Paul Hewerdine

According to the folk at Harvard Business Review, it costs up to seven times as much to find a new customer, than to get more business from an existing one.   It’s no surprise then, where once b2b organizations were going all out to acquire new customers, there’s a growing…

Sit down. Brace yourself. According to a recent DemandGen report, 9 out of 10 business buyers say that when they’re ready to buy, they’ll find you. Now ask yourself, in all honesty, will they?   The fact is the b2b buy cycle is changing fundamentally – and vendors are on the back foot. The…

Ideas to improve your customer marketing   We spot a hot new prospect across the crowded marketplace. We flatter them with niceties and promise them the world. We finally convince them, we’re a match made in heaven. And then, as soon as they’ve thrown caution to the wind and committed to us, we’ve…

It was way, way back in 1993 that Don Peppers and Martha Rogers published ‘The One-to-One Future’. For marketing practitioners everywhere, it was (and arguably still is) essential reading – introducing concepts such as ‘mass customisation’ and encouraging us to manage customers rather than products or services. We were promised…

Last year Accenture conducted an extensive survey into the strategic priorities of senior marketers globally. Whilst the results were hardly revelatory, there was a remarkable consensus of opinion with 81% of executives citing ‘operating more efficiently’ as their most important goal. Faced with budgetary pressures, headcount issues, demands to demonstrate greater ROI…

Your marketing strategy is watertight. Your go-to-market plans are honed to precision.  Even your budget (for once) is to die for. And then horror of horrors your campaign bombs. ROI: Negligible. Embarrassment factor: High. Marketing’s reputation: Well and truly tarnished. The fact is, if your value proposition isn’t rock solid…

The pitch process: it separates the wheat from the chaff; the winners from the also rans; the successful from the just plain shambolic. It’s both the bane and the boon of agency life - and undoubtedly no walk in the park for our friends on client-side. As David Kean comments…