Welcome to the introductory page of the Creating Demand  digital book. This digital book, on the AGILEdge website, focuses on issues, ideas and tools for creating demand for an organizations' products and services or for a share of the proceeds of future products and services (i.e. for investors in biotech/technology firms) or for a specific outcome (in the case of fundraising for nonprofits). So the focus is on what most would call sales and marketing excellence with a slightly broader view.

From what we've seen over the years, there are 2 major causes of failure or in the best case, mediocrity in this area.

First is really a failure to pay attention to reality and involves the quality and accuracy of information on which decisions and actions are based. The homework is not done. That is, the planning and decision making process is corrupted by inaccurate assumptions and/or so-called "knowledge" based on the past and/or a fixation on completing the plan format or on some "cool" solution. This is further often complicated by leaders who ignore the reality of their team and assume that their department heads are fully informed about external and internal influences and issues. That is, the sales or marketing guy is fully aware of all key issues on the customer, the engineering guy knows the ins and outs of all available technology, the regulatory affairs buy is fully up to date on all regulatory, legal and process influences, the financial guy is an expert on … and so on.. . "Yep, all I need to do in my role as this here company's leader is get my team together, talk things through and spit out a plan, then we can play some golf…"