced situations.

The reason this approach is so effective is that no hard selling has to occur, you get to control the sample offering, the client gets value whether they agree to hire you or not, and finally, you get a value-based start in the engagement.

6. Build a Reliable Sales Process

In the same way that your marketing generates leads, you need to also take that same approach when a prospect wants to learn more. Have a well thought out road map that every new lead walks, a way to develop trust and rapport, and a proven process for orienting new clients can positively influence the bottom line conversion results you experience.

7. Create a Marketing Calendar

The one thing that is finite for any business is time. There is always more month than time.

So you must identify how and when you would like to launch your program to market your products and services. By creating monthly projects and themes, weekly action steps, and daily marketing appointments, you keep the focus, enthusiasm, and creativity on marketing.

Follow your marketing calendar even if it doesn’t seem to be producing results. Avoid the temptation to alter it for at least a few months. Give it time, remember process not an event.

The reality is that marketing is an ongoing process. Once you go through the seven steps and build your marketing process, you want to constantly be reviewing, documenting what works and what doesn’t, and changing your approach accordingly.

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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