You’ve got to love January. Those plans you’ve been revising for months are finally in motion. The agencies are gorging themselves on billable hours to fund their trips to Cannes, after an exhausting December of canapés and signature martinis. Yet even as that New Budget Smell lingers in the hallways, the Sales Squirrels are already […]
Lost Squirrels: Putting Sales Where it Belongs
Mostly statistics just annoy me, but every now and again I am absolutely gobsmacked by one. Like this gem I picked up from Sirius Decisions at a marketing conference: sales people spend only 18% of their time in front of customers. You read that right, folks. Your Sales Squirrels are spending less than one-fifth of their time […]
Algorithms & Blues in the Obscurocratic Empire
This week my youngest son started high school. In an age where self-esteem is considered a core metric of eduction systems everywhere, many high schools hold welcome parties or special orientation days for freshmen and their helicopter parents. They give out elaborate packages of information but. naturally, the only thing in the package any of the […]
Eight Things to Do if You Have a Sucky B2B Agency
It’s been a while since we were unkind to agencies in this space and frankly, I miss it. So let’s talk about what you can do if, despite your very best efforts, you find yourself stuck with a Sucky B2B Agency. Maybe you work in the forgotten B2B corner of a mighty consumer brand, perhaps […]
Coming soon to a P-Cube Near You
It’s been about a year since we met our friends in the P-Cube. If you’re new to my little ecosystem, these are the folks in the Corporate Procurement department who spend their days in fabric-covered boxes watching hope die in a cloud of entropic cube-farm anxiety. Also they buy stuff from people like us and we […]