Many years ago I worked alongside the sales team of a B2B2C financial services company. The Sales Director was getting frustrated at the lack of sales being closed, and became even more frustrated when he discovered that his sales managers weren’t sticking to the agreed script when they went out to see prospects. He’d …
Author archives: Simon Hayhurst
Why savvy marketers aren’t abandoning brand investment just yet
Imagine for a moment there are two luxury car brands. Let’s call them…oooh, I dunno…Mercedes and BMW. Let’s imagine both are facing a downturn in sales as inflationary pressures bite into household expenditure, and customers think they’ll delay renewing their existing model for another year. (No idea if this is true, by the way, but …
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Why promotion is dead, and marketing is the Next Big Thing
A couple of weeks back on LinkedIn, I posted a link to an article that hailed the advent of the Metaverse as new tech that would completely revolutionise businesses everywhere. The article was sponsored by a management consultancy urging CEOs to get on board with this brand new disruptive tech before their own company gets …
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Why the Metaverse may never be universal
“Who remembers Google Glass? What were all that about?” It’s almost a decade since Google announced that the Explorer Edition of Google Glass was going on sale at $1,500 a pop, offered initially to Google I/O developers in the US. For digital natives too young to remember that far back, Google Glass was …
Why we B2B marketers need to sharpen our propositions (and how to do it).
A proposition is a very simple thing. It’s the response to the request: “Give me one good reason why I should buy your product”. Yet too often in B2B marketing when faced with that request we lapse into what is known as the Elevator Speech. The Elevator Speech itself is a simple concept. You’re standing …
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Vorsprung Durch Branding
Once upon a time, in the days when the world wide web was just a gleam in Tim Berners-Lee’s eyes and direct mail was an actual *thing*, I started out on my career in marketing. The financial services company I worked for had recently appointed BBH’s newly-formed below-the-line* agency Limbo to work on its direct …
Selling to a business? To be on the short list, you first have to be on the long list – here’s how
Since the dawn of B2B marketing, there seems to have been a raging debate about whether B2B buyers act more rationally than consumers. Classicists argue that the business procurement process is designed to eliminate irrationality and engender accountability across the entire purchase process. The involvement of multiple B2B stakeholders in that process helps ensure that …
How hard can it be to stand out from the crowd when everyone is identically dressed?
I was recently tasked with reviewing the thought leadership output of several hundred law firms in the US and UK for a major client desk research project. Something that struck me upon clicking through the home pages of site after site after site was how distinctive the first impressions created by most of them seemed …
Why marketers need to wrestle back control of the “other” Ps
When most people start out in a marketing career, the very first thing they learn is that the success of any marketing activity rests on the 4 P’s – the product you are selling, the price you sell it at, the places you sell it in, and the way those three things are promoted. …
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Beating the Billable Hours Behemoth
My heart goes out to those professional services marketing mangers who are constantly having to cajole partners in their firm to contribute something to the company blog. “I’m tasked with hitting my billable hours, not writing window dressing for the website” goes the standard rebuttal. And if you live or die in a …