B2B Marketing
A little while back a former colleague of mine was invited to a job interview where they were asked to make a short presentation on “the barriers to innovation in Professional and Financial Services”. As a prep for their interview, they asked for my opinion, and I – in turn – asked my own …
Continue reading “Fear and Loathing in Professional & Financial Services”
In a recent piece in Marketing Week, the The B2B Institute‘s Peter Weinberg and Jon Lombardo opined on how AI is going to positively impact B2B market research. As the authors testify, it’s certainly true that there’s plenty of positive advances that AI can contribute to the research process: for example, augmenting questionnaire design by using ChatGPT to suggest answer sets to quantitative …
Continue reading “Why AI isn’t killing B2B research just yet”
Picture the scene: a CMO faced with a rapidly changing market needs to get to the heart of why too many target prospects are buying from their competitors, and needs to know how to finesse their own proposition so that more prospects entering the top of the funnel actually make their way to the point …
Continue reading “The 3 key mistakes CMOs make when commissioning research – and how to avoid them”
“Better to have pitched and lost than never have pitched at all” might sound a little trite on the ear to your typical Sales Director, but for all the frustrations that losing a pitch can generate there is a pretty valuable consolation prize that surprisingly few companies grasp. Fact is that if you have …
When I first started working in advertising back in the early 1990s, I worked on the Lloyds Bank account at a division of famed ad agency Lowe Howard-Spink. The part of the account I worked on wasn’t let anywhere near the TV stuff – we had to do the point of sale and direct …
Continue reading “Sometimes the old advertising ideas are the best”
Many, many years ago I did some contract work for Churchill Insurance. Upon entering their Bromley Head Office for the first time, I was presented with a massive sign that proudly set out Churchill’s company values. Although we’re going back well over a decade, from memory, the first value was ‘Courage’. The …
If you’re in corporate sales, right now it may feel like you’re being asked to constantly push a stone uphill, but it needn’t be so. The good news is that the thing about recessions is that they hit your competitors as hard as they hit you. If your firm is struggling to hit …
Continue reading “What do you do if your sales targets are up, but your market is in decline?”
Another day, another mailing from John Lewis Finance politely asking why I haven’t got around to applying for their new Partnership credit card. But this isn’t a regular credit card recruitment mailing of the kind that MBNA and Capital One used to carpet-bomb the nation with at the end of the last century. …
Thought experiment. A recession looms, and the business you work for decides to tighten its belt. All discretionary or uncommitted marketing spend is put on hold until the business feels it has seen off the worst. All of your competitors, bar one, facing the same recession, do the same thing. The odd …
Continue reading “How to out-think the competition in a recession”
Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover seems to be following the classic phases of the “Move Fast and Break Things” mantra. That’s fine for Musk: right now he’s the richest being on the planet. If he breaks things and fails fast with Twitter – no matter how expensively or publicly – he knows he’ll still live …
Continue reading “How to fail quietly – and succeed in the process”
