Good Events Are Built, Not Booked
Thirteen things that decide the return on an event. Only a few happen at the event. Black Hat in Vegas rolls around next week and if you work in cyber half your feed will be…
Zero to Pipeline Hero: Building a Brand That Opens Doors
Part five of a five-part series on building a B2B marketing function from scratch. A strong brand does two things for a small company chasing big deals. It gets you in the door, and it…
Zero to Pipeline Hero: Signal Over Spray
Part four of a five-part series on building a B2B marketing function from scratch. With the story straight and the plumbing fixed, we could begin to turn on demand activities. And the first rule, with…
Zero to Pipeline Hero: No Plumbing, No Pipeline
Part three of a five-part series on building a B2B marketing function from scratch. When I arrived there was no real reporting, a questionable pipeline, and no agreement on what any of it meant. Nobody…
Zero to Pipeline Hero: You Are Not the Hero of This Story
Part two of a five-part series on building a B2B marketing function from scratch. In my first fortnight I asked a lot of people the same simple question. What problem do we solve, and for…
Zero to Pipeline Hero: Ninety Days, Then the Hard Part
Part one of a five-part series on building a B2B marketing function from scratch. I joined a scale up to lead Marketing and quickly found that there was little semblance of a marketing function, had…
Dear Marketing Leader. Stop Telling Me Marketing Is Hard. Start Asking Why.
There is a specific kind of LinkedIn post that makes me close the app and go for a walk. You have seen it. A marketing leader, usually titled CMO or VP, posting at length about…
Don’t Automate the Judgement
What the AI company hiring 60 marketers tells the rest of us. Here’s a thing I’ve been chewing on. Anthropic, the company behind Claude, one of the leading AI models, is currently hiring somewhere north…
The Strategic No: Marketing’s Most Underrated Superpower
Be flexible. Be agile. Be the person who makes things happen. Say yes, figure it out later. That narrative gets celebrated constantly, especially in marketing. The order taker who never pushes back. The team that…
The Marketer Who Forgot to Market Themselves
I have spent the best part of twenty years telling companies how to best position themselves. How to differentiate. How to build the kind of credibility that makes a prospect lean forward instead of reaching…
Not Marketing’s Problem. Until It Is.
There’s a version of the marketing leader role that involves staying firmly in your lane. Running campaigns. Generating leads. Hitting that MQL target. Handing off to sales and wishing them well. Keeping your head down…
The Marketing Measurement Starter Pack
After I published The Lamppost Problem blog recently, some people asked: “This sounds great, but how do I actually build this?” Fair question. Knowing what to measure is one thing. Building and implementing the infrastructure…
The Lamppost Problem: Why Your Marketing Data Lacks Credibility
David Ogilvy, the legendary adman who built one of the world’s most successful agencies, famously said that too many people use data “as a drunk uses a lamppost: for support rather than illumination.” Early in…
The 3 AM Marketing Manager: The Reality of Leading Global Teams
It’s 3:17 AM and I’m on a call with the APAC team. I’m wearing pyjama bottoms and a dress shirt because nobody needs to see below the camera line. My coffee’s gone cold. Again. And…
Partners, Not Order Takers: How to Reset the Marketing-Sales Dynamic
“Marketing doesn’t understand our customers.” “Sales never follows up on our leads properly.” I’ve heard these complaints in every environment I’ve worked in, and frankly, they’re both usually right. The challenge isn’t the people, it’s…
Dear CEO: The True Cost of Your Revolving CMO Door
If you’ve burned through three CMOs in two years, congratulations. You’ve just spent £500,000 learning that the problem isn’t your marketing hires. It’s your understanding of what marketing can and can’t do. And frankly, that’s…
Sensible Marketing for Daft Situations 