TABLE OF CONTENTS These are just a few of the many stories, exemplary of those that you will find in the references provided in Appendix D. These are not Viable Vision stories. These stories are about companies that took one application of the Viable Vision in one area of their company, applied it, and achieved outstanding results. Imagine what these companies would have achieved if they had applied the entire Viable Vision.
As discussed in Chapter 5, the question that offers a way to distinguish your company from the competition, for both customers and prospects is, "What problems do you have that no one in our industry is addressing?" In other words, marketing must discover what problems you can solve in your industry that no competitors have yet solved. This requires a marketing person to access senior customer management and find out about their business.
For example, the President of a furniture manufacturing company called on prospects and asked them what made it so hard to run a furniture retail store. He heard comments such as, "You see this huge inventory in the store. Most of it has been sitting here for six months or more, and I'm paying the bank huge interest charges to finance this inventory. At the same time, I have customers that walk into the store and can only find a partial living room or bedroom set, or the color that they want is not in stock."
The President of the manufacturing company asked...
