2. The American Marketing Association’s Customer Message Management Forum estimates that up to 90 percent of marketing tools and sales support materials never get used in the field. And BtoB magazine reported 70 percent of companies grade their marketing messaging and sales support functions as D or F on a scale from A to F. Numerous industry analysts have assessed similar questions—consider the massive efforts to determine the ROI (return on investment) on marketing expenditures, as one example, or the need for marketing accountability. While the “over 90 percent” level appears surprisingly, and perhaps even atrociously, high, it is not intuitively wrong. Often marketing remains seriously disconnected from sales, and marketing materials are fun damentally not aligned with what a company’s sales force needs.