The essential template for profitable management of key, Strategically important customers.
One of the current marketing buzzwords is 'ABM,' or Account Based Marketing. It is heralded as the panacea for all B2B sales challenges, generally with the caveat that you buy their software. What utter Bollocks. Allocating resources against important, and...
Will regulators ever catch up with innovators?
Following on from the rant about the dominance of Gooface a short while ago, comes this 'explanatory' note from Facebook about a test being carried out in several countries that smacks of changes being made to the newsfeed that will remove...
Message to the new CEO.
It is a scary place, no matter how much you have worked and trained for it, suddenly you are the man (or woman) everyone is looking to for the cues they will use that drives behaviour and ultimately results. No person can do everything, but every leader...
The right tool is still not enough
A huge impediment to effective and ultimately successful marketing is our obsession with the tools, especially the new and shiny ones. My father was a very keen golfer who practised and sweated for years to get his handicap down to 20. One of his mates was...
The ‘Rocking Horse Shit’ story.
Years ago in a corporate strategy retreat that was also a reason to have a nasty headache on Thursday morning, we had a session on responding publicly with little or no notice. The disciplines required to be able to speak publicly with clarity and...
Will Apples ad barrier slow down Gooface?
In September last year (2016), Facebook conceded publicly that they had over-estimated the average time viewers spent on video on their site by 60-80%. They did not tell us how long they had known of this 'error' but I suspect it was for quite a while,...
How to make a sale without selling
Like it or not, we are all in sales. Not the sales of the aggressive close, but gently, continuously persuasion of those who may have a need for what we can do for them. How many times have you bought something, then wondered, ‘how did that happen?” How...
What is the best headline ever written?
We all accept the advice of 'Madman' advertising guru David Ogilvy , that headlines are the make or break element of any writing, and that we should spend as much time on the headline as we spend on everything else. This was true in the Madman days, and...
The getting of wisdom
As I get older, the world seems smaller, more complicated, but smaller. This is not just the technology we all now have that has shrunk all the boundaries of our world over the last 20 years, putting the all the information anyone has ever had at our fingertips, that...
Finding the sweet spot of organisational cadence.
Last week I watched for the first time in many years Stanley Kubrick's masterpiece, 'Full Metal Jacket'. Amongst the many parts of the movie that struck me, were the scenes in the first half where Gunnery Sargent Hartman is calling cadence as the platoon...