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This book will not help you grow your business. This book will help you improve how you think about marketing.

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What is marketing?

Or better, what is the job marketing should get done in a business?

I asked those questions out of desperation in my first marketing role.

We were building and preparing to launch a SaaS product. We had a good runway (cash in the bank) yet market dynamics were increasing our urgency.

What we thought was our problem: We didn’t have our marketing “in order.”

Regardless, we pushed ahead and released the SaaS product. The response? Crickets.

Yet, the founder (with a sales background), would push for us to do more marketing.

“We’re not doing enough marketing! If we could do more “marketing” then we could grow!”

This book is not for him, even though it would help immensely.

For him, marketing’s job was to:

• Post salesy content on LinkedIn daily
• Reshare salesy articles that we posted months (even years) ago
• Cold email consultants to increase our partner pool

Does that look like marketing to you?

Maybe #1 and #2. Even then, I would argue those are lower on the marketing impact ladder.

The things at the top of that ladder are positioning and how well you know who you serve.

I call these things the Higher Aims in marketing—The things that move the needle.

Rarely do we focus on them because we don’t fully understand the job marketing is hired for.

Understanding this is important for other reasons: