My guest today was Tim Riesterer -- co-host of the radio program and CEO of teh CMM Group. It's always nice to have Tim on the program because he brings a keen sense of perspective to one of marketing's greatest areas of pain: our consistent inability to engage customers in a relevant dialogue that is mapped to their needs. What we are really good at is talking about ourselves.

Tim mentioned that 85% of brand decisions by customers are made from the interactions between themselves and sales professionals. This is amazing...85% of sales come directly from the experience with a sales person. Not from all the marketing messages, the slick brochures, or the creative ads we run.

By building out our stories -- not our history and media boilerplates -- but answers to every customer scenario, Tim feels we can significantly increase the number of sales, decrease the length of the sales process, and speed up the training time of new sales staff. And through these stories we achieve a level of differentiation that keeps us safe from commodity status and price-point selling.

Check out the Customer Message Management forum at www.marketingpower.com/msa or visit Tim's Web site at www.customermessage.com for more info, a Web cast, and even info on Tim's book.