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”
“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”
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”
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 …
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 …
Continue reading “Why savvy marketers aren’t abandoning brand investment just yet”
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 …
Continue reading “Why promotion is dead, and marketing is the Next Big Thing”
