We had a great conversation with the Founder and CEO of The Demand Creation Institute, Sean Stormes.

Sean had the good fortune of leading a Continuous Quality Improvement initiative within a Fortune 500 company. This led him to the world’s authority Dr. William Edwards Deming, the father of the quality movement. Deming was credited with revolutionizing Post World War II Japan’s manufacturing industry and making Japan one of the most dominant economies in the world. In 1951 the Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers established The Deming Prize that recognizes organizations that have implemented systems that promote quality, and individuals who have made contributions to quality. It is one of the highest awards int the world and the longest running national quality award.

This formative experience led Sean to explore the world of variation, a symptom that eventually leads to defects. Once he began researching, he saw variation at every level of a company.

He saw variation in the articulation of purpose.

He saw variation in the articulation of value to the client.

He saw variation in the alignment of purpose, quality, and value throughout the company culture.

To add fuel to the fire, he also saw an epidemic of sameness. He could take any number of company websites in any market and see no substantial differences.

Finally, he saw that the measures of sales performance lacked the means to create a compounding effect, limiting the scale and impact of the company.

Sean’s passion for excellence in demand creation creates the context for all of this.

Enjoy this great conversation and then begin to question all the elements that add up to creating more from your go-to-market efforts.