It’s time for my daily dose of marketing caffeine. Today I’m talking about the customer journey and the theory of constraints. First, what is the theory of constraints? To keep it really simple, it’s a bottleneck that’s preventing you from achieving your goal. For example, if you want to pour soda from a bottle into your glass it has to pass through the bottleneck. You can’t pour it any faster because the bottleneck is small. But the interesting thing is actually how most people try to solve this problem. They get a bigger mug, they shake the bottle, they ask someone else to do it!! It doesn’t matter what you change, if you don’t deal with the bottleneck you can’t speed up the process. Now what does that have to do with marketing and the customer journey? Your customer is on a journey right now. First they need to become aware of your product or service. Then they can consider and compare you to arrive at a buying decision. If you’re a good fit you acquire them and take their money. Then they move to the adoption phase, they start using your product or service. If they’re happy they end up at the end of their journey in the advocate stage where they tell others. This journey has a bottleneck. It’s different for each business, and only you know where it is. The key is for you to put all your energy into fixing the bottleneck, nothing else. If you’re successful the bottleneck will change and you can repeat the process. Where people go wrong is they put energy into marketing that has zero impact on the bottleneck. If nobody knows about you, it doesn’t matter how good your product is.