I don't think there's a shortage of remarkable ideas. I think your business has plenty of great opportunities to do great things. Nope, what's missing isn't the ideas. It's the will to execute them.

Competition validates you. It creates a category. It permits the sale to be this or that, not yes or no.

The combination of fear and ignorance (two sides of the same coin) can be paralyzing.

It's easy to pretend expertise when there's no data to contradict you.

Put aside your need for a step-by-step manual and instead realize that analogies are your best friend.

The goal, then, isn't to draw some positioning charts and announce that you have differentiated your product. No, the opportunity is to actually create something that people choose to talk about, regardless of what the competition is doing.

Traditional sales and marketing involves increasing market shares, which means selling as much of your product as you can to as many customers as possible. One-to-one marketing involves driving for a share of customer, which means ensuring that each individual customer who buys your product buys more product, buys only your brand, and is happy using your product instead of another to solve his problem. The true, current value of any one customer is a function of the customer's future purchases, across all the product lines, brands, and services offered by you.