Author: admin37109
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Trying out ChatGPT
Of course, really, we all want to build Skynet. However, until Judgement Day comes, we’ll have to make do with ChatGPT. ChatGPT is obviously a Big Deal right now for marketers, so I wanted to find out for myself. Firstly, as…
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The Marketing Flywheel
New Year, new marketing plans. Hopefully by now you’ve kicked off various activities and you’re waiting to see how those early campaigns are working out. The other thing I see in marketing departments at this time though is burnout. Everyone is…
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The marketing flywheel – an alternative to the marketing funnel
A lot has already been written about how the old marketing funnel model is no longer as relevant in modern B2B organisations as it used to be, and how a flywheel model is more appropriate for how customers really buy (as…
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How to make decisions
There’s a myth that as you get more senior, you get to make more autonomous decisions about what happens in your business – what strategies to pursue, tools to buy, markets to go after and so on. “I’m the Head of…
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Beware roles that advertise long hours
A friend is looking for a new role at the moment. He’s lucky enough to be able to pick and choose what he goes for, so I asked “What really attracts you to a job? What puts you off?”. It’s always…
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Why ROI calculators aren’t enough
ROI calculators are a pretty common tool amongst B2B marketers. On the face of it, the logic is simple – show a calculation of how the time saved from subscribing to your product equates to money and how that money is…
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Scaling from SMBs to the Enterprise – a 10-Point Plan
I’ve had this conversation about 6 times in the last year – how can you scale from selling to small businesses (SMBs), up to Enterprise organisations? What are the marketing challenges? What’s necessary, what’s nice-to-have, and what’s a red herring? This…
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How We Grew Marketing Sourced Pipeline by 20% in One Quarter
We’re about to go into our quarterly review period at Redgate. We don’t just run QBRs, we also run reviews across all parts of the business. These are a chance to examine the last three months – what worked? What’s going…
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How Collaboration Can Grow Revenue
Why do Marketing and Sales departments need to collaborate? Sure, it’s nice, but beyond people getting on better together, how can it really impact the numbers, the outcomes for the business? We’ve just spent a month at Redgate improving the collaboration…
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Getting from Green Park to King’s Cross
Anyone who has used the London tube system much, will know that there are two routes from Green Park to King’s Cross – the Victoria Line and the Piccadilly Line. The Victoria Line is the “Right” way to get from Green…
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Working from Home
Lots of people have written about the “New world of remote working” (so much so, that that phrase has become a cliche in the space of six months). But I think it’s still an interesting topic, because I have a hunch…
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How to Present to an Exec or Board
For better or worse I find a lot of my tips and tricks for working in a software company from fiction books and films. I learnt most of what I know about how to present to senior folk (an Exec team…
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Join a Scaleup to Scale Your Career
It’s hard getting ahead in Marketing. It’s a discipline changing every year (certainly true of 2020), it covers an enormous breadth of disciplines which need a great variety of skills and it’s notoriously difficult to prove the impact of your work.…
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Under-promise, Over-deliver for product-led growth
There’s a lot written about the advantages of product-led growth (PLG), how it keeps marketing and sales costs down, how customers prefer it and so on. All good, but I struggled to find much on the actual strategies to use – how do…
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External Marketing during COVID-19
Everyone’s got marketing advice about what to do in the current crisis, haven’t they? As though it’s easy and obvious what you should be doing in this “first-in-a-lifetime” situation we find ourselves in?! I don’t think it’s easy and obvious at…
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There are two times when you don’t need to worry about Customer Success. And neither apply to you
Another thought exercise. I was trying to think of scenarios where Customer Success – i.e. genuinely worrying about whether your customers were using and getting value from your offering – wasn’t going to be a priority for a business in 2019. I could…
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Focus on Marketing Effectiveness to Scale Up
Here’s a very non-theoretical problem – you’ve got two ways of spending some digital marketing budget, either a) LinkedIn advertising, or b) Facebook advertising. The former works pretty well, you manage to calculate a return of $1.50 for every dollar you…
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Finding Balance in Marketing Strategy
It’s that time of year again (for us anyway) – putting together the detailed marketing strategy and plan for 2021. And yet again it’s hard going. I’m not complaining – if it’s not difficult, then you’re not doing it right. Our…
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Why HR is the Most Important Department in your Business
Surely not!? Surely it’s the Marketing department (I am a marketer after all)? Or maybe Sales, maybe Engineering, maybe Customer Support. But no, I want to argue that getting HR right is one of the step changes you can make to…
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Five Myths About The Marketing Revenue Engine
I love the book Rise of the Revenue Marketer. In it Debbie Qaqish describes the need for a change program to move your marketing department from being a cost centre (“We’re not sure what marketing do, but we need them to do…
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Review: “Subscribed” by Tien Tzuo
The Subscription Economy is the idea that more and more customers (and therefore vendors) are moving over to being subscribers of services rather than purchasers of products. An obvious example is Spotify – the money spent by consumers on streaming services now significantly…
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Building a MarTech Stack at a Small Organisation
I recently spoke at the B2B Ignite conference in London on “Building a MarTech Stack at a Small Organisation: A Real World Example of What’s Worked and What Hasn’t”. Here are my slides from that talk. Rules of Thumb It’s a…
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Measuring Outbound vs. “Always-on” Marketing Performance
Whenever I meet customers I always slip in a marketing question or two along the lines of “Where did you hear about us? What brought you in to Redgate?”. One of the answers from a couple of months back was: Well a…
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Brand Amplifiers
I’m writing this on my way to the Sirius Decision Summit in Vegas (sitting in Terminal 3). I’m hoping to get a lot out of the conference (though I’m currently in option paralysis mode – too many sessions to choose from).…
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Your Customers Pay Your Salary (not your Employer)
“Don’t find customers for your products, find products for your customers” – Seth Godin The simplest ideas are the best. But they can also seem the most banal. Hidden in the Seth Godin quote above is, I believe, one of the…
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To learn about the “Buyer Process” try buying something
I guess this is more a post about sales rather than marketing per se, but still – understanding buyer journeys and how you can help at different stages is an important part of the marketing role, particularly when the sales cycle…
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You’re applying Marketing Theory, But You Don’t Even Know It
I love this article from Helen Edwards – about the need to understand marketing theory but then the need to apply it to the real world. Theory without execution is just an indulgence, a wholly academic pursuit. But if you’re executing well against…
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Sentiment Analysis of Twitter – Part 2 (or, Why Does Everyone Hate Airlines!?)
It took quite a while to write part 2 of this post, for reasons I’ll mention below. But like all good investigations, I’ve ended up somewhere different from where I thought I’d be – after spending weeks looking at the Twitter…
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There are Three Types of Marketing – Inbound, Outbound and… Plain Rude
Reading one of the many number of content marketing pieces from HubSpot, I noticed the following from a basic piece on What is Digital Marketing?, after paragraphs about the virtues of Inbound marketing techniques: Digital outbound tactics aim to put a…
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Your Primary Job as a Marketing Leader is to Prioritise
I’ve just finished the excellent Complete Guide to B2B Marketing by Kim Ann King. It’s very “List-ey” – it’s full of To Do lists (“Want to figure out your budgets for media spend? Here’s a 7-point list of how to do it”),…
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Anatomy of a Great Ad
It’s easy to forget, amongst the talk of marketing automation, social media strategy, customer experience, lead nurturing and so on, that you still need well written, well targeted and well designed ads to reach new customers. I spotted a great example…
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Sentiment Analysis of Twitter for You and Your Competitors – Part 1
This post is split in two, primarily because I hit a roadblock half-way through the work – and I wanted to get the first part out. Second part to follow once I’ve fixed the difficult problems! A lot of people follow…
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Write Content That People Actually Want to Read
This feels like a pointless blog post – the think I’m going to say seems so obvious, I shouldn’t need to say it. Still, I see examples where this doesn’t happen, so perhaps it’s worth re-iterating the point. Here’s the incredible…
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Measuring Customer Experience
Customer Experience (CX) – it’s a popular topic right now, analogous to the importance of User Experience (UX) in the world of product development. And something which I strongly believe is important for a marketing team to get right. So, we all…
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If a Brewery Can Innovate, So Can You
This weekend we went to Southwold and Aldeburgh – two of my favourite places in the UK, for various reasons. One of these reasons is the Adnams Brewery, based in Southwold. It’s been going for over a century and has always…
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Your People Are Your Customer Experience
We went to Milton Keynes today (school holidays – where else would you want to go?) and there were two examples of what I’d call, using marketing jargon, “A great customer experience” for the children. Listening to them talk about it…
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People. Customers. Action.
I was mugging up again last week on the McKinsey 7-S Model, now pretty old, but I still think a great framework for looking at organisational effectiveness. All very interesting, but then I found the post that Tom Peters wrote about…
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Human Beings are Holding Back Machine Learning
Machine Learning (ML) and AI are big topics right now. Poor Lee Se-dol has just been beaten by AlphaGo – a machine put together by Google/DeepMind and there are numerous other examples in the news.So everyone is interested, and everyone wants to…
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Why You Can’t Pivot as Quickly as You’d Like
There’s a great scene, towards the end of the film American Sniper, where Bradley Cooper’s character has to take a shot from over a mile away from his target. But the point is, there’s a long time between the point he…
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Better to be in the Arena Fighting…
A place I used to work, perhaps 10-12 years ago, had (what I think, now) was a strange custom. Every Monday morning the whole company would get together to go through everything. There were around 70 of us, at the peak, and we…
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The Difference Between Management and Leadership
What is the essential difference between “Management” and “Leadership”? Are these, basically the same thing – “The stuff you do when you get “Manager” in your job title somewhere? These are both such vague, all-encompassing terms (perhaps the worst job title…
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The Value of Completely Arbitrary and Artificial Constraints
Another slightly abstract post today, though based on very real and pragmatic problems. When working on a project, where there are 100s of different options for things you can do and you’re drifting in to option paralysis, often a manager will…
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Great Customer Service – Detail, Memory and Management
I was fortunate enough this week to go for one of the finest meals of my life. Just incredible food – however, that’s not what this post is about (I believe there are many blogs out there on all things foodie..).…
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Why Doing Nothing Inevitably Leads to Failure
Every new idea is a bad idea. Well, not quite, but every time you choose to do something new, there always seems to be 100 reasons why it’s going to fail. Wrong people, not enough people, misunderstanding of the market, can’t…
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Why Complex Decisions Inevitably Take Weeks
I often find that, when it comes to make certain types of decision in an organisation, this just seems to take weeks. And if you’re unlucky, this can roll in to months. Why? What is it, a lack of decisiveness? An…