The Customer Connection illustrates the process a fictional company went through to develop a marketing plan. On their way to discovering how to increase market share they also found a way to improve teamwork through a renewed awareness of the company’s purpose.

James P. Jensen founded the Jensen Printing Company 37 years ago. His sons, Neil and James, Jr., take over the company after their father’s sudden death. Rather than continue to run the company they decide to sell it to Consolidated Industries. Neil and James, Jr. are no longer a part of Jensen Printing.

Consolidated keeps the team at Jensen intact, but gives them aggressive sales goals to achieve. They’ve required a marketing plan be submitted to outline how the Jensen division will meet those goals.

Allen Goodman, Jensen’s general manager, reorganizes his team with an emphasis toward creating the plan and reaching the goals set by Consolidated.

Goodman has many long-term, loyal employees, yet they’re anxious about the company’s new ownership. As expected they don’t want change. They feel they’ve helped the company become successful and can continue to do so if left alone. But that’s not an option. Consolidated is demanding a growth in sales along with an expanded market.

Goodman puts Bob Hayden in charge of marketing. Bob has been with Jensen for 18 years and has worked in several key positions. He has much experience with the company but none creating a marketing plan.

With no previous plan to guide him, Bob begins to research marketing in books and on the Internet. He also turns to his entrepreneurial uncle for advice. His uncle, Phillip, asks him a series of directed questions that lead Bob to reach his own understandings and conclusions about marketing. Bob leaves his first meeting with Phillip with an exercise to take back to Jensen to help the management team set a direction for the marketing plan.

Through the exercise they discover the way to meet their goals is to accept that the purpose of their business is to serve customers. They also find they have 2 types of customers—internal and external. They first focus on internal customers.

With help from a coworker, Bob creates a new work-process flowchart that gives employees a visual of how their job affects the overall object of serving Jensen customers, and how employees support and serve each other within the company.

On Bob’s second visit Phillip gives him a business formula. It ends with profit, the result of a successful business, then backtracks to the source of profit based on the idea that profit is what’s left after all expenses are deducted from revenue, and continuous revenue only comes from satisfied customers. Phillip shares with Bob how to make certain that customers are being satisfied as much as possible.

Bob then takes his uncle’s advice to the sales department where they refine a process to serve customers using a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats). After using the SWOT with customers the sales department begins to discover new opportunities and new ways to serve customers. It also helps Jensen move towards Consolidated’s goal of expanding their market.

Throughout the story, Bob finds parallels between Jensen and his son’s football coach’s philosophy. He finds that motivating a football team to a winning season is very similar to motivating a business team. The sports analogy also gives Bob another source of insights that help develop his marketing plan.

In the end, Bob turns in a plan on schedule. But, more important is the change in attitude at Jensen Printing—the attitude that was the foundation of the company when it first began, but that had been set-aside over the years.

What Bob really uncovers are the company’s original values, goals, and attitudes that made it successful to begin with. Jensen Printing is now in the forefront again and off to continued success with employees pulling together to serve their customers while exceeding Consolidated’s expectations.