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…
Fear and Loathing in Professional & Financial Services
Category: B2B Marketing
Uncovering where a small change can make the difference between losing a sale and landing it
“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…
Sometimes the old advertising ideas are the best
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…
What do you do if your sales targets are up, but your market is in decline?
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…
Maybe “loyalty marketing” is a misnomer. Maybe we should all be inertia marketers.
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…
How to out-think the competition in a recession
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…
How to fail quietly – and succeed in the process
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…
The easiest sales to close are the ones where the competition have left them wide open
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…
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…
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.…