Hello and welcome to the C-suite Business Show, where we talk about some of the most exciting developments in new business generation from our own consultancy experience to the latest strategies and technologies available to you, the C-suite business community. And I'm your host, Nigel May well, welcome to this podcast. And I thought it would be a more sensible way of presenting this rather than just a written article on a website, by the way, that is available. And there is a download as well that you can read at your leisure on a tablet or however you want to consume your content. But the point of this is to look at the the domain title and understand that there are very very few people who can actually impact the way a business can move forward, especially if part of the environment or some of the players are doing something that doesn't work. And so in my opinion, what's required is a wholesale change to do with sales and marketing. But it's a it's a big ask, it's a big deal. And I wouldn't be talking about it or doing a podcast on it if I didn't think it was viable or a logical way forward. So but I mean, as a CFO, I know you're inundated with requests for budget. I mean, especially from marketing. And as the person who controls the finances, you're expected to make a valid judgment on the expenditure. Whilst I suppose assessing will be able to assess the pros and cons of the budget request you've just been given. It's like I said, I've written and done this expressly for CFOs for it to be treated almost like a one stop shop, one location, so to speak, to get a handle on these marketing requests. Even if they are stumping their feet and demanding. But I want more. I mean, the trouble is very few marketing personnel can prove an R y, and they probably never did in the past either. But there is a significant change happening. If you haven't already noticed the businesses are starting to increase the salaries for senior marketing people. The most recent I've seen, which is quite surprising was one business looking to pay 350 grand as a one off payment, followed by two 50 to three 50 grand a year. It's like any three quarter million pound a year for somebody marketing. I mean, what's going on? Others are more frequently tipping. 250 grand a year. I mean, that's not to mention the headhunting headhunting costs or the recruitment costs, but the common desire is for someone who's got a couple of years, decades experience under their belt, who can move the needle for the proposing business. But there's a big problem. It's the two decade experienced professionals who have caused the problem in the first place. And that's why produce this article is for CFOs as an explanation as to why businesses are finding sales and growth so difficult, with much of it falling at the feet of technology and the rest as a result of lazy B2B marketers who in the past believed they could just rely on salespeople to pick up the slack. You heard it all before. I mean, they marketers, they want money for the martech stack. Without it, the business is going to suffer. Or whether it's the martech stack or the tech stack, the reality is B2B marketers are behaving as if they're selling to consumers and have failed over the past ten to 15 years to deliver an educational process to prospects to help them by this failure. My opinion is reminiscent of the copy sales in the eighties and telecoms in the following years because no skill was required, just a cold call asking the prospect, Do you wanna buy a copycat or you want to lower your telecoms costs? I sales marketing is broken because everyone focuses on one to one selling and not one too many, many inherited strategies don't work. And it's time for change, end of story. But don't. I mean, it's not just me. There's that. There's a guy, not just me advocating this print Adamson, who his title is distinguished vice president and B2B expert at Gartner. He reckons that too, and there's a link in the website to his article about traditional B2B sales marketing becoming obsolete. But not many people know this, but you can stop cold calling, ditch marketing automation and still reach your total addressable market quicker, more frequently. And at a fraction of the costs and with greater accuracy and engagement and profitability than you could ever do before. So it's not about technology or costs in fact, it's about spending less money, believe it or not. So what's required is actually a wholesale restructure of sales and marketing to help organizations start generating consistent new business. And once it's set up, become on autopilot for like 12 to 18 months, says no unnecessary ongoing costs. But the question is who's going to start there? The conversation. I mean, is this explanation, this, is this, this, this podcast, this is a I suppose an explanation of what's gone wrong. And my experience over the past 30 odd years is a consultative illustration as to what can be done to put it right in. Okay, so it takes 20, 30 minutes, but after you've listened to this you'll be equipped to deal with any pleadings or desire requests from marketing people and provide some, I think some much needed insight and informative explanations that your next CSM to your board meeting What I've done, I mean whilst I've got this, you know, I'm doing this as a podcast, there are some, some different headings that have got on the, the actual document itself out. I won't read through all of them because it will be forever. But basically I hope you agree with my sentiment that you are the person as a CFO to decide if we, if what I'm actually saying is answer to new business and long term long term stability. And by reading and all listening and sharing this with your colleagues, I think it could be one of the most important things you could do this year. But to start with, nothing has changed in B2B sales and marketing for the past 50 years. So the only way for a business to get back on track is to access or rather to assess new options from a financial perspective. First, it's got to start with the cash. And that's why I've done this and that's why it is targeted at the CFO the performance figures and financials that you look at month after month bear out to businesses that new business is not consistent and sales and marketing are not doing a reliable job. But finding new business has always been a nightmare cost of fortune and that too many people involved in the process. And what I'm going to do is just explain what's been going wrong and how to change things and create exposure, increase profitability, and at the same time reduce costs. It's not nonsense. I mean, it seriously it is easily achievable. But the trouble is sales, marketing, recruitment agencies are inadvertently stopping this information from getting through to CEOs and boards of directors And that's why the problem is not going away. Is this that makes sense to you? Please, you know, share this with you. Say it with your CEO and your colleagues. As I mentioned earlier. And I've also was profit prepared this for CFO shows. I've got a separate document that is tailored towards CEOs anyway that said, let's just kind of move into it. So do this. Do the figures stack up? And if you say this, if you came to this fire, the via a LinkedIn advert, you can you can see why I've put this on there. But do the figures stack up and and the CFO. You're the only person in the company who will evaluate something dispassionately and purely based on its, I suppose, financial viability. And that's why I say, you know, the figures stack up and if they don't, it's time to rethink. Firstly, I'm going to explain what's been damaging B2B organizations over the past 15 years and provide an explanation and a solution for a better not just, just a more profitable way forward because it's all about the numbers and addressing the one to one ratio of sales activity to prospects. And you won't have her you wouldn't have heard anything like this before for business to business organizations in my 30 years in business says that it's better for CFO to hold on, hold onto the keys to the future of an organization rather than entrusting them to sales and marketing. I mean, this is more fundamental than any bit, Darren. And you quickly see I'm not siding with sales or marketing. I mean, when you when you hear the rest of this is far from it, but I'm also not advocating to buy more software, almost SAS or more advertising spend. I'm just suggesting to take a look at the new business infrastructure from a different perspective. I mean, typically sales and marketing, you know, you've heard them complaining about each other. You only have to look at the past three, five, even ten years turnover figures divided by the total number of employees to see that the average is virtually static. And in the UK, it's in the region of 80 to 160 grand per person per annum, and that's between ten and 50 employees. And above Google, by the way, is 1.5 million per person per annum. And we've got some there's some graphs and stats on that on the website as well. But if you could take 50 CV's from CMO's 50 marketing strategies, 50 marketing consultants even and you see that they're all the same and have been the same way for the past 50 years and the primary reason for this is because their inability to move away from this one to one sales mentality that keeps hampering business and because of the lack of success and growth, you can see why over the past nearly eight know ten years, the average tenure of a CMO in the UK in the USA is only 18 months and I think it's because they promised the year and they failed. I mean if you look at, you know, your role, you wouldn't expect it to forecast year on year growth from just you, specifically your activity but they do. And the trouble is marketing people do promise to us at the interview stage, they say they can achieve it and then they end up to kind of tail between their legs. They've got no choice but to leave after 18 months. I mean the most recent employment record I saw on LinkedIn was someone with 18 jobs. She was a CMO, a seven person software company, and she was in like late thirties, maybe early forties, she'd never stayed long enough for anyone job to ascertain if her plans had ever worked. And some people say, Oh yeah, you know, the more jobs I've had, the more experience they've got. I'll get them on board. No, I know you can sell foreign accounts anything, but if you're moving every every year or so, it means you ain't making it work. And so you can see why I've said, you know, do the figures stack up? So, I mean, as you would expect, business owners, they have to listen to their employees but they did listen to their employees and big tech and they accepted the return on investment argument from sales and marketing that marketing automation software was a great idea and it would increase the flow of inbound leads. It was supposed to monitor and provide analytics and therefore help manage and target the performance of marketing, which I guess prior to automation was simply an administrative role. And it still is, in my opinion. But as working environments change, staff began to demand ball pits and table foosball and free beer on tap on Fridays. But when the marketing processes began failing, the only option was to find someone you could buy your work, just as the CMO had been promised in the first place. And to attract this new person, the ball pits and free beer was a must The reason marketing automation doesn't work in B2B settings. Our stress that in B2B settings is because they're selling products or services intended to create increased profitability. Makes sense. Yeah, but is it marketing and big tech convinced CEOs to buy into it? But the evidence that they were delivering was based upon the success of B2C campaigns selling at no changes in jeans and cars, all of which the individual buyer can say, This looks good to me, but your typical B2B customer could never say about SAS or technology or services or anything else like that to be, you know, this this SAS looks good on me. So within the sales process, marketing automation is simply replaced that physical activity of cold calling. I know because I've done it which was basically obtaining a comprehensive knock on a door, obtain a complement slip with the intention of making a telephone call to the prospective customer to gauge any interest So marketing automation used by the vendor attempts to force the prospect into a transaction before defining what it is they're actually offering. So asking upfront for an email address instead of a no and everything else makes people shy away. And that's where Gartner of I've turned around and said that 83% prospect's research online before engaging with the salesperson So you know and if they keep their information and get the download they end up unsubscribe me straightaway. So to kind of further I suppose support this narrative a narrative Forrester who you've probably heard of did a report a few years ago and said that less than 1% of B2B prospects who supposedly traversed that so-called funnel purchasing funnel actually become revenue generating customers. So the addition, the additional damage automation does is that it hides all of the content the company produces from all of the search engines. So if it's a PDF, you can't ascertain if the contents any good or not, if it's being or even if it's being read. And this is the Web page, no one, not even Google can see it if an email form needs to be completed before accessing it. I think. But we kind of know that Google are the like the preeminent measure of engaging content. So if your content was was to achieve a high ranking on their search engines, like you can get to page one, then is it just simply the equivalent of getting a gold star as it means it's well-structured And it could very well be engaging to audience, but it doesn't guarantee success because then you've got to hope that people are actually searching for your content in the first place. So to actually get noticed, you have to factor in the potential staggering cost of Google Pay per click, which is supposed to bypass all the organic search process and present your banner ad on page one. As long as you've as long as you've paid more than your competitors to your prospective customers. And then the final hurdle is that your whole marketing engagement team need to have first created a good enough banner, maybe 12 or three banners to do an ABC split test to test copywriting that links them to a landing page to hopefully someone on that landing page as long as it's done properly and laid out properly. We'll give you their email address and then go back to square one. I'll just to thank just just kind of bear in mind for a moment. So with this process, this whole process just explained, you've got friction with pay per click, with the pay per click banner advert. Does it work or not? You got friction with the landing page. Has it laid out, is it split tested in multivariate testing and so on. And, and finally friction on engagement because you're still demanding a transaction and asking for their details before they can access the content. So now can you, you know, you can you see why the pay per click for B2B and marketing automation is flawed, does it? It's completely unsurprising. And with all that in mind, you then got the recruitment cycle, which happens year after year, which means you cycle someone you see take on a new CMO, you have three months to get their feet under the desk, year to implement their new marketing plan or whatever they've promised you promised the Earth to do. And as it unfolds that it's not working or making any difference, they gave themselves another three months before they forget, can get a new job or they get fired. And if this doesn't happen at the same, say, eight month frequency, it's usually because the CEO was forced to get so deeply involved in the marketing that it meant that the CMO couldn't be as I suppose, as readily fired because the CEO was calling all the marketing shots irrespective of he or she was qualified to do or not. So I might say lucky CMO, but also you won't see the attributes that I've been talking about and so on in a typical marketing related CV, because the recruitment agencies, they're not business consultants, the filtered out because the recruitment companies are simply doing their job and delivering to you what you ask for, which is I guess to an extent just a better one than the one before. And don't forget, I mean, think about it. The eight month churn is great for business. So why change anything? Mean, you just wouldn't. Nobody would. So that's why I say it's a completely biased cycle. And it makes me wonder. I mean, people go a new job. So what you're looking for, they can't say that they're looking for a new challenge because they keep doing the same thing over and over again. And it's a bit like whether it I think it's a bit of a misnomer, but the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. So what exists now is an environment where salespeople have been conditioned into waiting for leads. They rarely engage in telesales because that's the domain of the business deals. So the market is a salespeople who have rarely ever run a business is certainly not able to offer any kind of entrepreneurial ideas or advice to improve their business units, because the general consensus is that's what the city does. That's what the CEO does, is they're responsible for those decisions. So naturally, their expectations for them is to keep their heads down, just get on with it with what they're given. That's, you know, sales, marketing, quite happy to leave things as they are because they're getting paid to do it. And if somebody simply comes up with a new idea, fine, they'll execute it. But it's not their next on the line. I mean, the fight I mean, you've got a look at I mean, I've read some of these offered the hope that there's a long list on there. Half a million businesses start every year. Half million businesses fail every year, according to the Financial Times. 30% of all businesses fail in the first year. 50% in the second 70% by the third, and 91% by the 10th. Harvard Business Review say 40% of invested businesses fail, period. 80% of investee businesses fail to achieve their own targets. And 95% of investors businesses fail to achieve a return on investment for their investors, like CB Insights. You might have heard of them. They're not like a an information publishing company. 50% of all business failures. The reasons for 50% of all the reasons for business are all marketing related I mean, is it staggering if the people that you know 83% want to they want to engage digitally before speaking to a salesperson less than 1% go through the fact that the funnel is looking at the average turnover. I mean to date no one seems to know what to do about this constant dilemma because everybody's doing the same thing. I mean we've got we've got an idea and a plan about this but there's no point launching into the plan unless you've got the background and understanding what's going on. And before I get into that, just just to touch on digital transformation. And whilst it's all the rage and it's been like that for a while, it doesn't include sales, marketing, got to think I have to think about that digital transformation, customer experience, to an extent, operations business operations and so on. Great. So this is a business does want all the efficiency that a business process management platform can offer, like a Appian Business Chief ServiceNow Zone. But you've got to factor in the customer and it's not an afterthought. Customer experience is paramount to retaining customers, but if the route to becoming a customer is fraught with the nonsense, you and I have always had to put up with it, with the typical sales ploys and the closing techniques and don't forget the accounts. Give me the account based marketing that has got to involve everybody now. Yeah, because then nobody can. If you involve everybody, nobody can be blamed for making a bad decision. But but the customer, if you want the customer to stay a customer for long term, they've got to experience something that's worth staying with you for. So especially there's no respect for the vendor in the first place. The customer is not going hang around and this will translate as a lack of loyalty on behalf of the customer who will switch we know. We know they will, irrespective of any kind of clever customer experience, strategy or whatever. It's about genuine behavior I mean, there was a CEO of ServiceNow, Bill McDermott, and he's a bit of a character, but he's really flipped ServiceNow profitability from profitability wise and so on. And he did this article in ERP Today magazine. This is digital transformation is the practice of radically disrupting an existing problem or challenge through an entirely different lens when the world turns on a dime. Businesses need to be equipped to execute a new plan in record time. We used to talk about just in time. Now we're talking about just in case you've got to go from linear thinking to exponential thinking. It's reported that 70 75% of fortune 500 companies that are on the list today will not be on that list in 2027 therefore we have to think of new exponential ways to solve will solve old problems. Digital files to left digital transformation takes the concept of exponential thinking by radically disrupting convention with a completely fresh approach. Better is not good enough to solve the problems of the 21st century And finally says I.T. architecture is now the business architecture and the business model will be built upon its ability to digitally digitally connect with your customer. So the lack of digital sales market transformation is I think is astounding. Everyone wants to be the hero responsible for the which it gave might be, but there's crickets overnight I tumbleweed when it comes to sales marketing. So now I'm kind of full circle back to the ball pits and free beers and marketing automation martech stacks without. And this is what they don't do without considering the cameras, mikes and lights a digital products to And they are a a necessary or necessary components for marketing. But the problem is most marketers have absolutely no experience with these types of digital creation tools. So they dismiss them as unnecessary, too expensive or too complicated or are. It's not my job. So the bottom line is there's only one way to break free. I say there's only one way to break free from the perpetual low performance that comes out of the first out of one to one ratios, and that's to adopt one too many mentality and a corresponding strategy. And it starts with understanding how to reach your total addressable market on a regular basis. So you got to stop wasting time and money on cold calling and demand generation by using marketing automation platforms. So it's about communicating with the market and knowing those numbers from the outset. And the numbers are that it's commonly known to only 1% of your total addressable market are looking for your type of product. Each week, and you have to maneuver your business to consistently communicate with them at a relaxed and unobtrusive frequency. So your business or whatever you do least have the ability to connect with and engage with as many prospects as possible. And obviously as cost effectively as possible, whether they're in one country or lots, lots different countries. Every potential prospect needs to be assured they can get everything or thing they want from you. 24 sevenths, three 65 or online. And if they do need to speak to someone, then a highly trained sales professional will be on hand en chat on, zoom on the phone, or whichever platform the customers on in order to get an answer. So, I mean, if you're looking at the sizes of businesses, you know, up to 50 employees, yeah. There's 5.7 million of them in the UK. But when you get two to 50 employees and what is 212,000 up to 500 employees 36,500 employees and above 8000 So this type of approach could never be achieved using any anything like telesales BD styles or any other one to one ratio of employed in structure infrastructure you could do it because of those numbers. You can then go to consider how many businesses 1% equates to the types of businesses you're looking for or your companies looking for. So then there's a process of educating prospects, which are the only way I can put this is with genuine, genuine help for a meaningful content. I mean, this is kind of the essence of a digital selling strategy, but it's the ability to engage with prospects and for them to self-serve so that they've got to they're the ones they want to do. They have to have an idea about something. They're the ones that want to go and research. That's why I got to say 83% research but you want them to be able to do that all the way through to placing an order. And with everything being on demand. There's no need for human contact. And I'm not talking A.I.. I mean, I think I should stand for artificial interest, artificial income or artificial intent, especially when it comes to B2B marketing. So this approach isn't uncommon, though, and if you look at the success of B2C, you'll see what I mean. But you're not selling trainers or jeans or high energy drinks, and we're not talking about involving YouTube or or TikTok influencers. But say, for example, you're selling a high value complex products are services. Your prospects expect you to have a high level of information and content available upon which they can evaluate you and place you on their own respect scale before they'll even entertain buying from you. And if it's done properly, the transition to digital selling might entail the redeployment of certain staff. But when the shift occurs in the finances of the business, at the end of the day, as if there's going to be less telesales people around, there's less less paper around, less costs. I mean, if you've got less telesales people to find prospects, less people are required to close the deals, less people required to manage it, less commission to pay out because it's all being derived from self-service It starts to become a the kind of financial mechanism that everybody's been dreaming about On top of that, because of producing this self-service content, the digital assets required keep increasing month on month because they're not being hidden by an email form to support this marketing automation platform. Thereby, you increase visibility via the search engines with just drastically reduced expenditure and significantly increases overall the effectiveness of the effectiveness. Sorry, of all your marketing So at the end of the day, the gearing ratio from selling changes from one to one to one to many, which means there's no limit to the number of businesses who could investigate your products and learn how to implement them. So reaching your total addressable market and communicating with them every week can actually be achieved by one person properly trained, which would make the whole telesales operation redundant. So, I mean, in a bit of background, I mean, I started up in telecoms and two and technology businesses. I've personally sold million pounds worth of kit and I did technology, integrated with telephone systems, integrated with CRM and SAS. I know the issues everyone's got from running a business in the first place to telesales, to field sales, to installation and inflammation, implementation and trading. So I've done it. I've absolutely done it, and I can talk you through it step by step if you want to be to that. The bottom line is to not show this. The business has got to be clear of who and where the market is. They must easily and cost effectively be able to tell their market that they exist and prospects must have the ability to self-serve all the way to placing an order, which means every every method, every, every, every means must be available to facilitate that contact using phone chat, video, email and livestream accounts that minute So it might seem obvious to you, but as soon as that any any form of telesales is adopted, you flip back to one to one ratio and you're completely back to square one. And if you speak to anybody in, say, in telesales, now you're looking at 300 to 400 to one success rate to find people that might be interested just by bringing them up. So phoning 400 people a week, 100 people a day, five days sorry, four days to find one person that might be interested. You've got to be kidding me. So the important thing here is for you to pick up on what we're recommending and to is, is to see that the logic behind it and that what we're saying could be implemented with the minimum amount of fuss, the least cost, the maximum benefit. And from a purely financial perspective, you would be asked, does this approach to change make financial sense and does this make sense for new business generation? So this is pivotal because if as a CFO, you're in the unenviable position of making a decision whether or not you mentioned what you're listening to to your colleagues, So, I mean, we say, for example, you can look at starting something like this, the process of transitioning to digital selling begins with changing the perspective of the whole engagement process. It's not about prospecting cold calling or closing. It's aligning the business to the way in which we all go about acquiring products we like or need. So when it comes to digital selling, your business can implement this immediately, and you'd have to look at your what your existing sales have been doing over the past few years to see how closely they are aligned to what I'm saying. And it probably help with us directing them in some way in the first instance. But I will point out that our website, our own website, is set up for digital selling. So we've made everything freely available. There's no no forms, no nothing. There's there's no access codes, no emails, no logging, no direct tracking. We just know which pages people look at So we're practicing what we're preaching. I mean, to start with, the most obvious question will be most people say, well, how long would it take to to change over to this kind of this new way of doing things? And I would say especially depends on your existing marketing and what you've used them and what can be updated and adapted. But I'd recommend setting up this this kind of strategy in parallel with your current strategy. So then as the new one gathers momentum, the old one can be depleted, decreased. So it stopped in the dark for six months, give or take. That's why we you know, we'd have a chat about this in the first place, in the first place anyway. But I don't want to dismiss any of the operational matters, though, because being finance orientated, I kind of presented a comprehensive illustration about execution. And the reason I say that is you looking at persona, because you've probably heard persona and segmentation all the buzzwords over the past few years or so. One of the fundamental things is it has to be changed to people that are looking at primary, secondary, general product and how to buy. And the reason I say that is that if you're a website, you look at an about US page and actually a general piece of information, you might click on a case study, which is a secondary piece of you might look at a product about a How-To video, which is a product, a product page, our classification, and you want to find out how much someone someone might want to find out how much is charged or what the installation cost is. That would be classified as a how to buy page and any kind of thought leadership case studies, white papers that would be classified as primary, you know, infographics and social proof secondary. So there's a way that when we when we all look at information, we all look at information, a website, we bounce all over the place. So where's the funnel? You can't lead school because someone's bouncing all over the place. And that's why I say I on the home page of our website, the funnel doesn't exist inevitably only suited to the marketing automation platforms. To say that you can move, you're supposed to move down this linear path and it doesn't exist. So at the end of the day, the point is about producing multiple types of content that can be provided because no one can you second guess or make a decision what type of content people want to look at? I don't know what you know, you're listening to this or you're reading this. I don't know if you prefer video or whether you prefer a podcast or whether you prefer livestream I have no idea. So as a as a provider supplier consultant, I have no choice but to provide all of them. And that in turn means nor to you. If you look at your website and you got a corporate video. So what I was interested in corporate videos, they want to know who are you? How do you work or how do I use the what? Who are the people that are using it and so on. And the list goes on. But then you go Echo and tech manager and Google Analytics are all part and parcel of what we say to make sure you get constant visibility and you can see that you get in this content penetration and you're able to manage it I mean, it can be difficult to visualize, especially when you go to lots of content, and that's why there's a section on the online page. But we've got specific sections on our website that say that explain how to do streaming and copywriting, photography, podcasts, video adverts, SEO and analytics anybody could go on to our website, spend it, take them about two or three, maybe four weeks to go through and listen and watch everything. But at the end of that four week period, they would be one of the best marketers on the planet. Because I think we are. But if I'm not going to say who else is? So if you're looking at this whole process, we know selling is a numbers game. You've heard this before. You've heard the sales teams talk. You've heard the CEOs talk about this. But if you're not able to manage the numbers, if you're not able to manipulate the numbers, you're going to struggle to sell anything. And if 1% of your total addressable market are looking, then I'd know, say, for example, you got to 20,000 people. That means 200 people each week looking, each week looking. And the way to approach it, it's not it's not complicated. If you have got a database by it, to upload the data as your CRM, upload it to LinkedIn, set up a paperclip campaign and do a live stream. So you tell your total addressable addressable market you exist. Invite them to join you in a livestream. Bingo. A percentage of those 200 that are looking will come and look at you. So one person can be more effective than a whole team of telesales people. And you and you tell them each week, this is what we did last week. This is what we do next week. And you do interviews and how to and everything else it means. Zero prep, virtually. Zero prep sit down, press one button, go live on to multiple platforms. Don't need any marketing automation and cost cuts. Pennies honestly costs pennies and you just repeat every week. So thing is one of the another critical aspect I suppose of digital setting is to make a point of promoting a you've got to sell the content If you look at your own existing content, most businesses look to sell the product kind of logically makes sense. But it's wrong. Your prospects probably know what you said anyway. I don't need to be told to sell the product. They want to be sold the content to teach them how to use the product. They want to be taught. They want to be educated. That's the point of this. I'm part of what we what we recommend. We created this strategy called Social Four for four. And what it means is, is posting for adverts four times a day, every day of the week for four weeks. And then you repeat it. But these adverts are created in-house and posted on social media newsfeeds. So we're not talking about people not talking about pay per click here they're just being put on newsfeed, which means you'll put it you're producing the content you've got. Your content is static live on your website and you put this information out so people get to see your information once, maybe twice a day, maybe So if selling it, I'm assuming you're selling to a business market, then when you see your post, if they're locked in and scrolling down through the news, through the newsfeed, that's why we recommend 220 adverts which are prepped in advance and they include like graphics and motion graphics and names and videos and you taken every month automatically. This is just a bit of software that you use. So it's unlikely that, like I said, that they'll see the same advert again and again. But a bit of insight to business buyers, though, is just this is really important. It takes seven to ten direct connections before a prospect recognizes your brand or company but only one in three attempts to contact your prospect, get through So you need 30 odd messages lined up in advance so you can't send out more than one message a week because that'll just upset them. So therefore, if you're going to send out 30 messages, you've got to allow six or seven months before you start repeat reaping any award rewards so you can talk today. And that's another reason or fundamental reason why so many businesses fail is to have got the patience and they think that they can achieve success by employing the most basic tactic in terms of technical execution and management and cost color. Calling back to square one again So the recommended content promotion strategy means you can virtually use that term. And I think people have been wanting to use this forever, setting forget so that, you know, the the adverts and the available content doesn't need to be changed for up to 12 to 18 months because it's churning And the other point of it is mean, it means that you can see everything prepped in advance. So in terms of kind of I suppose financial factors and different implications, if you a brand new business think about this, if you're brand new business, if you would, I would say create all the necessary content in advance and you like you grow your attraction strategy before even embarking on any kind of fundraising exercise which means you end up gifting a large portion of your business to investors before you've even properly tested the market. And it might surprise you that you wouldn't even need that the size of investment in the first place. That's a new business for an existing business to implement a digital strategy in parallel to the existing marketing plan. And you can ascertain who in sales can support content development teams and so on, implement the process to reach out to your total addressable market and gauge what elements need to be put in place So that's just moving forward. But if you are involved in mergers and acquisitions prior to engaging, agreeing to any kind of merger, you could implement a fact finding task force to assess or reassess the marketing potential of that business based upon a digital selling strategy that you are purchasing, purchasing a new business, you might want to reevaluate your forecasts and even reevaluate what you would pay for the business. So there's this there are a variety of different reasons to do this, but the fundamental is it's going to cost an absolute fraction of every single figure that has appeared on your budgeting panel and perhaps your forecast budget projections. So if you have marketing or a content team in place, then to begin with, you need to start addressing these content and start preparing videos and podcasts and so on. And if you if you've got a database in place already, that's great. If not, then look at your addressable market and get a new database which costs administrative 5300 £50 per thousand. And I'm getting down to the nitty gritty here. But if you want, you know, a database of 10,000 names, so it's three and a half grand in terms of costs, it's like three or £400 a month. You compare that to marketing automation Compare that to market. So like what, five grand a month, minimum and if you're looking at, you know, three or £400 a month after you've, after you've got your database in place is on, that includes the cost of sending emails or to post on social and streaming software multi streaming platforms and so on. But if you needed to, if you needed to get other stuff in place for video and so on, you'd want to kind of acquire the most kind of cost effective and useful equipment. And we, I mean, we give you a shopping list or set out for you, but you can budget between 20 and 60 grand. It's a one off. So look at the middle. Yeah. In broad terms. 40 grand for the first year, four grand for the second year in subsequent years. And then obviously if you need somebody going to set out to pay for that. But, but two people can manage the whole operation and reach out to your total addressable market. So you compare that to your, your current costs or telesales. So I mean SAS are marketing attributed to new business and so on. You can't touch this There's the other aspect too, and that's about using all that equipment to record and create all that other digital content you require, like how to videos and video to record video podcast, which is, I mean, the fact that I think Spotify has just paid out something like half a billion invested in podcasts and YouTube are saying that they want to they want to incentivize people to video their podcasts so you can see where this is all going So we don't need to tell you it's all a fixed asset and can be written off over three years. But considering the existing costs and the work effort that goes into cold calling about videos coupled with that that they're staggeringly low success rates, nothing can compare to the strategy that this delivers Mean even if even if it cost underground it was a one off cost is cheaper and more profitable than anything you probably doing at the moment. But the important factor here is that we are demonstrating that we've prepared absolutely everything in advance and broken everything down to its component part to help provide like a comprehensive and robust cost illustration with supporting, I suppose, explanatory information and to to do that, I mean, again, go back to the website, go to the page. You can see there's a there's a a modeling spreadsheet for all of the costs. There's a project execution infographic that shows the different process and processes and paths from the addressable market is inbound outbound marketing and selling digitally and so on. And want to set up an update just all the different processes. We've also got a a digital setting organizational chart that covers technology, content and revenue that used to be IT marketing and sales. But what I've done is I've identified every single person involved in the whole infrastructure that's downloadable as a an Excel spreadsheet. So you can you can mix a match and tweak that around. And the point but the point of this is that, for example, with the technology team, it's really important that there's continuity and technical support, especially when it comes to software. So when creative people are expected to understand how the software works and devise marketing strategies using that software like copywriting and so on, and all that kind of stuff, when they leave, the Expertize walks out the door. So I say that the technology team are responsible for the management and implementation of all hardware and software. Even if you are in a contract for for marketing automation, it should be the technology team that looks after it. And it also means that there's crossover training within technical. So someone that's looking after the email service provider or marketing automation or analytics or data visualization and so on, it can be looked after by a group of people. So if someone leaves you're not left in the lurch unless I've got different ideas about how this can be implemented. In terms of sales, personally, I think a company can have a very, very tiny sales team because the work is being done and being hived off and has become functional online because it's all self-service and you're producing this content to help and teach and train and do whatever is needed or online all on demand They're only speaking to sales when they when they need to buy something. So in a transitional period, if the if your sales team have been used to, you know that they get a lead here or there or whatever, and they have to go and find business themselves or do whatever they do. Let me carry and then, Mike, there's a decision you can offer an alternative, which is to become part of the new business team, have the A-Team, which is the old team and the new business team who work hand-in-glove with people in marketing, in content and on that subject regarding content before it's called marketing department or marketing, call it content, get rid of the CMO, replace them. The title, not necessarily them, but replace them with an editor in chief because you producing content needs to be edited. But you'll see all of this from the from the from the auction. So the point is, is that because you're producing content, you you might you may need more people to begin with, but gradually through natural waste and waste and people leaving, you can be left with a significant amount of content that sells the business and the products and a smaller number of people that are there because you're able to market to many to communicate to many and sell to many with a minimum amount of fuss So I mean, going back some not I say wild probably 2018 really. I believed the businesses needed to create a cinematic type of high quality video what people were doing on YouTube. And so rather than just say tell businesses I can do this, I invested about I suppose close to about 50 grand on cameras, lighting audio and all the all the gear everything and learned as much as I could over the past I suppose up to now about past four years which included editing and production and learning and watching is pretty much anything I can get my hands on. And over the next few years, including during lockdown, I realized that what was needed was a proper, a genuine restructure of beat of the B2B sales organization because it wasn't working And I guess I joined the dots when nobody else had. And as a result, I developed this vision or version of digital selling and it addresses the whole color coding issue through to the problems with automation and naturally aligning everything to the behavior of people like you and I and the way that we like to buy business related products compared to personal consumer products. I mean, I've run everything. I mean, even on a small scale, I mean, I've run everything on a MacBook Pro on the road, a road cost appropriate use for podcasts. I got multiple Panasonic DSLR cameras for photos and video and a variety of one touch button and switching gear that enables me to do livestreaming. And you can see all of this on our website as lots of different examples of what of what we've done. We used to suffer Kody Kamm, which is pretty cool, pretty clever by itself, but it enables me to press one button and livestream over Facebook, LinkedIn and YouTube simultaneously on touch. So that's why I said earlier that one in a couple of people can take care of this and reach thousands and thousands of people depending on what you do. So at the end of the day, anyone can have a stream be set up, whether they're at home or an office. And I mean looking at offices, if you've got more and more people working from home, then you've probably got some spare space at the office. So your office can be converted, but a sound treatment, dampen it, you know, tamp down the sound, stop the reverb happening and create a studio a podcast slash live stream studio at your offices that people can just walk into and go and sit and broadcast. So there's lots of lots of opportunities. I mean, I am coming into land. I'm coming to the end. But what I've described and this overall strategy is straightforward. I know I've been in business long enough. 35 years I've been selling and do my thing certainly is specifically specifically for myself. So I know this is financially viable and has no chance of overspending. It requires minimum management and it lends itself towards maximum exposure to your correct market. And it keeps every element of new business expenditure in check. One of the other things is it's monitored by using Google Tech Management Analytics and Data Studio. You can monitor it and get it presented on a weekly basis to see how it's doing, to see what people's engagement is even to the point of seeing how long people are going to listen to a virtual watch a video. I mean, it's what you can do with that with a combination of tech manager and analytics is spectacular. It's amazing. But, you know, in terms of recruitment, well, you would use recruitment to increase sales and marketing personnel or content and revenue personnel only if it's necessary. Meaning, you know, if a certain if one of those two areas need more support, great willpower to you, take them on. But the new organizational structure, I think, has a calming effect on attrition because it helps reduce the technical talent walking out the door, which, you know, is instrumental are intrinsically linked to I.T. and not marketing. And it just it gives an opportunity for you as a company to evaluate this and go, what a second what if what Nigel's saying is going to work for us? How does it change Isn't that like we said before and accessibly so before doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. First of say, you can't expect people to turn up and go, Oh, we're going to do this with that with with demand. Gen Leach and APN, it doesn't work for B2B everybody knows it doesn't work that's why you keep such a high number of salespeople because they've got a blank book. They're the ones that go out and try and tickle deals along. I'll get them, but that's not what people want. They want to be able to self-serve and to start looking at it go, Well, wait a second, because if we do this and it means we cut these costs and we cut those costs, which means we reduce that if you start cutting staff costs, not because they're being made redundant, but through natural wastage, I think that's the word somehow. But you're not to me. So this new organizational structure I think would have a common effect on attrition and I suppose helps reduce the technical talent walking out the door, whether it's technical or content or revenue related because it's about making more sense of what's within the business. I mean, so I suppose to, to finish off completely I hope you'll be impressed. Surprised, relieved. I don't know. I'm not quite sure what would be the right description for it, but whatever it is, I hope once you've had a bit of time to think about this, that you'd be keen to share it with your colleagues and to keep you and them an opportunity to explore for a possible new strategy for the success of your offices and the stability of the business. Thanks for listening. I hope we meet at some stage and perhaps it might be a board meeting. Know who knows? But