B J REES

Category: Core articles

  • Everything So Far

    Everything So Far

    All of my PowerPoints so far. Most of what I know about marketing up to this point!

  • Updated B2B Marketing Guide

    Updated B2B Marketing Guide

  • The Marketing Flywheel

    The Marketing Flywheel

    New Year, new marketing plans. Hopefully by now you’ve kicked off various activities and you’re waiting to see how those early campaigns are working out. The other thing I see in marketing departments at this time though is burnout. Everyone is trying to do everything either because there’s no real strategy there (“let’s throw everything…

  • The marketing flywheel – an alternative to the marketing funnel

    The marketing flywheel – an alternative to the marketing funnel

    A lot has already been written about how the old marketing funnel model is no longer as relevant in modern B2B organisations as it used to be, and how a flywheel model is more appropriate for how customers really buy (as an old colleague said to me “The person who invented the marketing funnel should…

  • How to make decisions

    How to make decisions

    There’s a myth that as you get more senior, you get to make more autonomous decisions about what happens in your business – what strategies to pursue, tools to buy, markets to go after and so on. “I’m the Head of Marketing, so surely I decide all the marketing stuff!?” In fact it’s the opposite…

  • Beware roles that advertise long hours

    Beware roles that advertise long hours

    A friend is looking for a new role at the moment. He’s lucky enough to be able to pick and choose what he goes for, so I asked “What really attracts you to a job? What puts you off?”. It’s always interesting to know what people are looking for, how to genuinely attract great candidates…

  • Why ROI calculators aren’t enough

    Why ROI calculators aren’t enough

    ROI calculators are a pretty common tool amongst B2B marketers. On the face of it, the logic is simple – show a calculation of how the time saved from subscribing to your product equates to money and how that money is less than the annual subscription cost charged. Then surely the sale should be in…

  • Scaling from SMBs to the Enterprise – a 10-Point Plan

    Scaling from SMBs to the Enterprise – a 10-Point Plan

    I’ve had this conversation about 6 times in the last year – how can you scale from selling to small businesses (SMBs), up to Enterprise organisations? What are the marketing challenges? What’s necessary, what’s nice-to-have, and what’s a red herring? This is something we’ve done incredibly well at Redgate over the last five years (from…

  • How We Grew Marketing Sourced Pipeline by 20% in One Quarter

    How We Grew Marketing Sourced Pipeline by 20% in One Quarter

    We’re about to go into our quarterly review period at Redgate. We don’t just run QBRs, we also run reviews across all parts of the business. These are a chance to examine the last three months – what worked? What’s going well? What’s not going well and needs fixing? All part of a strong agile…

  • How Collaboration Can Grow Revenue

    How Collaboration Can Grow Revenue

    Why do Marketing and Sales departments need to collaborate? Sure, it’s nice, but beyond people getting on better together, how can it really impact the numbers, the outcomes for the business? We’ve just spent a month at Redgate improving the collaboration between the two departments and we can see the direct and measurable impact on…

  • Working from Home

    Working from Home

    Lots of people have written about the “New world of remote working” (so much so, that that phrase has become a cliche in the space of six months). But I think it’s still an interesting topic, because I have a hunch the changes we’ve seen in 2020 will become permanent, even as we start to…

  • How to Present to an Exec or Board

    How to Present to an Exec or Board

    For better or worse I find a lot of my tips and tricks for working in a software company from fiction books and films. I learnt most of what I know about how to present to senior folk (an Exec team or a Board even) from a two-minute scene in David Mamet’s film “The Spanish…

  • Join a Scaleup to Scale Your Career

    Join a Scaleup to Scale Your Career

    It’s hard getting ahead in Marketing. It’s a discipline changing every year (certainly true of 2020), it covers an enormous breadth of disciplines which need a great variety of skills and it’s notoriously difficult to prove the impact of your work. So what can you do to give yourself the best chance of success? Of…

  • Under-promise, Over-deliver for product-led growth

    Under-promise, Over-deliver for product-led growth

    There’s a lot written about the advantages of product-led growth (PLG), how it keeps marketing and sales costs down, how customers prefer it and so on. All good, but I struggled to find much on the actual strategies to use – how do you do it? There are obvious things like having a product with amazing product-market…

  • External Marketing during COVID-19

    External Marketing during COVID-19

    Everyone’s got marketing advice about what to do in the current crisis, haven’t they? As though it’s easy and obvious what you should be doing in this “first-in-a-lifetime” situation we find ourselves in?! I don’t think it’s easy and obvious at all. But if you work in marketing, now is the time to earn your…

  • There are two times when you don’t need to worry about Customer Success. And neither apply to you

    There are two times when you don’t need to worry about Customer Success. And neither apply to you

    Another thought exercise. I was trying to think of scenarios where Customer Success – i.e. genuinely worrying about whether your customers were using and getting value from your offering – wasn’t going to be a priority for a business in 2019. I could only think of two. But I think even these are slightly fatuous, I’d be…

  • Focus on Marketing Effectiveness to Scale Up

    Focus on Marketing Effectiveness to Scale Up

    Here’s a very non-theoretical problem – you’ve got two ways of spending some digital marketing budget, either a) LinkedIn advertising, or b) Facebook advertising. The former works pretty well, you manage to calculate a return of $1.50 for every dollar you spend. The Facebook adverts are more effective though – a return of $1.80 for…

  • Finding Balance in Marketing Strategy

    Finding Balance in Marketing Strategy

    It’s that time of year again (for us anyway) – putting together the detailed marketing strategy and plan for 2021. And yet again it’s hard going. I’m not complaining – if it’s not difficult, then you’re not doing it right. Our job as marketing leaders is to work through the almost-overwhelming volume of data and…

  • Why HR is the Most Important Department in your Business

    Why HR is the Most Important Department in your Business

    Surely not!? Surely it’s the Marketing department (I am a marketer after all)? Or maybe Sales, maybe Engineering, maybe Customer Support. But no, I want to argue that getting HR right is one of the step changes you can make to a business, with far broader impact than any of the areas listed above. There…

  • Five Myths About The Marketing Revenue Engine

    Five Myths About The Marketing Revenue Engine

    I love the book Rise of the Revenue Marketer. In it Debbie Qaqish describes the need for a change program to move your marketing department from being a cost centre (“We’re not sure what marketing do, but we need them to do the brochures”), to a revenue centre (“They’re responsible for generating a significant proportion of our company’s…

  • Building a MarTech Stack at a Small Organisation

    Building a MarTech Stack at a Small Organisation

    I recently spoke at the B2B Ignite conference in London on “Building a MarTech Stack at a Small Organisation: A Real World Example of What’s Worked and What Hasn’t”. Here are my slides from that talk. Rules of Thumb It’s a lot of pictures, so might be hard to understand without the actual talk! Any…

  • Measuring Outbound vs. “Always-on” Marketing Performance

    Measuring Outbound vs. “Always-on” Marketing Performance

    Whenever I meet customers I always slip in a marketing question or two along the lines of “Where did you hear about us? What brought you in to Redgate?”. One of the answers from a couple of months back was: Well a year ago, I got a new boss and she told me that I had…

  • Brand Amplifiers

    Brand Amplifiers

    I’m writing this on my way to the Sirius Decision Summit in Vegas (sitting in Terminal 3). I’m hoping to get a lot out of the conference (though I’m currently in option paralysis mode – too many sessions to choose from). But this post is about a very small part of that conference – though…

  • Your Customers Pay Your Salary (not your Employer)

    Your Customers Pay Your Salary (not your Employer)

    “Don’t find customers for your products, find products for your customers” – Seth Godin The simplest ideas are the best. But they can also seem the most banal. Hidden in the Seth Godin quote above is, I believe, one of the key differences between a mature and immature organisation. Between a company that is ready…

  • To learn about the “Buyer Process” try buying something

    To learn about the “Buyer Process” try buying something

    I guess this is more a post about sales rather than marketing per se, but still – understanding buyer journeys and how you can help at different stages is an important part of the marketing role, particularly when the sales cycle is complex. I’ve read quite a lot about marketing funnels – how customers at…

  • You’re applying Marketing Theory, But You Don’t Even Know It

    You’re applying Marketing Theory, But You Don’t Even Know It

    I love this article from Helen Edwards – about the need to understand marketing theory but then the need to apply it to the real world. Theory without execution is just an indulgence, a wholly academic pursuit. But if you’re executing well against a poor strategy, you’re just peddling fast in the wrong direction. She provides some…

  • Sentiment Analysis of Twitter – Part 2 (or, Why Does Everyone Hate Airlines!?)

    Sentiment Analysis of Twitter – Part 2 (or, Why Does Everyone Hate Airlines!?)

    It took quite a while to write part 2 of this post, for reasons I’ll mention below. But like all good investigations, I’ve ended up somewhere different from where I thought I’d be – after spending weeks looking at the Twitter feeds for different companies in different industries, it seems that the way Twitter is…

  • There are Three Types of Marketing – Inbound, Outbound and… Plain Rude

    Reading one of the many number of content marketing pieces from HubSpot, I noticed the following from a basic piece on What is Digital Marketing?, after paragraphs about the virtues of Inbound marketing techniques: Digital outbound tactics aim to put a marketing message directly in front of as many people as possible in the online…

  • Your Primary Job as a Marketing Leader is to Prioritise

    Your Primary Job as a Marketing Leader is to Prioritise

    I’ve just finished the excellent Complete Guide to B2B Marketing by Kim Ann King. It’s very “List-ey” – it’s full of To Do lists (“Want to figure out your budgets for media spend? Here’s a 7-point list of how to do it”), which I really like. Many marketing books are rather waffly and vague, so a…

  • Anatomy of a Great Ad

    It’s easy to forget, amongst the talk of marketing automation, social media strategy, customer experience, lead nurturing and so on, that you still need well written, well targeted and well designed ads to reach new customers. I spotted a great example this week, and just wanted to run through what I thought was great about…

  • Sentiment Analysis of Twitter for You and Your Competitors – Part 1

    This post is split in two, primarily because I hit a roadblock half-way through the work – and I wanted to get the first part out. Second part to follow once I’ve fixed the difficult problems! A lot of people follow the Twitter feeds for competitors or, of course, themselves. But, one of the things…

  • Write Content That People Actually Want to Read

    This feels like a pointless blog post – the think I’m going to say seems so obvious, I shouldn’t need to say it. Still, I see examples where this doesn’t happen, so perhaps it’s worth re-iterating the point. Here’s the incredible insight – if you want people to read content that you write, then it…

  • Measuring Customer Experience

    Measuring Customer Experience

    Customer Experience (CX) – it’s a popular topic right now, analogous to the importance of User Experience (UX) in the world of product development.  And something which I strongly believe is important for a marketing team to get right. So, we all know that getting your Customer Experience great and consistent is important for all of…

  • If a Brewery Can Innovate, So Can You

    This weekend we went to Southwold and Aldeburgh – two of my favourite places in the UK, for various reasons. One of these reasons is the Adnams Brewery, based in Southwold. It’s been going for over a century and has always produced wonderful beer (as well as other drinks). But a few years ago I…

  • Your People Are Your Customer Experience

    We went to Milton Keynes today (school holidays – where else would you want to go?) and there were two examples of what I’d call, using marketing jargon, “A great customer experience” for the children. Listening to them talk about it afterwards, it wasn’t just something to do with the actual places we went to,…

  • People. Customers. Action.

    I was mugging up again last week on the McKinsey 7-S Model, now pretty old, but I still think a great framework for looking at organisational effectiveness. All very interesting, but then I found the post that Tom Peters wrote about the book decades later and found a quote that I particularly liked: “You could boil…

  • Human Beings are Holding Back Machine Learning

    Machine Learning (ML) and AI are big topics right now. Poor Lee Se-dol has just been beaten by AlphaGo – a machine put together by Google/DeepMind and there are numerous other examples in the news.So everyone is interested, and everyone wants to do more of it. Whether you work in marketing or any other discipline, there’s…

  • Why You Can’t Pivot as Quickly as You’d Like

    There’s a great scene, towards the end of the film American Sniper, where Bradley Cooper’s character has to take a shot from over a mile away from his target. But the point is, there’s a long time between the point he takes his shot, and when he finds out if he has hit or not.…

  • Better to be in the Arena Fighting…

    A place I used to work, perhaps 10-12 years ago, had (what I think, now) was a strange custom. Every Monday morning the whole company would get together to go through everything. There were around 70 of us, at the peak, and we would all stand around from about one-and-a-half hours going through sales, marketing, development, ops,…

  • The Difference Between Management and Leadership

    What is the essential difference between “Management” and “Leadership”? Are these, basically the same thing – “The stuff you do when you get “Manager” in your job title somewhere? These are both such vague, all-encompassing terms (perhaps the worst job title for this is “General Manager” – it sounds like you “just do stuff” not…

  • The Value of Completely Arbitrary and Artificial Constraints

    Another slightly abstract post today, though based on very real and pragmatic problems. When working on a project, where there are 100s of different options for things you can do and you’re drifting in to option paralysis, often a manager will use a deadline (for example, an event, or a customer demo) as a way…

  • Great Customer Service – Detail, Memory and Management

    I was fortunate enough this week to go for one of the finest meals of my life. Just incredible food – however, that’s not what this post is about (I believe there are many blogs out there on all things foodie..). It’s about the superb customer service that came with the meal and the elements…

  • Why Doing Nothing Inevitably Leads to Failure

    Every new idea is a bad idea. Well, not quite, but every time you choose to do something new, there always seems to be 100 reasons why it’s going to fail. Wrong people, not enough people, misunderstanding of the market, can’t extract value from it, too many changes needed, not our core competence, not completely…

  • Why Complex Decisions Inevitably Take Weeks

    I often find that, when it comes to make certain types of decision in an organisation, this just seems to take weeks. And if you’re unlucky, this can roll in to months. Why? What is it, a lack of decisiveness? An unwillingness to commit to anything? Lack of identification of a “Decision maker”? Just weakness!?…

  • How Short Term Data Driven Decisions can be Dangerous in the Long Term

    Jeff Bezos’s letters to shareholders are, of course, famous for their insight, not only in to how Amazon functions, but also for their advice on how to run a certain type of business. One of my favourite excerpts, from the 2005 letter is: As our shareholders know, we have made a decision to continuously and significantly…

  • Guerilla Marketing for Startups – An Example

    We’re on holiday at the moment, in the Netherlands, but just thought I’d write a short post about a great example of guerilla marketing we spotted today, for something we visited whilst in The Hague. There’s a great attraction in a small basement near the centre of The Hague, called Amaze Escape – http://www.amaze-escape.com. Essentially…

  • Why Measuring Marketing ROI is Like Trying to Measure Employee ROI – Impossible!

    I’m beginning to think I might need to change the tag line for this blog. One of my earliest posts was about how we needed to apply some scientific rigour to the process of marketing attribution and therefore ROI. How can marketers be getting away with such unproven and unprovable techniques, spending all this money…

  • Setting Ambitious Marketing Targets is a Waste of Time

    We all, periodically set targets for ourselves and/or other marketing folk. How often have we started the year with a plan that goes something like this: Do activities a, b and c, Through activities a, b and c, achieve the following “up-and-to-the-right”* targets: Great, we’re all rich! But what I want to argue is there…

  • Process Hawks and Doves

    In US politics, and now politics around the world the terms “hawk” and “dove” (really “war hawk” and “war dove”) are used to identify politicians who have leanings in a particular direction – either towards controversial wars or against. The arguments always play out on both sides, hopefully tending towards a solid, well-argued solution for a…

  • Getting Stuff Done as a Product Marketing Manager

    I hardly know a Product Marketing Manager who isn’t overwhelmed by his or her workload. As I’ve written previously, this is at least in part because of the vast number of activities that PMMs “should” be doing – how can you not being doing your job properly if you don’t, at least, have a full…

  • The Need to Constantly Change in Marketing

    There’s a quote that I really like from one of Christopher Isherwood’s early novels, The Memorial: “Men always seem to me so restless and discontented in comparison to women. They’ll do anything to make a change, even when it leaves them worse off. […] Whereas […] we women, we only want peace.” Removing the sexism…

  • Increase Your Net Promoter Score to Decrease Marketing Spend

    Marketing budgets are always on the squeeze. Or may be less that money is tight and more that the expectations on Return on Marketing Investment (ROMI) are raised. “I don’t mind spend £50k on this campaign, but I want to know what return I got, or you won’t have £50k to splurge next year”. The…

  • The End of the Marketing Plan

    I’ve read a couple of books in the last year both with something to say on the subject of marketing plans. Well, I’ve read one and given up on the other. The one I finished was: Lean Enterprise by Jez Humble, Barry O’Reilly and Joanne Molesky And the one I barely got started on was:…

  • Keeping an Eye on The Competition

    Many, many years ago I studied psychology and one of the most interesting courses I did was on development psychology – how we go from  babies to infants to toddlers to children to teenagers to adults. The most fascinating lecture series was on Theory of Mind – the notion that, as we grow up we…

  • Xbox One vs. PS4 – How Marketing can Drive Development

    Hard to miss it, but two next-gen gaming consoles were launched just before Christmas – Microsoft’s Xbox One, and the Playstation 4. Normally this sort of thing would pass me by (I’m not a big video game fan – they just seem like complete time vampires), but something I noticed was how interesting the two…

  • Dissecting Thought-Leadership

    To start, I don’t really like the term “Thought-Leadership”. Like many things in marketing, it’s a bit too “marketing-ey”. It also has echoes of NLP, something I’m not a big fan of, to say the very least. But, I guess it’s pretty descriptive for what it means – I’d define it as something along the…

  • Market Sizing – Old vs. New Markets

    I was attempting some market sizing activity this week. It’s something I haven’t done for a few months and quite frankly I’d forgotten how hard it was. I start from a premise that the future is completely unpredictable. Really, aren’t we kidding ourselves when we think we can predict how many people will buy our…

  • Working on the Coalface

    Everyone who works in marketing and product management should be spending as much time as they possibly can with customers. Period. This is, of course, a bit of a bland and obvious statement (like all those marketing books that promise so much and deliver so little!) – we know this, we don’t have to be…

  • My Product is Great. Why Do I Need a Marketing Department?

    Well, I still hear this question and there is some logic behind it. I’ve created a product of beauty and wonder, why do I need to invoke the dark arts of marketing to get it out there? Won’t its greatness shine through and act as a beacon to all those lovely customers with their dollars…

  • Waiting for Google

    This isn’t going to be a very exciting post unfortunately, though it was supposed to be. I visited the UK Google offices this week to have a chat about the future of Google Analytics, well Google Universal really. I was hoping for some help, some tricks and tips, perhaps a few sneak peeks at a roadmap…

  • What I Should Be Doing as a Marketer. But Won’t Be

    “Should” is a complicated – and dangerous – word in marketing. How many times have you read blogs and articles proclaiming that you “Should be doing more mobile marketing”, that you “Should have full content strategy”, that you “Should be creating personae for all of you target segments”, “Should be doing more on Twitter”? And…

  • Measuring Offline to Online Marketing Attribution

    This post is about one of the many issues facing anyone trying to do marketing attribution – how do you measure the impact of offline activity on online success? If you’re selling online, but you’re carrying out offline activity (TV ads, magazines, direct mail, events, arguably word-of-mouth) then you don’t get this sort of insight…

  • When Marketing Isn’t Really Marketing – Google Analytics Multi-Channel Funnels

    I was excited this week about the prospect of finally having the time to play with Google Analytics’ advanced Multi-channel Funnel (MCF) functionality. As announced at their summit last year, they’ve extended their advanced attribution modelling to all GA users and this provides the opportunity to (finally!) try and attribute some measure of value to…

  • SaaS Product Management, Lovefilm and Getting Stale

    Lovefilm have just revamped the app that is used by devices such as Blu-ray players and the PS3 and it is, in my opinion, a great improvement. There are a large number of changes but I think also, and I’m speculating massively here, that the improvements were heavily shaped by some great data driven product…

  • How To Measure Campaign Success

    Quite a simple post this time round. Essentially how I measure the success of a given campaign or piece of marketing work. NB: This isn’t the Holy Grail of properly attributed marketing ROI – when I’ve worked that, I’ll post it up, if I haven’t retired first – but instead a framework for how to…

  • Value and Predictable Revenue Improvements

    I really like this very simple post about how to buy wine, when you don’t really know much about it (which is definitely me). Basically, select a price (say, £7.95), then select a wine at that price. That’s kind of it. And what Evan Davis is saying is “Statistically, give or take anomalies, most wines…

  • Competition, Disruptive Innovation and Total Recall

    A key part of any product marketing role is analysing the competition for your product. Put simply, when your potential customers are looking to solve a particular problem or take advantage of an opportunity, what are the options that they see, one of which (hopefully!) is you? Sometimes this job is easy when you have…

  • Why Product Managers Often Aren’t Great at Marketing

    Back when I was a developer, many years ago, I worked with a superb sales person – an ex-McKinsey sales person – who had been tasked with explaining to all us techies “What Sales Did”. Of course we already knew the answer – “Nothing, except get paid more than us, drive nicer cars, get more…

  • Five Tips for Implementing Marketing Analytics

    The book Competing on Analytics by Thomas Davenport and Jeanne Harris is a short but very interesting read about the need for organisations to significantly improve their analytical capabilities if they want to compete in the modern marketplace. The argument, quoting directly from the author is that: In today’s global and highly interconnected business environment,…

  • Book Review: Positioning by Al Ries and Jack Trout

    Another book review this week, this time Positioning by Al Ries and Jack Trout. Obviously this is a book that had been around a long time. And there are endless reviews, over the years with different opinions. However, what’s interesting from skimming through the Amazon reviews, is that there’s a real mix between people who…

  • Is it the Content or the Author that Matters for a Blog?

    If, like me, you subscribe to a lot of marketing RSS feeds, then you can’t have failed to notice the almost overwhelming proportion of posts about content marketing/SEO and how choosing appropriate and useful content for, say, your blog is a killer way of drawing in early stage leads. This SEOMoz post is a good…

  • New Year, New Markets, New Products

    Many of us will have come back after the Christmas break trying to think of new activities, new ideas and new opportunities for 2013. One of these is – is there some new product, proposition or market we could address, obviously with a view to expanding the addressable market, or creating new revenue streams? Easy,…

  • Product Management and iTunes 11

    Just to start – this isn’t another post written just to whinge about iTunes. It’s a post written to whinge about iTunes and its relevance to product management. Is the following situation familiar? Product manager or marketer wants to add new features, use-cases and options to their product, based on customer feedback, that they think…

  • Favourite marketing posts of 2012

    This post is now 11 years old so a lot of the links no longer work! This is my last post of 2012 before breaking up for Christmas and I thought I’d finish with one of those lazy “Everyone’s out for Christmas, let’s just re-use some old material” posts, summarising my favourite articles that I’ve…

  • Lean Personas – How to Make Personas More Useful

    First of all, I prefer the term “Personas” to “Personae”. Doesn’t “Personae” just seem pretentious, n’est-ce que pas? Anyway, the point is, I’ve always struggled, over the years, to find personas a useful tool in marketing. I’m specifically talking about marketing here, rather than user-centred design – I know these are two sides of the same coin,…

  • Product Marketing and Product Management Roles

    I wrote a brief post, about the different roles in the area of product management and product marketing, so it was interesting to read what Saeed Khan had to say on the subject in the following two posts (the first one in particular): http://labs.openviewpartners.com/role-of-product-marketing-in-your-startup-part-1/ http://labs.openviewpartners.com/role-of-product-marketing-in-your-startup-part-ii/ These posts give really great insight in to what the…

  • Are you doing marketing or Marketing?

    Very interesting post here from the start of this year, from Joshua Duncan: http://www.arandomjog.com/2012/01/the-end-of-product-marketing/ In it, Joshua describes how the role of Product Marketing Manager (PMM) is, essentially, moribund – not because the work done by these people isn’t required, but because these activities are rapidly being taken up by other individuals (Product Managers, MarComms…

  • Marketing and Data Testing

    Anyone who’s worked in a digital marketing environment will probably recognise one of the following two scenarios – 1) You’re merrily working through your day when you check up on a KPI graph that normally bobs along nicely only to see some unpleasant looking change (generally a “drop” of some sort). Panic. 2) You’re merrily…

  • Product Marketing, Product Management, Product Owner etc etc

    As mentioned a few posts ago, I attended the Agile 2012 conference a few weeks ago. As far as I can see, one of the products of this movement has been the advent of the “Product Owner” role in the scrum team. This is someone who, as far as I can gather, does some of…