The group stages of Euro 2024 are over. And, as promised, the update to our Euro 2024 prediction model has arrived. I’m young enough to...

The ability to win ‘new client logos’ is one of the most important predictors of future growth for a B2B business. The problem is,...

I’ve been doing some work recently on our LeadScorer tool, which takes a series of prospect attributes and behaviours, and predicts their...

Have you sat in a Management or Board Meeting of a company in the Business Services sector and thought: ‘how can we get more customers?’...

“Google Chrome to block third-party cookies by the end of 2024” – you may have read this headline or one like it, seen it in an article...

CEOs and PE firms alike have mastered the art of value creation through improving financial, talent, and operational efficiencies, but...

Making customer-focused decisions vital to value creation can be an intimidating task when you feel blind to what is going on within your...

Your sales team is telling you one thing, your finance team is reporting another, and your cash position doesn’t quite add up. This scenario is incredibly frustrating and concerning as a business leader. As a Board member, I found this situation to be more common than you’d expect, and it was usually a red flag for underlying issues. Often these were symptoms of underlying weaknesses causing revenue leakage—a common yet often overlooked challenge. Revenue leakage – it sounds

We’re continuing our series on alternative indicators of growth, looking at whether any ‘vanity’ metrics are correlated with or...

Many marketing reports I have reviewed over the years have focused on ‘vanity’ metrics like impressions, likes and views - which look...

Among the many ‘data gathering’ approaches that I learned as a strategy consultant, I always found mystery shopping to be one of the most...

I once sat in on an expert interview at the start of a market research project, as a silent observer. I had to bite my tongue as the interviewer diligently followed the interview guide and missed several opportunities to dive deeper into a nugget of insight that the expert had touched on. As a junior strategy consultant, leading these expert interviews was a core part of my role so I’ve led hundreds of discussions and probably made every type of mistake along the way. Qualita

The question of “how much to spend on marketing” is one that every business should ask itself. The answer is often “what we spent last...

Most of us have probably at some point written a list of the pros and cons, or advantages and disadvantages, of a particular decision in...

I’m fascinated by nominative determinism – the notion that our names can influence our professions or personalities. Usain Bolt, William...

'Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?' If there was one lecture at university that impacted my professional path...

Perhaps your business has just received private equity investment, or you’ve recently joined a private equity backed business as the Chief Marketing Officer. Your first board meeting is approaching, and you’ve been asked to create a marketing update to include in the board pack. You want to make a good impression but have no idea what is expected. Based on my experience of both creating and reading many board packs, I’ve created this simple ten-point guide that might just sav

Have you ever read the marketing section of your board pack month after month, read a long description of activities, but been unimpressed by the lack of any meaningful change in lead generation? You may be observing ‘Spray and Pray Marketing’ - a phrase that I find myself using to describe an approach to marketing that I think is generally to be avoided. As tends to be the case with English idiom, we rarely stop and think about the deeper meaning of such phrases and sitting

What’s the most effective, cheapest, and in every case where I’ve measured it, the biggest marketing channel that will never feature in your ROI reports or marketing section of the board pack? The answer is customer advocacy. In an age where consumers are constantly bombarded with advertisements, the trust in a recommendation from a peer stands apart. I’d like to unpack why this aspect of marketing is so significant. Customer advocacy as a marketing channel I’ve asked the ‘wh

Compared to its importance in post-deal value creation and frequency of discussion around the board table, Customer Acquisition rarely receives much explicit due diligence (DD) pre-deal. As a topic, it will, of course, be discussed frequently by Management and potential investors. But the emphasis will typically be to appraise Management’s key assumptions and decide on inputs for the investment case model, rather than a deeper analysis of opportunities and risks. Commercial D