The Cobbler’s Children Have No Shoes
As a Microsoft AI Solutions Partner specializing in Dynamics 365 implementations, we spend our days transforming how companies engage with their customers. We’ve implemented Customer Insight for dozens of organizations, built sophisticated nurture campaigns, and created marketing automation that turns leads into revenue.
Yet our own marketing operation was held together with duct tape, hope, and number of spreadsheets.
The irony was painful. Here we were, implementing sophisticated marketing automation for clients while our own team was:
- Manually copying contacts between systems
- Using Excel to track campaign engagement
- Losing leads who expressed interest in our solutions
- Missing obvious cross-sell opportunities for our ISV solutions (Shipment Depot, Project Survey, Client Feedback)
- Spending hours on tasks we routinely automated for clients in minutes
The Moment of Truth
The breaking point came during our quarterly planning session. We were preparing to launch several new offerings, had major events approaching, and needed to scale our marketing efforts significantly.
Our marketing manager laid it out bluntly: “We need the same tools we give our clients, or we need to hire three more people.”
That’s when someone asked the question that changed everything: “Why don’t we just implement Customer Insights for ourselves using our Rapid Implementation methodology?”
We all knew why—because being your own customer is uniquely challenging. We knew all the pitfalls, all the shortcuts we shouldn’t take, and all the temptations to over-engineer. We also knew that if we couldn’t deliver our own transformation in four weeks, how could we credibly promise it to clients?
The Decision to Eat Our Own Dog Food
We decided to treat ourselves exactly like a client. No special treatment, no scope creep, no “we’ll fix that later” exceptions. Four weeks. Same methodology. Same discipline.
Our starting point was sobering:
- Marketing campaigns scattered across multiple platforms
- No unified view of customer engagement
- Manual list management taking 5+ hours weekly
- Zero automation for lead nurturing
- No visibility into our marketing funnel
But we had advantages too. We knew the platform inside and out. We understood what good looked like. Most importantly, we knew what happened when implementations failed—and we were determined not to become our own cautionary tale.
Why This Series Matters
Over the next four weeks, we’re sharing our journey in real-time. Not a sanitized case study written months later, but the actual experience as it happens—including the mistakes, surprises, and uncomfortable discoveries.
Because here’s what we’ve learned from hundreds of implementations: every organization thinks their situation is unique. They think their challenges are special. They think the methodology won’t work.
We thought the same things. We were wrong.
This series will show you:
- What a Rapid Implementation actually looks like from the inside
- The mistakes even experts make (spoiler: we made a huge one)
- How to build a marketing foundation that scales
- Why simple solutions often beat complex ones
- The real timeline for transforming marketing operations
Most importantly: We’ll prove that four weeks is enough to completely transform your marketing—if you’re willing to confront uncomfortable truths and fix fundamental flaws.
Transform Your Marketing in 4 Weeks
Stop managing spreadsheets. Start generating revenue. Our Customer Insights Rapid Implementation gets you from chaos to automated campaigns in just 4 weeks—the same methodology we used to transform our own marketing.
