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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 like something you probably want to avoid, but what is it exactly? And how should you be thinking about it? In this article we’ll be giving you a rundown of what it is, common causes, how to identify it and some potential solutions. An estimated 42% of companies experience some form of revenue leakage, and for B2B businesses I would guess that that figure is probably closer to 60%+. What is revenue leakage and some of the most common causes? Revenue leakage refers to revenue lost due to inefficiencies, from the initial quote stage through to receipt of payment. Most commonly it refers to revenue that has been earned but not collected due to operational errors and weaknesses in systems. It can also refer to lost potential revenue due to inefficiencies in the sales funnel e.g., lack of systematic follow-ups with hot leads or failure to follow account management processes. Revenue leakage is likely to be a bigger issue in B2B businesses, especially those with multiple products and/or complex sales structures. Revenue leakage can be subtle and often go unnoticed. It’s like a dripping tap, happening in little bits, but with the potential to add up to a significant amount over time. Some common causes of revenue leakage are: Pricing, discounts, and promotions that aren’t centrally managed: e.g., introductory pricing going on for too long, discounts that aren't necessary to get or keep customers (just check how often your sales reps are applying their maximum permissible discounts), extra services being thrown in for free. Contractual pricing not being followed: e.g., not tracking and charging clients’ volume and usage patterns, unenforced penalties, undercharging for billable time as part of services revenue, not applying contractual annual inflationary prices increases. Manual processes, especially manual invoicing, leading to data entry errors, incorrect billing, services being omitted or delays between sales closing and invoicing. Poor data management: e.g., sales spreadsheets not integrated with billing systems, inconsistent data entry, inaccurate customer information. Gaps and inefficiencies in the sales pipeline: e.g., delays in sending quotes out or slow approval processes leading to lower conversion, renewal reminders not being sent out, upsell opportunities being missed. Poor handover between teams: e.g., marketing leads not being followed up with by the sales team, information from sales conversations not being captured and passed on to customer services. Incompatibility between systems – this is often the case in businesses that have undergone M&A or have legacy products alongside a newer business unit e.g., billing systems not linked to original proposals and contractual terms, different billing systems for different parts of the business. Why focus on revenue leakage? Revenue leakage may not sound particularly strategic, but it can be a significant value driver and should be on the Board’s agenda at least once a year. These are four key reasons management teams and investors should be thinking about revenue leakage: It has a direct impact on profit – revenue that hasn’t previously been collected, and suddenly is, tends to fall directly to the bottom line. Research shows that most companies lose 1-5% of EBITDA to leakage annually. It can be a key lever for growth during difficult macro-economic periods. Addressing revenue leakage typically requires operational changes rather than relying on increasing market share or tapping into a growing market. Optimised revenue leakage is usually linked to a ‘well run business’ which can have a positive impact on overall valuation - diagnosing the causes often uncovers inefficiencies in processes and systems, manual interventions, and poor data management. Addressing these should not only increase revenue, but also improve operational efficiency and can lead to other benefits such as better data, improved visibility, and cash flow management. During a sale process these are all ‘green flags’ for a well-run business which can add to the valuation multiple. Improved customer satisfaction. Unnoticed errors which lead to revenue leakage can also lead to frustration for customers (for example dealing with billing errors), make companies seem unreliable and unprofessional, and can damage customer relationships or a company’s reputation. Questions to ask your sales or finance director to identify revenue leakage issues Revenue leakage can be tricky to spot due to the fact it may exist in small pockets and below the level of detail of management reporting. If you want to assess the potential impact of revenue leakage in your business, here are a few suggested areas to ask about: Process – What are the steps in the current sales and billing funnel where is there potential for manual errors, system incompatibility, or missed conversion opportunities? Pricing – Are average prices and year on year changes consistent with the stated pricing strategy? One diagnostic approach is to conduct a review of a selection of customer accounts and compare prices in the system with the amounts that clients actually paid over the past years. Cashflow forecasting, late payments and bad debts – How accurate is cashflow forecasting? Are late payments and bad debts in line with your industry? Are they growing? Is there an understanding of the root causes? These are common signals for poorly managed billing and invoicing. As an investor I’ve been in situations where this started off as what seemed like a small issue but a definite red flag. When management dug into it, it turned out to be the tip of the iceberg and uncovered a whole tangle of legacy billing issues. It is much harder to get customers to pay up if you’ve been sending them erroneous invoices for the past 2 years! Pipeline – How accurate is your pipeline and revenue forecasting? Is there a big discrepancy between initial estimates and final quotes? Conversion – Are there noticeable ‘holes’ in the funnel where conversion is lower e.g., certain teams, products, channels to market? We think most companies would benefit from putting ‘Revenue leakage’ on the board agenda at least once a year. Ask the CFO to do an audit with help from the sales team - this might involve walking through the steps in the current processes and identifying potential areas for errors. They should also form and test hypotheses based on the indicators above e.g., check the largest accounts, accounts with late payments, legacy clients, accounts with the most complicated contractual terms. What are some solutions? Simplify your billing and invoicing, keep it consistent and automated where possible. Try to avoid too many tailored pricing options that create leeway in the sales team. Implement clear approval processes for pricing; regular account reviews, check client profitability regularly e.g., with timesheet or allocated direct cost data. Implementing automated billing systems not only reduces manual errors but also streamlines cash flow management, a crucial aspect of profit maximisation. Centralise processes and automate data capture as far as possible – this will help reduce manual errors and enable real-time monitoring, approvals, and tracking. Proper use of a CRM like Salesforce can be invaluable. Of course, it’s critical to ensure the quality of the data entered. Remember, garbage in – garbage out! With your sales funnel data integrated in a central source of truth, you can use automated reporting or AI to spot discrepancies and opportunities, such as differences between quotes and agreed contracts or salespeople that regularly ‘undersell’ certain add-ons. Conduct regular financial audits, monitor customer accounts, and tighten financial controls to identify discrepancies, errors, or fraud. Improved systems and data capture should provide better visibility and insights into data like cashflows, pipeline and resource utilisation. Train your employees, especially those in sales, customer support and finance, in revenue management processes and contract compliance. If you are asking people to change their behaviour, especially around CRM use, pricing, or enforcing penalties, it is critical to provide them support from the top in implementing this. As you can see, revenue leakage can be a broad umbrella for many issues. Hopefully this post gives you a starting point for assessing your own business and some ideas for where to look. Beyond the P&L impact, we believe that addressing causes of revenue leakage can lead to a more efficient and well-run business which makes it an important value creation lever. If you’d like to discuss whether revenue leakage might be an issue in your business and how to approach it, please Contact Us. All views expressed in this post are the author's own and should not be relied upon for any reason. Clearly.

We’re continuing our series on alternative indicators of growth, looking at whether any ‘vanity’ metrics are correlated with or predictive of profitable growth, based on the work we do with our clients to create a single customer view across their various marketing and sales data sources. Today we are focusing on enquiry response time – how many times have you filled in an enquiry form on a website and felt like you were just shouting into the void? Our conclusion is that this is one of the most impactful levers for conversion rate optimisation in B2B and long sales cycle B2C, that almost always works to accelerate customer acquisition. Why is enquiry response time important? At the start of most considered purchase journeys – perhaps for a first-time purchase, or one where getting it right is particularly important - purchasers are doing some form of research into potential providers & their propositions. For both B2B and B2C purchases, this will typically involve some combination of online searching and seeking recommendations from trusted contacts, then a review of the suggested providers. Think about the last time you looked at booking a holiday, obtaining a mortgage, or buying a new piece of software at work. For those journeys where there isn’t a ‘buy online’ option, purchasers will often then contact a handful of providers (previous research I’ve done suggests between 2 – 5 options). In each business on the receiving end of these enquiries, I’ve seen that conversion rate is highly correlated with the speed of response. If you imagine your own purchase journeys you can rationalise this effect - as consumers we infer that those who respond more slowly are less keen on our business and/or less able to service it (this of course may not be right but is a common heuristic). We were recently able to demonstrate this with a Coppett Hill client, where we saw that conversion rate for enquiries responded to within 3 hours was 3x that for enquiries responded to after 24 hours. This effect was also visible when we looked at the time of day enquiries were received. Our client was receiving enquiries from international locations but operated a sales team with UK hours, and as a result conversion rate dropped materially when the sales team were not online. This insight led to our client introducing much tighter SLAs for the speed of response, adjusting their opening hours, and adjusting the times that they were running paid digital marketing to generate enquiries. We were also able to combine this with some work on their Ideal Client Profile so that they are prioritising responding to the ‘best fit’ enquiries – not all enquiries are created equal. What does this look like from a prospects’ perspective? To Illustrate this, we’ve tested response times from a group of five ISO 27001 certification providers – who sell a mix of software and services to help businesses to achieve this security certification. We chose this group as this is something that Coppett Hill is genuinely considering, but also because the five providers we sampled have Private Equity investment so have had some level of external scrutiny of their sales processes. We made these enquiries at the start of the business day, and captured the complexity of the website enquiry form, whether we received an automated acknowledgement and the time it took to receive a phone call (the promised response in all cases). The fastest provider called us back after 43 minutes, whereas the slowest response took nearly 6 hours to respond, and one didn’t call us at all. This illustrates that even in a mature, competitive category there is still scope for improvement - we could feasibly have already booked 3 demos by the time we heard from the Provider D, and we would never choose Provider E in this example. One caveat is that the responses we received might reflect that we were de-prioritised based on being less of an Ideal Client Profile fit. Interestingly just one of the providers offered the opportunity on their website to immediately book a demo rather than requiring a call back from sales. How should I think about enquiry response time for my business? Producing this type of analysis can be hard – in the above client example we linked website form fills in the marketing automation platform, the timing of outbound calls from the telephony system and prospect conversation status from the client’s CRM. But once you have this, the typical dimensions to look include: The timing of calls – evenings, weekends etc.; The source of enquiries; Any customer attributes, for example whether they are a fit with your Ideal Client Profile; and Response time by salesperson or location. One of the most important things to keep in mind is the Flaw of Averages. You should look at the outliers – your average response time might be 45 minutes, but how many clients wait more than 1 hour, or more than 3 hours for an individual response? You could also think about how automation can offer some protection e.g. mentioning your average response time next to the enquiry form on your website, sending an automated acknowledgement email which sets some expectations (perhaps different versions for whether someone has submitted an enquiry within your office hours or not), or maybe even adding an appointment booking tool to your website. If you have an enquiry response step in your customer journey, I’d recommend testing this and looking at how you can increase response times to increase conversion and accelerate customer acquisition. You could also test this yourself with a mystery shopping exercise. If you’d like to discuss how you can join your marketing data sources to understand these relationships for your business, please Contact Us. All views expressed in this post are the author's own and should not be relied upon for any reason. Clearly.

Many marketing reports I have reviewed over the years have focused on ‘vanity’ metrics like impressions, likes and views - which look impressive on the surface - but made no mention of profit or return on investment (ROI). In the spirit of challenging assumptions, this is the first in a series looking at whether any of these ‘vanity’ metrics are correlated with or predictive of profitable growth, based on the work we do with our clients to create a single customer view across their various marketing data sources. I have always been fascinated with alternative indicators – for example measuring light pollution from space as a proxy for African economic growth or using satellite imagery of car park utilisation to predict retail like for like growth. First up in this series is email open rate. We have looked at this in two contexts: in a long sales cycle business (think B2B enterprise software or high value consumer goods) vs conversion to purchase, and in a transactional B2C business vs lifetime value. Example 1 – long sales cycle conversion This example represents a very high value B2C purchase, with a sales cycle of c. 1 year – so I think of it more like a B2B sales process. We see that there is a linear relationship between marketing email open rate (i.e. excluding 1-1 contact with salespeople) and ultimate conversion. Example 2 – transactional B2C lifetime value In this typical B2C ecommerce example, in a category with a high purchase frequency, the relationship is slightly different – getting email open rate above c.20% correlates with a meaningful increase in customer lifetime value (measured in terms of profit of course). Above this, there is a still a positive relationship but less strong than in our first example. What we have also looked at here is whether there might be covariance with the number of emails received – but when you isolate to just those customers who have received >50 emails, the trend is almost identical. How can we use this insight to drive growth? Of course, you may be wondering- is this just correlation or more fundamental causation? In the first example, common sense says that a prospect who is more engaged is more likely to open emails. In the second example, a customer who feels a connection to a brand and its content may well be more likely to open emails. I would make the case that in some ways this does not really matter, because the most valuable way to use this insight is as a correlation, in other words a predictor of prospect conversion or customer lifetime value. This could allow you to prioritise sales resources, direct churn prevention activities or indeed simply to produce a more accurate forecast of business performance. As to whether working on your email strategy can increase the correlated business metric – that is something you should test. With both client examples described above, the next layer of detail suggests the opportunity to make gains – looking at the specific email campaigns, automated journeys, and scope for more A/B testing. One of the best characteristics of email marketing as a Chief Marketing Office (CMO) is that compared to your website, app, or other digital products, you are likely to have full control of A/B testing without the need for your tech team to get involved. Send days, times, subject lines, and email content can all be optimised. If you have the data available, check this comparison to conversion rate and lifetime value for your business. If you do not have this at your fingertips, it is worth the effort to start to tie your different marketing data sources together to create a single view of the customer journey to uncover insights such as this. Next up in this series will be enquiry response time – please do suggest any other indicators you would like to see tested. If you’d like to discuss how you can join together your marketing data sources to understand these relationships for your business, please Contact Us. All views expressed in this post are the author's own and should not be relied upon for any reason. Clearly.

Around two thirds of trackable web traffic comes from search engines, whether from paid listings (paid search or PPC) or organic/free listings (organic search or search engine optimisation - SEO). The chances are that search represents a very meaningful source of online traffic, leads and customers for your business – even if it is at the start of a long B2B purchase journey. It follows that when you are setting your digital marketing strategy, you should be seeking to understand your potential opportunities for growth within paid and organic search, and then tracking changes on an ongoing basis. Search engines helpfully provide a lot of information of advertisers on the performance of their paid search activities, but this is not the case in organic search meaning that marketers must rely on third party tools to track their SEO rankings. In our experience, organic search is overlooked in terms of its commercial importance to most organisations, receiving much less Management time, fewer metrics in the board pack and insufficient investment than other marketing channels. Your SEO rankings can often account for 50% of new customer acquisition once you have clear picture of marketing attribution, at a very attractive Cost Per Acquisition CPA compared to other channels. This lack of attention results from a combination of the difficulty of measuring/tracking the value of your SEO rankings and the (misplaced) idea that organic search traffic is both hard to influence and in terminal decline, so why spend time focusing on it. A Search Headroom analysis that is based on your SEO rankings can help change some of these perceptions and help to bridge the gap between senior managers and technical SEO practitioners. What is a Search Headroom analysis? A search headroom analysis highlights a business’s share of its potentially addressable organic search traffic at a specific point in time. The higher up your business appears in the organic search rankings for any given keyword, the greater your share of traffic will be. You can think of this like a digital version of a traditional ‘market share’ analysis. The difference is that traditional market share is based on the ‘stock’ of customers in a market (e.g. a car manufacturer’s share of all the cars on the road today), where as a search headroom analysis considers the ‘flow’, the customers who are actively searching for a given product or service (e.g. a car manufacturers share of the new cars sold this year). Businesses that are growing will often have a higher share of search traffic than their overall market share – hence this can be a valuable leading indicator of growth. In principle there are a handful of steps to follow when creating a Search Headroom analysis: Build a list of your own web domains and those of your competitors; Use a third-party tool to produce a list of all the keywords where each domain appears in the search results, and their respective SEO rankings; Aggregate the results together and remove duplicated keywords, irrelevant keywords, and those where the ranking is so far down the results, they are unlikely to generate any traffic; Combine with data on the overall monthly searches for each keyword; Translate the rankings into estimated traffic for each domain on each keyword (considering both the ranking and other search results page (SERP) features which could impact click-through rate (CTR)); Group the keywords into common sense segments for your product/service; Explore the results at a segment, keyword and even landing page level; and Review the search results for your most important keywords to check for any additional competitor domains to include the next time you update the analysis. Figure 1 - example summary from a Search Headroom analysis showing 'market share' by domain and keyword segment. A Search Headroom analysis is a very powerful tool as it can be built both ‘outside in’ using 3rd party providers of search results tracking, as well as being enhanced with more accurate internal data, for example when estimated CTRs. We have used this approach both as operators and investors as a result, to understand a market overall, dig into competitor strategy or track who is gaining/losing share. You can also apply this methodology in other channels e.g., Amazon. A Search Headroom analysis is also very useful when you are planning big changes in your digital marketing strategy – launching a new website, re-platforming an existing website, or planning a domain consolidation. All these changes can cause significant and immediate change in your SEO ranking that you need to carefully monitor and mitigate. What digital marketing insights can a Search Headroom analysis generate? Understanding your business’s search headroom can yield many interesting insights about your business, your competitors, and your market. For example: Your ‘market share’ of organic search traffic, and how this varies by segment and keyword Trends in your ‘market share’ over time Level of fragmentation/concentration of traffic in your market Seeing where your competitors are winning traffic, but you are not Growth YoY in terms of search volume (10 years ago it seemed like every keyword was going in volume terms, but overall search volumes are now relatively stable, so growth in searches tends to correlate with overall market growth)) The level of volatility in your market i.e., how often SEO ranking changes How commercial/sophisticated the digital marketing strategies are in your market i.e., understanding the mix of organic vs paid traffic (search ads and shipping ads in some categories) Where you are doing well in organic search but not paid search and vice versa, by comparing the Search Headroom analysis to your paid search data How overlapped your market is with other markets that may have similar search terms – think about a market like cyber security where you will find many different overlapping niches as well as job seekers and students searching very similar keywords Seeing your SEO rankings at keyword level (where do you rank vs. where you ‘should’ rank based on the product/service offering of your business) Where you may have recently lost high volume SEO rankings Whether your SEO/ content team are spending time in the right areas to both protect your most valuable SEO rankings and grow your visibility in the areas of biggest opportunity Comparing the performance of your different landing pages (and those of your competitors) Figure 2- example keyword level market share from a Search Headroom. What makes this difficult? Whilst the benefits of a Search Headroom analysis are hopefully clear, this is something that many businesses have never attempted. One of the challenges in the complex, technical nature of search marketing, and in particular SEO. In our experience, many talented, technical SEO professionals don’t think about top-down opportunity enough and for most management teams SEO is the ultimate ‘black box’ where cause and effect are very hard to understand. The closest teams often get to quantitative reporting of their search marketing is a page in the board pack listing their top 10 keyword rankings. There are a few other factors that make producing a Search Headroom analysis hard: The (very) long tail matters – previously businesses I’ve worked with have generated as much as 90% of their organic search conversions from keywords with fewer than 100 monthly searches. You will likely need a dataset with thousands or tens of thousands of keywords, potentially more if you are an established business in a large market e.g., online travel. This means that completing the Search Headroom analysis need more advanced analytical skills which your team may not have. Most SEO tools – and there are lots – track a selection of SERPS and produce various metrics like ranking, perhaps even estimated traffic, but this is rarely out in the context of overall category and certainly doesn’t highlight opportunities and risks – so you need to do your own analysis to produce an overall view of your ‘market share’ as well as being able to drill down. To get a complete view of your SEO rankings you may need to combine data from multiple tools. There are many features that can appear on the search results page and influence the click-through rate for any given ranking. The number of paid search ads, shopping ads, maps, and featured answers all play a role – you ended to look carefully at your own data to make sensible estimates for each potential scenario, again adding to the analytical complexity. The recent emergence of generative AI is going to lead to a lot of change in the SERPs over the next couple of years which will only add to this complexity. Deciding how to segment your keywords can be subjective and requires some test & error – how many groupings to create and how to define them. In our experience, we find it helps to remember that not all traffic is equal in terms of its likelihood of converting, so we will create segments that differentiate by level of intent e.g., whether a search includes a high purchase intent word like ‘buy’, ‘compare’ or ‘reviews’. We will also always create a segment for branded terms as these behave very differently with very high click-through rates on your own brand terms. The changing search engine landscape – this will vary by business and geography, but Google has c.85% share globally, and Bing has been gaining share and has reached 8%. For now, if you build your Search Headroom analysis based on Google you will get an accurate enough answer, unless you are focused on one of the handful of markets where Google is not the outright market leader (e.g. China, South Korea). Novel products / services with limited directly relevant search traffic - I’ve worked with businesses at the vanguard of a new category where consumers are not yet searching explicitly for their product or service in high volumes. This means a Search Headroom analysis will typically show the business as having a very low share of some large, adjacent keyword categories – which isn’t especially actionable in the short term. In these cases, we narrow down the keyword focus to the handful of directly relevant keywords but monitor closely for new keywords which will be likely to appear every month. How can I create my own Search Headroom analysis? None of these difficulties should prevent you from undertaking a Search Headroom analysis – the insights you can generate will be truly insightful, helping you to both spot opportunities and manage risks. At Coppett Hill, we've created our own tool to create Search Headroom analyses for our clients, "Searchscope". We've combined our experience of SEO across many different industries and geographies with proprietary AI to rapidly produce actionable insights that can be updated every month. This saves our clients considerable time and effort in understanding this critical area on an ongoing basis. If you’d like to discuss how you can use your SEO rankings to use our Searchscope tool to create a Search Headroom analysis for your business, please Contact Us. All views expressed in this post are the author's own and should not be relied upon for any reason. Clearly.

Among the many ‘data gathering’ approaches that I learned as a strategy consultant, I always found mystery shopping to be one of the most powerful ways of both understanding the proposition of a business and highlighting an issue with a customer journey or competitive challenge. Ask yourself – when was the last time you mystery shopped your own business, or one you are invested in? If I look at the photo library on my phone from my time at CarTrawler, it is full of screenshots of the Google search results, our booking funnel and emails. Some of my best moments as a strategy consultant were from mystery shopping exercises, including: Countless golf buggy rides around caravan holiday parks in 2009-2010 were a key part of understanding how the propositions of different operators compared – claiming to be interested in purchasing a caravan for my retired mother; Getting thrown out of Chiswick Sainsburys in my first year at PwC for taking photos of the merchandising of the nappy aisle; Visiting 15 pubs in the Channel Islands in one day (which turned out to be a Champions League day making the last few visits particularly tricky); Getting questioned by security at a garden centre – admittedly I can appreciate that it was a bit weird that three 20-something men were walking round taking pictures on a weekday afternoon; and Spending two weeks visiting men’s formalwear shops in Lagos, Nigeria while working with a British brand. Figure 1 - some of my many mystery shopping experiences as a consultant Why is mystery shopping so effective? Businesses tend to work in vertical silos across the journey, whereas customers move through ‘horizontally’. When one aspect of the journey is designed or updated; there is no guarantee that it will fit with the whole. Some teams responsible for part of the customer journey may be incredibly customer-aware, others may be more concerned about improving their own team’s operational efficiency. It is just plain difficult to really put yourself in your prospect or customer’s shoes without going through the same journey as they do. Mystery shopping is a great way of doing this. I’ve worked with a law firm who prided themselves on incredible client service, but were seeing disappointing Net Promoter scores (NPS) . When they dug into the feedback, they found that their accounts team were issuing often incorrect invoices and following up aggressively with clients, eroding the goodwill that the firm has built. This part of the customer journey was effectively ‘hidden’ from the lawyers and senior management. How to mystery shop your own business Think of this like role play – imagine the situation of a typical customer for your business and try to replicate it. This is the time for some method acting, so be prepared to go full Day-Lewis to best match the real customer experience. When they might decide to start looking for the product/service you offer, and how might they try to find a provider like you? Are they searching online, talking to a trusted advisor, looking at reviews or asking their network? You could even get as specific as when in the day/week they are doing it, and on which device, and from where. Then consider what a customer’s needs and expectations are. Do they want a fast, low friction purchase journey? Or will most of them need advice and the opportunity to ask questions? Is this a purchase that they will be making at a time of personal/corporate distress, or as an indulgence? Will they be comparing you against a handful of close competitors or only be considering your product/service? Once you are ‘in character’ you can start the mystery shopping process. You might want to have a pseudonym and non-identifiable email address ready, if your colleagues would recognise your name on a list of prospects! Or you could ask a family member or close friend to do it for you – their feedback may be brutal but it isn’t tempered by having been told by your CTO just how hard it would be to change those landing pages or create an online demo. The exact nature of your mystery shop will vary based on the product/service offered by your business – you might be sat behind your desk, out on the high street or on the phone (or all the above). There are a few items on my standard mystery shopping checklist which might help you: At each stage, capture what you experienced, whether this met your expectations, and how you felt. Take notes, photos, screenshots, make a few videos, and time things (e.g. how long to respond to your enquiry) How well does your messaging (across all touchpoints) describe what a customer is looking for or the problem they have? How clear and compelling are the calls to action – did you feel like it was obvious what you should do next? Go through any online process that your business operates – e.g. a full purchase journey, content downloads, or 'contact us' form submissions. Where are the points of friction? How many steps do you have to go through? What jars with you, for example input validation warnings before you’ve even started typing! At what point(s) did you want to give up? If in your typical customer journey, they might go and look for online reviews or discount codes – make sure to do that as well. Try each mode of contact – contact form, webchat, phone numbers, messaging. Assess the speed of response and the nature of it. Ask a realistic but detailed question and see what kind of response you get. Ask for a demo or call with keenness – and see how quickly it is set up. Could you hypothetically have been speaking to a competitor in that time? If your journey involves engaging with a salesperson and it is possible for you to do this – what did you make of their materials, clarity of communication, understanding of your needs as an (imaginary) customer, and how is price communicated? What supporting comms do you get e.g. emails, content being shared. This is one of those times when you should always subscribe to the mailing list. If your business sells B2B, you could try and present as a poorly fitting customer (e.g. too big or too small) – do your sales team say no? What to do with your mystery shopping findings To summarise your findings, I’d suggest coming up with some relevant criteria and scoring your experience out of five on each. Create a highlight and lowlights list. Try to specifically call out the points at which you might have walked away. This might be more impactful if you are able to make a comparison to a couple of competitors who you’ve also mystery shopped, in particular if that would be the typical customer journey. Then to share with your team, consider the feedback you have for your teams on both (a) having the right process/journey and (b) following the process that’s in place. Understand that aspects of your experience might be exceptional/unusual so don’t instantly extrapolate - mystery shopping isn't the only valid way of understanding the effectiveness of the customer journey and will always be somewhat subjective. But ask the question of how common such an experience might be and seek data to support this. If you are a senior leader, be wary of how your view may be treated. Your team will no doubt know many (but probably not all) of the issues & opportunities that you identify, so communicate your findings accordingly. You also don’t want them to place too much weight on your input vs other research & data gathering activities - don’t be a HiPPO (the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion). And a last piece of advice – don’t use your real address or phone number. My mum still receives brochures from those caravan parks 15 years on and has never forgiven me! If you’d like to discuss how you can better understand and improve your customer journey, please Contact Us. All views expressed in this post are the author's own and should not be relied upon for any reason. Clearly.

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 year plus a bit more”. Imagine that instead of simply making tweaks from last year’s budget, you had a blank sheet of paper to design a set of activities and costs with the goal of maximising profit growth over a 3-5 year time horizon – a form of ‘zero-based budgeting’. When I took on responsibility for the consumer brands at CarTrawler, I had to answer this question so that I could build a strategy and budget at a time where my knowledge of each marketing channel was fairly limited, so I approached it from economic ‘first principles’. A recent conversation with a value creation leader at a mid-market private equity fund prompted me to try to set out my thinking and share it. In trying to answer the question of “how much to spend on marketing” through an economic lens, what we are really talking about is treating the process of acquiring customers as a demand & supply problem. In this problem, ‘supply’ means the number of customers that we can acquire at any given average Cost Per Acquisition (CPA) and ‘demand’ means the average CPA that a business is willing to pay for a given number of customers to meet its goal for profitable growth. I’m going to describe each of these components in turn, talking through the theory then coming back to the practical application of this way of thinking. The ‘supply’ of new customers & problem of diminishing returns A very common issue in business plans that I see when a business is seeking private equity investment is forecast year-on-year growth in the number of new customers alongside a reduction in CPA. There may be one-off factors that may explain this, but on the whole, if you want to acquire more customers you should expect your CPA to increase. The reason for this is simple – to add more customers you will have to start additional marketing activities which are likely to be less efficient and/or more costly than your existing activities (assuming some level of optimisation has happened over time to lead you to these existing activities). A good parallel to this is the oil cost curve – which plots different sources of oil against their ‘breakeven price’, i.e. the $ per barrel at which it makes sense to ‘activate’ these supply sources. When oil is >$100 per barrel almost all supply sources become economically viable, whilst when <$50 per barrel a range of sources become too costly to extract for the return you will achieve. Figure 1 - Oil Cost Curve, Goldman Sachs Research, “Top Projects 2022”, April 19, 2022) In marketing terms you could think about this as starting with word of mouth as your ‘cheapest’ source of new customers on the left side of the curve, moving through organic search, partnerships, through to paid search, then paid social and perhaps with sports sponsorship as the most ‘expensive’ on the right hand side. I would recommend thinking about what this supply curve looks like for your business – being sure to factor in the full cost per acquisition, including things such as agency & technology costs as well as personnel costs & sales commissions. It can help you to understand whether you are really maximising the potential of your most effective marketing channels before moving ‘up the supply curve’ to more expensive activities. For example – almost every marketing team is leaving ‘money on the table’ with a limited focus on customer advocacy. Of course in real life, the confidence you could have in such a curve would rely on the level of marketing attribution you had in place to allocate new customers fairly between the marketing channels that originated them. It would also be hard to account for new marketing activity where you don’t yet have the data to really understand the true cost per acquisition. It is important to note that we are thinking here in terms of average cost per acquisition. Such an average will almost certainly include some areas of marketing activity which have a very high, uneconomic cost per acquisition that you could focus on to find efficiencies - a great example of the Flaw of Averages in marketing. For some businesses, this curve will also look unusual, for example it might have a finite end – beyond a certain point you can’t acquire any more customers at any ‘price’ (cost per acquisition), because there aren’t any more in the market; or there might be step functions where beyond a certain volume of customers, CPA increases very significantly. How much to spend on marketing - the ‘demand/supply equilibrium’ for marketing I’ve asked many management teams: ‘if you could buy customers off the shelf at Tesco, what would you be prepared to pay for them’ – in other words, the maximum CPA you would pay. This is a difficult question to answer, but we can use our demand-supply thinking here to attempt it. If you’ve already got an understanding of your ‘customer supply curve’, then there are two factors to consider: Your expected customer lifetime value over a time horizon that makes sense for your business & how to overlay this on your supply curve to understand the profit maximising average CPA; and Other constraints for your business, primarily the maximum cash that you are able to temporarily invest in customer acquisition, for example as customers may be loss making for an initial period before they ‘pay back’ the cost of acquisition (this isn’t the same as your marketing budget but rather in finance terms the working capital required to fund marketing activities). Once you have these inputs, you can work out the cost per acquisition you should target in order to profit maximise over your chosen time horizon. For example, let’s assume that customers generate on average £800 contribution before acquisition costs in year 1, and a total contribution before marketing costs over five years - their lifetime value - of £2,500. We can apply this lifetime value of £2,500 to each point on the customer supply curve, to work out how much overall profit we would make: Lifetime Value of Customer Cohort = (LTV per customer – average cost per acquisition) * Number of customers. When we plot this curve on the chart, we identify that the ‘profit maximising’ cost per acquisition is c.£1,650, which will bring us 7,100 customers. At this level, we will spend £11.6m on marketing and an annual cohort of customers will make £6.2m of profit after marketing spend over the five-year time horizon. Targeting a higher average cost per acquisition will lead to more customers but less profit per customer, and less profit for the cohort overall effectively meaning that each extra customer acquired beyond this point is loss-making. Now, clearly if average CPA is £1,650 but year 1 contribution is £800, these customers are going to be 'loss making' at first - and not every business would be willing or able to support this. Let’s assume that you (and your CFO!) are willing to temporarily invest up to £2,000,000 cash (working capital) in customer acquisition at any point in time. We can this constraint into a maximum number of customers at each level of cost per acquisition and plot it on our chart: Number of customers = Cash available/(Year 1 customer lifetime value – average cost per acquisition) The point at which the 'Customer demand curve' line that we've added crosses your customer supply curve reflects the average cost per acquisition you should target, given the cash constraint. At levels of cost per acquistion below Year 1 contribution of £800, you can see that the line doesn't appear on the chart as you aren't constrained by working capital at these levels in this scenario. In this *highly illustrative* scenario, you would only be able to afford an average cost per acquisition of £1,270, hence your cash constraint would limit your marketing spend rather than marginal customer profitability becoming negative. In this simple example we are looking at customer ‘breakeven’ over a full year, in practice you might think about this at a monthly level or an even shorter timeframe – but the takeaway is that often from a ‘demand’ perspective, it is often (but not always) the appetite of a business to invest in temporarily loss-making customers that will set a ceiling on the number of customers you are willing to acquire - in particular in business models with subscriptions or other types of recurring/reoccuring revenue. In reality, other constraints will also come into play, such as the operational capacity of your business to service any given volume of customers, or perhaps that your input assumptions around unit economics will change because beyond a certain point you would end up acquiring less attractive customers. How to put the theory into practice I’ve found that this way of thinking about customer acquisition is a helpful way to evaluate marketing strategy and make decisions, rather than something to be used as a precise ‘model’. As with much economic theory, the real world doesn’t always behave, input data will always be imperfect and relationships will change over time. But if you have a clear enough starting point of your current marketing effectiveness and customer lifetime value, you can apply this approach in a few areas, for example: Use the concept of the customer supply curve to identify and prioritise improvements to your customer acquisition activities, for example improvements to your conversion rate, demand efficiency eg PPC quality score, or renegotiating partnership terms; Calculating the overall impact of improvements to customer lifetime value and the resultant change in your maximum cost per acquisition, for example when considering investments that could improve lifetime value; Answering my favourite question for marketing leaders of ‘where would you spend your next [£1m]?’ by identifying whether simply having a greater willingness to invest in working capital for customer acquisition could allow you to increase the number of customers you acquire profitably; and Use this approach to zoom in on a specific channel, for example we’ve recently used this approach with a client to deep-dive into non-brand PPC. This helped us to highlight that their average cost per acquisition was well above the profit-maximising level, and a lower cost per acquisition / higher ROI could significantly increase business profitability. If you’d like to discuss how you can accelerate customer acquisition in your business, please Contact Us. All views expressed in this post are the author's own and should not be relied upon for any reason. Clearly.

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 our professional lives. Perhaps you’ve even written one for a personal choice – like Charles Darwin, who in 1838 created a list of the pros and cons of marriage, concluding in the end that the pros outweighed such disadvantages as having less money for books or perhaps not being able to live in London. Sometimes however, we need to frame a more complicated set of choices or other data, and one dimension is not sufficient. That is where the consultant’s favourite decision-making tool comes in, the matrix, or four box grid. Years of conditioning as a strategy consultant mean that I get (too much?) satisfaction from untangling a problem onto the skeleton of a matrix or grid, but for many people it represents a simple and elegant approach to communicating something complex. The four-box grid (or in consultant shorthand, the 2x2 grid) can be applied in many different situations. For example, I’ve recently covered the Important vs Urgent matrix, or Eisenhower matrix, that I use to separate out those tasks which are important but not urgent in a business context. I also frequently use a 2x2 grid to compare strategic initiatives, perhaps in terms of impact and effort. You can also sometimes add a third dimension where the size of ‘bubble’ or shape on the grid is used to denote the size of an opportunity (e.g., profit potential) or another quantitative variable. Let’s talk about three of the most well-known four-box examples that you can use in your own decision making. What is an Ansoff Matrix? The Ansoff Matrix, also known as the Product/Market Expansion Grid, is a strategic management tool used to visualise and evaluate potential growth strategies for a business. Developed by management theorist H. Igor Ansoff in 1957, it presents four growth options based on the new dimensions of (i) products (new and existing) and (ii) markets, or customers (new and existing): Market Penetration: This focuses on selling existing products in existing markets. The aim is to increase market share, achieved through strategies like pricing, promotions, or increased distribution/marketing activity. Product Development: Here, companies introduce new products to existing markets. This involves innovation, research and development, and often requires understanding customer needs to introduce products they'll adopt. Market Development: This entails selling existing products in new markets. Strategies can include entering new geographic territories, targeting new customer segments, or using different sales channels. Diversification: normally the riskiest strategy, diversification involves selling new products in new markets. This can be related (a similar field or technology) or unrelated (in effect a completely new business venture) to your core business. I find this matrix particularly useful when a business is considering focusing on customer acquisition vs driving cross-sell and up-sell to existing customers. In general, I’ve found it to be a more straightforward route to growth for mid-sized companies to focus on acquiring more customers (in existing markets or new markets) rather than trying to diversify their product offering and cross-sell. What is a Boston matrix? The Boston Matrix, also known as the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) Matrix, is a strategic tool used by companies to evaluate their product portfolios. Developed in the 1970s by the Boston Consulting Group, it categorises products based on the two dimensions of (i) their market growth rate and (ii) their market share relative to competitors. This matrix divides products (think business units or brands, or even countries) into four categories: Stars: These are high-growth, high-market-share products, and are leaders in expanding markets. They often generate more cash than they consume in their routine operations but may also require substantial investment to maintain their position over time as the market evolves. Cash Cows: Products in mature markets with high market share but low growth. They generate more cash than is reinvested, providing funds for other parts of the business. But beware - these businesses are ripe for disruption as competitors will be tempted into the market Question Marks (or Problem Children): These have low market share in high-growth markets. They often consume more cash than they generate, and their future is often uncertain. Strategic decisions must be made about whether to invest in them or divest. Dogs: Low market share in low-growth markets. They may generate enough cash to be self-sustaining but are generally considered for divestment. The Boston Matrix aids companies in allocating resources among products and deciding where to invest, maintain, or divest. What about a SWOT analysis? Possibly the most used four-box grid, a SWOT analysis is a strategic planning tool used to evaluate an organisation's Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Strengths and Weaknesses are internal factors, reflecting a company's resources, capabilities, and internal processes. Opportunities and Threats, on the other hand, are external factors, emerging from the environment, competitors, or market trends. This might be controversial, but I see very limited value in a SWOT analysis vs a simpler ‘Opportunities and Risks’ analysis, such as Darwin’s list. It is hard to create a SWOT analysis without some level of duplication between Strengths/Opportunities and Weaknesses/Threats – there is an inherent relationship between internal and external factors. For me, SWOT analyses are up there with pie charts as on balance hindering understanding and communication rather than helping. When to use a matrix or four-box grid? If you’ve not had occasion to use a matrix or four-box grid to date, then hopefully you’ve got a sense of how this simple tool can help you to frame a decision or clearly communicate a complex dataset, for example when you are: Writing a 100-day plan (axes: impact vs effort) Creating your business plan (axes: impact vs effort) Creating your ideal client profile (axes: likelihood, likeability) Comparing marketing channels (axes: ROI, headroom) Evaluating your customer base for white space (axes: share of wallet, growth potential) You don’t have to be a consultant to use it, and I’d recommend giving it a go! If you’d like to discuss how you can make strategic decisions in your business, please Contact Us. All views expressed in this post are the author's own and should not be relied upon for any reason. Clearly.

I’m fascinated by nominative determinism – the notion that our names can influence our professions or personalities. Usain Bolt, William Wordsworth, Tom Kitchin – to what extent was their path in life even slightly, subconsciously influenced by their name? Is it possible to invert the historical tradition of a a family surname originating from the profession of the bearer (as any Archer, Fletcher, or Mason could testify)? The ‘Feedback’ column in New Scientist magazine coined the phrase 'nominative determinism' in 1994 and ran a regular column on the subject for a number of years. An academic paper was published in 2002 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology entitled 'Why Susie Sells Seashells by the Seashore: Implicit Egotism and Major Life Decisions'. The authors found that 'people prefer things that are connected to the self (for example, the letters in one's name)', and are hence disproportionately likely to 'choose careers whose labels resemble their names (for example, people named Dennis or Denise are over-represented among dentists).' I think that this concept extends into how we choose names in business – for teams, roles, processes, even meetings. The name we chose can have some impact on the outcomes that can be achieved if it has even a modest framing effect on the participants. Those in the UK will be familiar with the ‘Ronseal effect’ – based on the advertising slogan that the best-selling wood stain ‘does exactly what it says on the tin’. What is customer acquisition? Customer acquisition is the combination of activities that a business uses to attract and convert new customers. It can include the work of a marketing function, a sales team, and perhaps even elements of product and operations. It is influenced by the strategic choices made by the board and management team. It also includes the brand and reputation of a business, and the extent to which current customers are wiling to act as advocates and recommend it. All these teams, individuals and other factors can influence the number of new customers that a business wins over a given period. I believe that using the term ‘customer acquisition’ is a powerful way to make this point and show how counter-productive an organisation’s structure can sometimes be, for example, the myriad ways I’ve seen marketing and sales teams fail to collaborate (including in one case barely being on speaking terms). I prefer to other terms such as 'Go-To-Market' as I think it more readily meets the Ronseal test. Given its multi-faceted nature, to accelerate customer acquisition, we have to consider both the strategic choices that a business can make, as well as how these translate into day-to-day operations – the people, processes, technology and data - which come together to attract and convert customers. Businesses that can successfully join the dots have the opportunity to create competitive advantage from their customer acquisition efforts. This is the reason that I describe the work that we do at Coppett Hill as ‘accelerating customer acquisition’. Most of our work involves helping our clients to improve their marketing and sales efforts, to support future growth and improve efficiency. We could describe our services as ‘strategic marketing & sales consulting’ – but we could provide ‘strategic marketing & sales consulting’ and not help our clients to win a single extra customer. So we use the name that best describes what Management teams are looking for and what we aim to achieve – it’s all in the name. How could you use the ‘power of a name’ in your business? Renaming your weekly meeting to encourage action-orientation? Or even – changing the name of your marketing function to ‘customer acquisition’. If you’d like to discuss how you can accelerate Customer Acquisition, please Contact Us. All views expressed in this post are the author's own and should not be relied upon for any reason. Clearly.

'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 more than any other, it was Mark de Rond’s very first ‘Introduction to Strategy’ at the Judge Business School. He posed the question ‘What is Strategy?’ to the assembled students, and received a few volunteered answers, which were all in the right postcode but didn’t quite seem to nail it. He then put a cartoon on the screen, an excerpt from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland. In the picture, Alice is attempting to find her way home when she is met by the magical Cheshire Cat, and asks him ‘Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?’, to which the Cheshire Cat answers, ‘That depends a good deal on where you want to get to’. Professor de Rond argued that at its essence, business strategy is the answer to these two questions: where are you trying to get to, and how are you going to get there. This definition has stayed with me, and has shaped every strategy consulting project, strategic review, and investment case I’ve worked on since. I am drawn to its simplicity and obvious common-sense qualities. In a sea of buzzwords and stilted AI-generated content, this short passage from Lewis Carroll could well be one of the best (unintentional) pieces of business writing. The question ‘what is strategy?’ is one that is worth revisiting if your business is about to start a business planning process, or if you are developing a value creation plan. A strategy is not the set of detailed initiatives you will no doubt come up with, nor is it a financial model with its underlying assumptions. It is a set of choices, revisited periodically, that should shape every aspect of how a business operates and how it is structured. Where to play and how to win? I think Alice’s question maps directly onto my favourite language for framing strategy development - ‘where to play and how to win’. This originates from the work of Michael Porter on the theory of Competitive Strategy – that to succeed a business must deliberately chose a different set of activities (to competitors) to deliver a unique mix of value to customers. Using this approach to setting business strategy entails making two types of choices: The proposition of a business – such as the markets and customers a business will serve, the products & services it will provide, how it will charge for these services, and how it will grow (for example undertaking M&A and/or focusing on organic growth); and The advantages a business has or can build vs its competitors that will allow it to ‘win’ – such as unique intellectual property, access to the best talent, sourcing advantages, a superior brand or reputation, and operational excellence. Of course - these choices are not made in isolation; you should logically choose to play where you have at least some chance of ‘winning’. To quote Michael Porter, ‘the essence of strategy is choosing what not to do’. This is a helpful way to ensure a ‘tight’ definition of the market you are trying to serve, which in turn can lead to real clarity on your sources of competitive advantage. Most of world’s largest companies today started out just trying to serve one market where they built a clear competitive advantage (Amazon > books, Google > search, Microsoft > PC operating system). There are some common traps to avoid with this approach to strategy as well. There are many examples where businesses have assumed that the advantages that allowed to win in their existing markets would be the same in a new market, most commonly when expanding into a new geography for example Tesco in US, BestBuy in the UK, or Starbucks in Australia. What does it mean to ‘win’ in strategy? The definition of ‘winning’ will be different for each business and is dependent on the timeframe we are considering. Some common factors that I think define ‘winning': Gaining market share / growing faster than market – the clearest sign that a business has some form of competitive advantage. Top quartile profitability among a set of relevant competitors – to prove that a business is not ‘buying’ market share growth and that growth is sustainable. Clear path for future growth – current success is not just a ‘flash in the pan’. Meeting the needs of different groups of stakeholders: shareholders, customers, employees, community. If you can demonstrate success in these areas, then it is safe to say you are probably ‘winning’ and that any investors will be happy! So if you are about to start a strategic planning process, develop a value creation plan or start a strategy consulting project – take a lead from Alice in Wonderland and ask 'would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here'. If you’d like to discuss how you can create a strategic plan for your business, please Contact Me. All views expressed in this post are the author's own and should not be relied upon for any reason. Clearly.

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 save you time and a few long evenings, and hopefully help you to create a constructive conversation with your board. Demand indicators – think of these as your ‘inputs’: e.g., share of traffic in organic/paid search (ideally on more than just your Top 10 search terms); partner introductions / referrals; content views. Funnel conversion metrics and change over time: this could be vs last year in a seasonal business or last month / quarter otherwise. You might not own all the conversion steps, but you are best placed to show the end-to-end journey. If you have a longer sales cycle – show your pipeline by segment (e.g., customer or product type), stage and change from last month. I’m always wary about using a weighted pipeline unless the %s are based on robust historical data, so as a minimum show both weighted and unweighted values. Overlay your target customer segment(s) / Ideal Client Profile(s) on your pipeline / won customers – to show whether you are winning where we want to be. ROI analysis of your marketing spend based on proper attribution – potentially on single transaction/ contract value and/or estimated lifetime value. Include a breakdown by channel to avoid the Flaw of Averages! Depending on scope of your marketing team – include a focus on existing customer performance. This could potentially include lifecycle marketing, a separate pipeline and funnel for cross-sell and up-sell, together with gross and net retention metrics. Update on competitive positioning and relative performance – such as share of traffic, financial metrics where publicly disclosed, presence of direct competition in proposals for B2B, or any significant news from competitors. This is all about giving context on your performance and demonstrating that you are aware of what is going on in the wider market. Summarise customer feedback – including public reviews, and with a comparison to competitors where possible. Show the new/change rather than just the total or average which will move slowly. The gold standard is your own measurement of customer NPS (or a similar measure of customer advocacy) and a summary of the key issues for detractors with your plan to address them. In my experience, marketers are best placed to champion customer views, as opposed to leaving this for the operations section of your board back. Distil your main marketing activities into 3-5 initiatives and explain what you are doing, what outputs you expect, and how these translate into value creation (growth and/or improved margins) and reduce risk. For example – building a new suite of landing pages, thought leadership development, appointing a new agency, launching new marketing channel, developing an app. Provide a view on status and delivery timelines, with a clear summary of what the board should expect to see delivered ‘by next month’. This is last in my list, but could well be first in your presentation – a summary of key messages. You could write this as a list of things that are working vs need improvement, a summary by market, by channel or even just a summary of things that are on your mind. But think of this as your opportunity to shape the conversation you want to have with the board, as well as to demonstrate that you know what will be on their minds. Could these topics help to improve the quality your board conversations about marketing? Of course – please treat this list of topics as a starting point, you will clearly want to tailor this to your business model, the remit of your marketing function, and to evolve it over time. It might be that you don’t have all of the data available that I describe here – in particular if you are new to the business. It is okay to have a placeholder at first, or to describe that you are working on creating improved KPIs (and certainly better than just excluding a topic from your update). In terms of length, it is entirely credible to have just one page on each of the above topics, so 10 slides. You might have a couple of additional pages ad-hoc if you are sharing some deep-dive analysis, but the emphasis should be on clarity of communication. I thought it would also be helpful to offer some general tips to keep in mind when preparing your update: If you include an KPI, include a comparison and ideally a target. Numbers without context can be confusing and frustrating for those who aren’t in your business every day. Minimise jargon – talk about website visits rather than sessions, display ads rather than programmatic. Focus on the money – conversions, revenue, margins, spend and ROI. Use top of funnel metrics sparingly (e.g., ‘impressions’ or ‘eyeballs’). Avoid spin – you should give equal weight to what is ‘working’ and ‘needs improvement’. Your investors should understand that not everything will work first time and are instead looking to see that you test and learn at pace. If something ‘needs improvement’, be clear on your plan to get it back on track. Avoid historical description of activities and instead give a forward view of initiatives. Make sure your CFO is comfortable with how you are using financials – if an investor sees a discrepancy in the numbers this will be a distraction. Step back and think about your key messages. Run it through with a board member beforehand e.g., the Chairperson. Ask for feedback after your presentation. If asked for additional analysis, avoid them becoming regular slide unless necessary - otherwise your 10 slides will quickly become 20+ (I speak from experience!) Every company and board will be different, with established ways of working and preferences – so make sure to seek guidance from your CEO, chair and potentially investor ahead of preparing your board update. I hope that the above structure will help you to go into your first board meeting feeling prepared and demonstrating that you’ve tried to put yourselves in the shoes of your board colleagues and anticipate what they are seeking to understand. Have a try and let me know what you think, I’d love to hear your feedback. If you’d like to discuss how you can understand and improve marketing performance for a private equity-backed business, please Contact Me. All views expressed in this post are the author's own and should not be relied upon for any reason. Clearly.