Articles
I write articles about marketing, go to market strategy, and sales execution.
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I’ve written recently about sales incentives, sales excellence, RevOps and go-to-market strategy. They might seem like different topics, but they all come back to the same question: what separates consistently high-performing commercial organisations from the rest? One answer sits underneath almost every commercial metric leaders care about. Pipeline quality. Forecast accuracy. Win rates. Sales productivity.…
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Few topics divide opinion in B2B marketing quite like events and tradeshows. Mention exhibitions, conferences, customer events, or hospitality and you’ll usually get one of two reactions: some people absolutely swear by them, others see them as expensive distractions that consume budget, time and resource for questionable returns. I’m usually somewhere in the middle. Events…
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When sales performance falls short, or growth stagnates, one of the first things leadership teams often consider is changing the sales incentive plan. The logic might seem sound: if our sales teams aren’t delivering the right results, surely changing how they’re rewarded will change their behaviour, right? Sometimes it does. More often, though, digging into…
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As agentic AI moves from experimentation to implementation, the question facing most B2B marketing leaders isn’t whether to adopt agentic workflows, but where to apply them first for the greatest commercial impact. In my recent articles, I explored why many organisations are often solving the wrong AI problem by focusing solely on efficiency, and what…
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There’s a sentence that gets said in boardrooms, sales meetings and quarterly reviews all the time: “The team hit plan.” Great! Targets matter. Revenue matters. Nobody builds a serious commercial organisation by pretending the number is optional. But ‘hitting plan’ is not the same as ‘sales excellence’. A rep can hit target because one large…
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For all the excitement around agentic AI, most discussions still focus on what the technology can do, rather than where it’ll create the most value. That’s an important difference. Some business functions are dominated by creativity, ambiguity and judgement. Others are built around coordination, process and operational discipline. AI will undoubtedly influence both, but it’s…
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The traditional executive model is starting to fracture. For decades, businesses built their leadership teams around permanence: full-time executives, fixed structures, long-term organisational hierarchy. But increasingly, companies are moving toward a more flexible model, accessing specialist expertise only when and where they need it – they’re harnessing so-called ‘fractional’ executives (note: it’s called ‘fractional’ because…
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The AI era is now here, and marketing teams are facing into the biggest wave of change our discipline has ever needed to ride. For the past two decades, scaling ‘marketing output’ almost certainly meant scaling marketing headcount, supporting more channels, more content, more events, more campaigns, more geographies. That model is now changing as…
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There’s no shortage of noise about AI in marketing. Every week brings a new tool, a new use case, a new promise. Teams generate content in seconds. Agencies showcase AI-produced campaigns. Vendors promise greater productivity, lower costs and leaner teams. For many organisations, the direction of travel feels obvious: adopt AI, improve productivity, reduce cost.…
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Note: This article was also published on The Engine Room’s blog, here. The Engine Room is a strategic brand and design agency mixing design thinking and business thinking to simplify complex propositions into world-class brands. And they’re awesome. Don’t just take my word for it – visit their site. Client-side marketing teams are under pressure.…
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For many businesses, the idea of a Fractional CMO is appealing. The logic is straightforward: senior marketing leadership, lower cost, faster impact, greater flexibility. I’ve outlined seven practical reasons businesses consider the model in a separate piece. But those benefits only really start to make sense when you understand the work itself. So, what type…
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For many businesses, the need for stronger marketing leadership arrives well before the appetite to hire a full-time CMO. Marketing activity increases. Expectations rise. Growth targets sharpen. But the structure behind it all – strategy, prioritisation, accountability – doesn’t always evolve at the same pace. At that point, hiring a permanent CMO (Chief Marketing Officer)…
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Like marketing, sales is full of terms that are often used loosely, inconsistently, or with different meanings across teams. This creates misunderstanding, but also friction, weak qualification, and unreliable decision‑making. I previously published a separate B2B marketing glossary that sets out the definitions I use with marketing teams. This glossary focuses on B2B sales terminology…
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Marketing is full of buzzwords and acronyms, usually not very well-defined. ‘Go-to-market’ (GTM) is certainly one of those terms – it seemed to creep into business language a few years ago, and many companies now use it, but few define it clearly. Ask five sales and marketing professionals what GTM means, and you’ll get five…
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“So, tell me about your marketing strategy?” Never has there been a more revealing question for a marketer – or a senior commercial leader, for that matter. It’s a question I now love to ask. It gives you a fast sense of where an organisation really is on its go‑to‑market journey. It helps assess the…