Most businesses are very good at explaining what they sell. Ask them what they do and they’ll tell you about their products, services, systems, processes, experience and capabilities. Their websites are filled with features, their proposals explain deliverables and their advertising tells customers exactly what they can buy.
The problem is that this is often not what the customer actually wants. Customers aren’t searching for products and services simply because they want to own them. They’re trying to solve something. They have a frustration they want removed, an opportunity they want to capture or an outcome they haven’t been able to achieve on their own. The product or service is simply the mechanism that gets them there. It’s the medicine. What they’re really buying is the cure.
This distinction might sound simple, but it can completely change the way a business communicates its value.
Nobody Wants a CRM. They Want Predictable Revenue Growth.
Very few businesses invest in a CRM because they simply want another piece of software. What they really need is reliable customer data that gives them a clearer picture of what is happening across their business and what is likely to happen next.
A well-implemented CRM brings customer information, interactions, opportunities and sales activity into one place, creating the visibility businesses need to understand behaviour, identify patterns and make better commercial decisions. Instead of relying on fragmented information or gut feel, teams can use their data to understand where revenue is coming from, where opportunities are being lost and where future growth is likely to come from.
The CRM is the infrastructure that makes this possible, but the system itself isn’t the value. Usable customer data that helps a business build more predictable revenue growth is the cure. If you’re selling CRM by talking exclusively about integrations, dashboards and functionality, you’re talking about the medicine while your customer is thinking about the growth it can help them achieve.
Nobody Wants a Brand Bible. They Want a Brand People Remember.
Your customers will probably never see your brand guidelines. They don’t know the exact colour codes, typography rules or design principles being followed behind the scenes, and they don’t need to. What they do experience is the result of those decisions every time they interact with your business.
Businesses invest in branding because they want to become recognisable. They want customers to encounter the same identity across their website, social media, proposals, advertising and communication. That consistency creates familiarity, and familiarity helps establish credibility and trust.
The brand bible is simply the tool that protects that consistency. What the business is really investing in is a brand people recognise, understand and remember.
Nobody Wants a Marketing Strategy. They Want Direction.
A beautifully presented strategy document sitting untouched in a folder has very little commercial value. Businesses don’t invest in strategy because they want another document. They want clarity around who they’re targeting, what those customers care about, where their marketing budget should go and what they’re actually trying to achieve.
A strong marketing strategy creates a framework for making better decisions. It reduces guesswork, establishes priorities and helps teams understand why they’re doing something before money and time are invested in doing it. The strategy is the medicine, but clear direction and commercially meaningful outcomes are the cure.
The same thinking applies to design. Businesses aren’t paying designers because they desperately want another attractive graphic. Good design has a business function. It helps people process information, understand a message and form a perception of a company before they’ve ever spoken to someone inside it. Looking good is useful, but being understood, remembered and perceived as credible is considerably more valuable.
Sometimes the Smallest Deliverables Solve Bigger Problems.
Even something as seemingly simple as an email signature demonstrates the difference between selling the medicine and selling the cure.
An IT department doesn’t want another signature platform to manage, marketing doesn’t want to spend its time checking whether hundreds of employees are using the correct banner, and leadership certainly doesn’t want employees communicating with outdated job titles, incorrect details or branding from 2009.
What the organisation actually wants is consistency and control. It wants accurate information across the business, centrally managed campaigns and a communication touchpoint that doesn’t require constant manual intervention. The signature itself isn’t particularly exciting. The business problem it removes is.
Account management works in much the same way. Clients don’t hire an account manager because they’ve always wanted another person to email. They want someone who understands the bigger picture, keeps work moving and knows who needs to do what without requiring the client to coordinate every member of the marketing team themselves.
When strategy, design, advertising, content, CRM and development all need to work together, good account management creates continuity between them. The role might appear on the invoice, but what the client is really buying is ease, accountability and considerably less chasing.
Nobody Really Wants a Website Either.
Having a website isn’t an achievement anymore. Having one that contributes to the business is.
Businesses invest in websites because they want the right people to find them, understand what they offer, trust what they see and take the next step. That next step might be purchasing a product, requesting a quote, booking a consultation or becoming a warm lead for the sales team.
The website needs to facilitate that journey by answering questions, reducing unnecessary friction and making the desired action clear.
The website is the medicine. Visibility, credibility, enquiries and conversions are the cure. Simply being online is no longer enough if the digital experience isn’t helping the business move potential customers closer to action.
Nobody Wants an Influencer. They Want Influence.
Influencer marketing makes the distinction particularly obvious. A business doesn’t actually need someone with 100,000 followers. It needs access to the trust, attention and influence that person has built with a relevant audience. Those aren’t the same thing.
A smaller creator with a highly relevant and engaged community can create considerably more value than a much larger account whose audience has little interest in the product being promoted.
The influencer is the mechanism. The business is investing in relevant reach, transferred trust and the opportunity to influence customer behaviour. This is why follower count alone tells you very little. Nobody really wants an influencer. They want influence.
So Why Are We Still Advertising the Medicine?
This is where businesses need to look critically at their own marketing. Companies regularly complain that marketing isn’t generating enough leads, but their advertising is often dominated by descriptions of what they sell. They talk about their services, features, experience, technology and processes while the customer is having an entirely different conversation in their head.
The customer is thinking about the lead that wasn’t followed up, the website that isn’t converting, the brand nobody remembers, the sales pipeline they can’t see or the marketing budget they can’t justify. They’re thinking about the pain they need removed. Then an advert arrives and starts explaining the medicine.
Good marketing connects the two. It demonstrates that you understand the customer’s problem before presenting your product or service as the mechanism for solving it.
Instead of starting the next campaign by asking what you’re trying to sell, start by asking what your customer is trying to solve. That one question can fundamentally change the way you communicate your value.
The Medicine Doesn’t Always Taste Good.
There is another side to this analogy that businesses shouldn’t ignore. Getting to the cure isn’t always comfortable.
Your strategy might need to be challenged. Your positioning might not be as clear as you thought. Your CRM might need rebuilding. Your website may need more than a cosmetic refresh. A campaign you’ve invested time and money into might need to be stopped because the data is telling you it isn’t working.
Meaningful change requires work. Strategy requires preparation, systems require implementation and new processes require teams to change established habits. Effective marketing requires testing, learning and occasionally admitting that an assumption was wrong. None of that is particularly comfortable, especially when a business has been doing something the same way for years.
A strategic partner’s role isn’t to agree with every idea or make every conversation easy. Their job is to understand the outcome the business is trying to achieve, identify what’s getting in the way and help make the decisions required to move forward.
Sometimes the most valuable advice is the advice you didn’t particularly want to hear. The medicine can taste terrible. That doesn’t mean you stop taking it before you get the result.
Start With the Cure.
The distinction between medicine and cure isn’t simply a marketing analogy. It’s a useful way of evaluating almost every piece of business communication.
Look at your website, read your latest campaign, open your sales presentation and listen to the way your team describes the business. Consider how much of that communication explains what you do and how much explains why somebody should care.
Your products, services, features and processes absolutely matter because they’re how you deliver the result. But they’re not where your customer’s story starts. Their story starts with a problem they want solved, an opportunity they want captured or an outcome they want to achieve.
Understand that first, then show them how you get them there. When businesses stop making themselves the starting point of the conversation and start communicating from the customer’s perspective, the value becomes much easier to understand.
