 Good afternoon everybody and welcome to today's webinar Express organized by CIM Yorkshire. Before we get started I'd just like to go over a few things so you know how the event will work and how to participate in the Q&A session. The presentation will last approximately 30 to 35 minutes followed by a short 10 to 15 minute Q&A session. You'll be able to post any questions you have by clicking on the question mark which you'll see on the right hand side of your screen if watching on a laptop or on the top or bottom if you're watching on a tablet or smartphone. You can send in your questions at any time during the presentation and will attempt to answer as many as we can during the Q&A at the end. If you'd like to share your thoughts about today's webinar on social media you can use the hashtag CIM events. If you'd like to download a copy of the presentation slides you'll find them in the handout section along with a list of additional reading resources which complements today's topic. We'll also be recording the webinar which will be available to watch again in a few days time on the CIM North Regional webpage and the CIM YouTube channel. The links for both you'll see along the bottom of your screen. So I'd now like to hand you over to Dr Simon Kelly who is our guest speaker today. Over to you Simon. Thank you very much. Before we get into the presentation which is really based on our book which is called Standout Marketing. How to differentiate your organisation and see a sameness. I just want to tell you a little bit about the three authors. First is Dr Paul Johnston who was a colleague of mine when I was working at Sheffield Hallam University. Like me he's a pracidemic. His background was marketing and sales director at Bell Fruit in the gaming industry. He's now at Nottingham Trent. Stacy Danheiser I met when I was running North American Marketing for the biggest telecoms company in the US based out of Denver. Her background is FinTech, telecoms, cable and some other industries. And now she's the founder of Shake Marketing Group. And myself as you could tell from the grey hair even though it's a black and white photo. I've had years of experience in telecoms and IT primarily. I was the marketing director for BT's major business division. I've run North American Marketing for the third biggest telecoms company in the States. I've now called myself a pracidemic. I was at Sheffield Hallam. I'm now at the University of York and with Shake Marketing. I work with the other two principals to help organisations develop powerful standout marketing. OK, so let's talk about the book. We wrote a book before this which some of you may have read called Valueology, Aligning Sales and Marketing to Shape and Deliver Profitable Customer Value Propositions. Now, this book was, if you like, a how to develop value propositions and took you through a process from sort of understanding customers through developing value propositions and executing campaigns. But through our research, we kind of discovered there's a little bit of a problem out here because organisations do seem to have problems differentiating. Let's test out our gut feel on this. And so we did three studies. We've done this for three different industries, but we'll bet good money on the fact if we did it elsewhere, we'd probably find the same thing. So we started with telecoms. That was our background. We analysed the website and Twitter feeds from the top 30 companies in the world, and what we found was they were just all saying the same things. And we did it for data centre companies, and we've also done it for UK universities. You can find white papers for the telecoms and the data centre reports, which are called CSAMELESS, when I give you the website details at the end of the presentation. These were our findings from the CSAMELESS studies. First of all, the 10 most frequently used words on the website and Twitter feeds were all generic business terms, like services, businesses, solutions, and then words specific to the particular industry we're looking at. So for telecoms, it was cloud, connectivity, that kind of thing. Kind of what I'd ask you to reflect on as I'm walking through this is does this thing of sameness apply in your own industry in your own context? Because one thing we did find, which I think is very prevalent, is companies talk way too much about themselves. So in telecoms, we're saying things like we've got a large footprint, we've got a world-class infrastructure, we provide 24-7 support, which everybody else can provide, by the way, and not a lot of this is very relevant to what customers are actually worried about. And then they were all making claims about being able to do fantastical things like helping companies grow and transform. Without any real indication that they understood the problems the customer was facing, or any real specifics about how they could actually solve the customer's problem or problems. So what this leads to is a real lack of differentiation in these industries and other industries where we think this is prevalent. And the problem that causes us for marketers and salespeople is that it's difficult to differentiate when customers actually look us in the eye and say, well, what do you differently or better than the next person in your own industry? 41% of salespeople actually cite lack of differentiation as a big problem and a sales barrier. Though interestingly enough, in our later research, which I'm going to come on to in a minute, when we ask salespeople and marketers about are you clear about what differentiates your organization? Then salespeople had a slightly better idea than marketers. They found it difficult to pinpoint what was the differential for their organization. And when they were trying to articulate what helped them stand out on the website, most people, most companies focus on their own company, their own products, their overall approach and their experience. Not anything that was too customer focused or very customer centric. This may be familiar. So how does this all benefit the customer was the key question we were asking. So what, we've been through all these websites, we can't see any differentiation, which is not clear to us why if we were a customer, we would choose one over the other. And bear in mind, especially it's been heightened during this pandemic. Before the pandemic, lots of research from organizations like the corporate executive board said that people in business to business situations are 67% through the buying cycle before they talk to a salesperson. So all the information that they get through the marketing channel, through the web and Twitter feeds and other forms of communication have become more and more important. So with this data from our CSAMNAS studies, we thought, well, we really need to try and understand this problem a little bit more. So we decided to do what we always prefer to do as the prakademics in us, which is to do some in-depth interviews. So we interviewed a lot of sales leaders, marketing leaders, business leaders, primarily in the UK and the US, but in other countries too. And we had a global survey and we added our findings to our 20 years experience, just 20 for me, it's a lot more than that, of leading organizations and teaching marketing as a practice in leading universities. So combined with that, we came to our findings. And our findings are really about the competencies that are required to be a person who can help an organization stand out in its marketing and selling. And this is where you may be quite surprised and you may be expecting to see some skills and hard skills or soft skills that are not covered in this framework. Bare in mind, we developed this framework from the output of all this research, so it's not just made up. So because we believe in customer value, after all, that's what's at the heart of marketing. We wanted the framework to add up to the word value, and so it did. The five key competencies are visionary, activator, learner, usefulness and evaluator. And so what I'm going to do for the rest of the presentation, I'm going to just give you an overview of each of these five competencies, which are obviously then detailed in the book in much more depth. And I'll ask you to think about as we go through what you would score yourself or your team, just on what you've heard me say. Now, in the book, there are obviously tools that you can use to allow you to assess yourself in a little bit more depth than we would on this call. But it should be an interesting exercise for you to reflect on and give yourself a score as we go through. Before we do that, I just want to make clear that we mean by skill, when we talk about skills, something that you need to do your job. So if you're a footballer, you'd have to be able to tackle and dribble. But in order to be competent as a footballer, you have to be able to combine knowledge, skills and behaviors to do the job in the round, to have resilience, to have vision. If you're a footballer, funnily enough. And that's how we differentiate between skill and competency. OK, the first one is visionary. Now, I think imagine a world where your chief executive comes to you and says, Fred or Frieda, I'm really interested in you telling me what our next strategic move should be rather than would you be able to set up an event to get as many customers as we can online on a Zoom call to try and drive some sales leads? Yeah, so in order to be able to do this, then marketers need to be visionary to be able to foresee the changes in the broader environment. And if you're a salesperson to be able to share those insights with customers and if you're a marketer to be able to portray that in the way that you develop in your strategy and the way that you talk to customers. So this is made up of five key things. First of all, is the ability to have an outside in view that is not to get too obsessed by all the internal meetings and all the internal goings on that happen in those internal meetings. Think about what's happening in the broader environment. And like an eagle fly three or four thousand foot above all the environment around you and take a view as to what looks as though it could be promising or threatening going forward. And like an eagle to be able to zoom in to the thing that looks like it's really the next biggest opportunity or threat, which means that in order to be able to do that, you have to be able to take a view of predicting what's likely to happen. Now, again, we're in we're in encouraging times for developing this particular competence, because we're all going to have to lay bets on how people are going to behave and how they're going to behave differently as we come out of this pandemic. Now, for example, I believe that lots of people are going to want to be social again and people are going to want to have face to face meetings and some online meetings that other people seem to take a different view. And so at some point, we're going to have to predict or guess or imagine what the world might be like in future. So added together, that's what a visionary does. Now, and now there are people from all different sort of backgrounds and experience levels on this call. So if you're a student at this moment in time or you've recently been a student, then you've probably used tools like Pest or Pestle. And what's disappointing is that is really what that kind of tool and that toolkit is supposed to be all about. But very rarely is it used for that and very rarely do I see that organizations actually routinely use tools like that. What's missing both in education and in real organizations is the whole bit about, you know, you do the analysis at looking more broadly, because if you don't and somebody like an Uber is going to come along and eat your breakfast if you're a normal taxi company or the Airbnb is going to come along and eat your breakfast if you're a hotelier. So be aware of all the developments in technology. Be aware of all the developments in your own industry and in the industry's customers. But how can you develop these? Well, before you think about that, I think it'd be useful if you could now write down on a piece of paper in front of you or something that's nearby to you. If you were to give yourself or your team a score out of five where one's pretty poor and five is excellent for this visionary competence. What score would you give yourself and why? So in terms of how to develop this, I think, you know, seek new perspectives. Don't just talk to people in your own organization. Ask yourself if you're you're actually going out there and asking people who may be industry experts or industry analysts or people that are technology experts in areas that apply to your field or people that develop an interest in understanding how customer behaviors are changing because, you know, there's been a lot of changes in customer behavior over the last few years. Certainly, if you're business to business customer, then in your normal life, you know that you can just fire an app open, do things straight away. So why when we do things that are business to business level? Does it seem to take an inordinate amount of time for companies to respond to things which would seem quite simple, given our experience in B2C? The next one is is activator. And this is pretty important to, you know, it's getting by into initiatives that could drive growth in the business. And for marketers, I think it's a really important competence because you've got to be able to ask for the resources and to get the commitment of the people who can drive activity for you inside the organization and or if you are salesperson to get the customer interested enough to be activated to want to buy the thing that you're selling. So there are a few things that we think are important here. One of these terms we actually got from one of the senior executives that we interviewed, and that's something called balanced advocacy. Now, as marketers, most of us start with the opening line. If we true marketers of what's important to the customer and hopefully that's what drives all your behaviors. But quite a lot of people that we interviewed said that they didn't think marketers got a very good grasp as to what actually worked both for the customer and for the organization, balanced advocacy. And certainly people who led sales organizations, you may recognize they said sometimes salespeople, if they're managing big accounts, go native and don't take enough appreciation of what the thing that they're suggesting that the customer needs could do for the profitability of their own organization. So that's balanced advocacy. The second thing and it's pretty key is listening. You know, a lot of the research output that we got from our interview said that, you know, marketers quite often move into an environment where they've developed an idea quite often in a room full of marketers and then try to mobilize that idea without listening enough to what the other people in the organization think like the salespeople and like the other executives. So we say don't go into discussions with a fully baked idea and go with the bones of a good idea and then listen to to input from people who may have more experience or different perspective from you and then shape the idea for success. And in order to do this, I think marketers need to get better at understanding that when you take an idea back into the organization for development, you're in a negotiation situation, you know, that not everything that you you were taking forward is going to get over the line. So you're going to have to appreciate that some things you might have to give up on, other things you might have to ramp up. And, you know, while salespeople almost always all get to the negotiation training, we don't find that this happens very much for marketers. Now, above all else as a marketer, you have to have tenacity because we all read the Great Wall Stories about how Dyson had ideas turned down for his what turned out to be fantastic hoovers. I'm sure you wouldn't like me to call them that. But as marketers, we're trying to get approval for things and we're not always going to get approval. And even if we do, then we're going to have competing ideas from lots of other functions like HR that are going to take up time of the people that we need to have invested in our idea. So you have to keep the idea from to mind and be tenacious, tenacious, tenacious to drive it through. And this takes a certain amount of people centricity. You know, some of the salespeople's sales leaders set up. It's amazing that some people who the salespeople don't seem to be as people centric as they really need to be because it's a people business. And what we've tried to do with this whole competence framework is to try and say marketing is talk, certainly at universities and is seen as a technical skill set where you go through certain stages and it doesn't pay enough attention to the actual skills and competencies required by marketers. And so finally for the activator, there's a thing called contextualization, which we think is really important. So we appreciate that the difficult thing a marketer has to do is to develop communication and develop messaging for the whole of the customer base for the organization. For example, on the website, you have to talk to all the customer base. But in order to be able to help a salesperson, you're going to be able to talk in the language of the customer that the salesperson is talking to at an individual level and an organization level. So you've got to be able to talk at those different levels of context in order to be able to activate your idea and be successful. OK, so again, score yourself out of one to five for that. I actually think that the first thing you could try to do, if you don't think you know this already, is actually think about how your company actually makes money. Quite often there is a disconnect between the chief marketing officer and the chief exec, because this is not clearly enough understood. And one of the guys who interviewed who was a commercial director for a big global organization, which is a marketer from the beginning of his career, he was apoplectic about the fact that, you know, he had a lot of marketers that worked for him over the years who who just didn't seem to appreciate, you know, the the business model for the company that they were working for and how the company made money. And so we're coming up with with ideas that weren't really driving their own business forward. OK, so the learner learned from changes in the environment in what your customers value and in what sets you apart from competitors. I think by the very fact that you're on this call and you probably join other calls like this, demonstrates a propensity to learn. So you should be ahead of the bunch of other people who aren't doing things like this. At the heart of this is curiosity. And you can see there's a link between all these different competencies. And of course, there should be. Be curious about the environment. Be curious about what's changing in the customer's world. Be curious and naive about what your company's doing and question why it's doing things and why it might be checking to a product product approach when you know that a different path is a better way forward. You know, be proactive and engaged in what's happening in your in your own business and in the environment around it. And above all, be reflective about what's worked about how your own behavior is actually influencing results positively or negatively. The next thing we think is to be fearless and to be able to experiment. You may have read or seen an IBM report called the Modern Marketing Mandate where it looked at chief marketing officers and said, you know, CMOs need to strategically address how to help their own organizations develop value. And they classified CMOs into three different levels. Reinventors, practitioners and aspirational. And if you see in the detail of that report, that they demonstrate that the reinventers are the ones whose businesses are performing much better. And what they actually call out in that is that reinventers do fearlessly experiment, try something if it works, keep it rolling, learn from it, reflect, improve. If it doesn't work, then pull away from it. Yeah. And overall, be receptive to new ideas. And again, you're on this call today. So I guess that's something you always try to do. But people don't do that often enough. So how good are you and your team at learning on a scale of one to five, you think? OK. Get into the last two. This is probably a really important one. I think we could have used different words, but we had to have a word that began with you to fit in with the value theme. And so we call it usefulness. I mean, overall, it's really about relevance by differentiating in a way that's relevant, practical and resonates with customers. So what you need to be able to do here is to connect the dots, to connect the dots from the problems that you've identified that customers have. Because you're a learner and you're trying to be a visionary, you're always trying to understand what the issues are that are affecting the customer and his environment or her environment. So the learner competence really pays dividends in this usefulness competency. And let's not hide away from this. Marketeers can develop a bad reputation here because there's this marketing activity illusion where we're driven to do stuff because it looks good if we produce brochures and we produce campaigns. But corporate executive board research said that 94 percent of organizations said that they tuned out from other organizations because they were receiving stuff which just wasn't relevant to them. So this usefulness is key to success and usefulness therefore is about being customer centric but also being disciplined, disciplined in pushing back and saying to the people who come to you with new requests, you know, that seems like a great idea but is it actually something that the customers will appreciate and will resonate with them and to be flexible and adaptable to changes in the customer's world and in your own world. Okay, so what do you think to your own usefulness? What we're asking you to think about here is to deviate from the assembly line approach. You've always been driven to do campaigns and think about concentrating on smaller amounts of things that develop your brand and develop connectivity with the customer if you want to call it that. So finally, we get to evaluate it. This is not just about what's working or not from a marketing campaign or program standpoint. It's also the ability to evaluate in an objective way or as objective way as possible what could actually work or not, okay? So it may surprise you what's in this chapter because, you know, we're not naive and neither are the people who we spoke to are all sales marketing or business leaders but overall, you know, you need to be seen as the marketeer who's doing this evaluation about your own programs to have a level of integrity to be able to be trusted as a person in an organization or the chief exec can go to and say, do you think this can work or not work? And therefore, once again, you have to be able to demonstrate balanced advocacy of considering what's gonna work for the customer in your own organization and to be able to connect the dots here between the things you were trying to achieve and the actions that got taken and which of them worked or not. But interesting enough, above anything else you need political now some persuasion because I'm sure we all know that it's not just about numbers and you're not gonna operate in an environment where anybody's gonna wanna see their own pet project taken off the agenda, even if the numbers say that they should. So, you know, there's an amount of persuasion in those situations of political nows to make sure that this evaluation takes place in a non-threatening way. So, to develop your evaluation skills just sort of always ask the question, well, so what and now what do we do because clearly the evaluation needs to help you reflect on what's worked to decide what to take forward or not. So again, think about how you score yourself one to five. So, in the book, there's a slightly bigger model which also explains as I'm sure you'd expect that all this has to take place inside your own organization's culture and is driven by how the leadership behaves in an organization and we appreciate that and that knowledge in the book and a couple of chapters that draws things together at the end. So, how we can help going forward is if you want, we can do lunch and learn sessions where we can take you on your team through an exercise similar to this and we can dive deeper and look at workshops which explore how the competences are made up in a bit more granularity and discuss that and develop that with your teams and we're developing an assessment. There are lots of assessment tools in the book and so there's the stuff there that can help you immediately but we're looking to get sort of a heavy-weight assessment of this sort of Myers-Briggs type if you want to call it that, that people can use to assess the sales and the teams going forward. So, if you're interested in that or any of these offers of help going forward then just let me know. So, I hope that's provoked some thought. I mean, here's some resources going forward. In terms of the book, I don't know if you've been on this podcast it's called the Marketing Book Podcast. It is to my mind the best podcast about marketing books in the whole world, run by Douglas Podetta of Virginia in the States. He's reviewed over 600 books and he says that standout marketing is one of the three books that every marketeer should read to have a successful career. The other two are the 12 powers of marketing leader and another one. So, you can buy with a 20% discount at the moment from the CIM bookshop or through Kogan page in there, the codes. There are more resources on our website. If you are interested in further discussion there are my contact details, especially if you're interested in assessment as we develop it going forward and feel free to LinkedIn with me. That's my LinkedIn profile. Okay, more resources on our website. So, I hope you've had a chance to absorb some of that. It's always a bit quick and rushed on these kind of environments and fairly impersonal because all I can see is a number at the corner of my screen but I'd be happy to hand over for Q&A now. Okay, that's great. Thanks Simon. Just by reminder, don't forget, you can still download a copy of Simon's presentation and the list of additional reading materials which you'll find in the handout section. Okay, so we're now gonna have a short Q&A session and don't forget you can still submit any questions you have and we'll try and get through as many as we can in the next five to 10 minutes or so. And just a reminder that if you're enjoying today's webinar and want to post on social media you can use the hashtag CIMEvents. Okay, our first question is Simon, apart from the sales team who else are the key stakeholders within the organisation that you should attempt to negotiate with? Well, I think that's interesting and clearly the CFO is always somebody you've got to try and convince depending on the scale of the task that you're trying to move forward. And ultimately, if you're the Chief Marketing Officer it has to be the Chief Exec. And then there are other people depending on what is your mobilising. So if it's a product that needs developing then the product shop and engineering may have to help if you're in that kind of organisation. So I think that one of the tough things about being a marketeer is your key job, the key part of the job is alignment and getting people aligning your own organisation. So it will differ from one organisation to another but has to and must include sales, the Chief Finance Officer, the Chief Exec in some form or other, at least. Okay, second question, once we know our score how do we act on that, for example? Does a certain score mean do X or could you advise? Yeah, that's interesting and that's why we're developing the, if you like, heavyweight assessment tool. Now in the book that there are tools that can help you're an advisor in each particular area. I mean, there's a link question which we sometimes get which is, do you need to be able to do all of these to be a successful marketeer? And that really depends. I think like a Myers-Briggs, if you like, it can help you at an individual level but tools like Belbin, which are more team focused. I think if you're running a team then I would say you need to have a balance of these competencies but not necessarily all of them should you be fantastic at. But yeah, there are tools in the book that can help you depending on your score and that's why we're also developing this more, if you like, heavyweight assessment tool as well as the tools that are in the book already. Doki, where does segmentation fit into your thinking? I think that's right at the beginning. I think one of the interesting things was in many B2B organizations for sure, salespeople drive a lot of what's going off and therefore marketeers think they need to do campaigns the whole time. A lot of the sales leaders said, we need marketing to step up more to talk about what they see for the future and which new segments or which segments we should be concentrating on in order to develop successful, go-forward business. Yeah, so yeah, right in between the visionary and the activator is the whole segmentation piece. Yeah. Great. Okay, do you have any examples of companies that have managed to differentiate themselves and what do you think they have done well? Well, I don't think I'd come out with anything that's too far away from what people would expect. I mean, on a business to business level though, I think I'd probably use somebody like salesforce.com who first of all, realize they're an environment that the existing offers were way too complicated and started to develop something which was much more user-friendly and also developed a brand based on a real purpose rather than just, if you like, using text-peak the whole time. Other than that, I mean, I would always encourage people if they don't look at it routinely to look at, you know, Interbrand's list of the 100 most valuable global brands and dig into some of those because it's usually because they've differentiated the sales well and took the brand more seriously than others do in the same field. Okay, this next question comes from the heart, actually. How do you break out of the numbing but regular experience of the discretionary marketing budget being one of the first areas to cut when belt tightening happens? Oh, wow. That's a great question and it's the one about world peace. Yeah, the book I'm just reading because I'm going to do a podcast with these guys now is one called Humanizing B2B and I think this is back to this question about negotiation. Quite often, it's the chief exec who has a poor understanding of what brand is, yeah, and therefore what marketing is. And so I think there's a job that needs to be done at a senior level of really making the senior execs to understand what the value is in marketing beyond just campaigns. But then at the more routine level articulated in this competence set is I do think we have to get better at being able to evaluate what's worked and what's not worked to demonstrate that if the marketing budget does get cut, there's going to be an adverse effect on performance and if it does get raised, then it will have a positive effect, yeah. And I'm not just making that up. I mean, it is part of my role at BT. I did actually get the marketing budget increased by fivefold when I was the head of marketing for that particular division. So I'm not just making that up, folks, OK? But I acknowledge that it's tough. I also think there's a question that individuals need to ask themselves, perhaps when the economic conditions are improved, to understand, is it sometimes if you're a marketeer and you're in an organisation where the culture's not right, then you're never going to put that right, that attitude of, oh, we're always going to reduce marketing spending tough times. And if you're in that environment, you need to think about if that's right for you over time, yeah. OK, what strategies would you use in a market that is dominated by a particular brand? That's interesting. And as an answer to any question in marketing, it always depends now on what the reason is for its domination and what its weaknesses are, and whether it is that dominant brand that you need to challenge in order to get market share. We've talked about Uber as an example, and we've talked about Airbnb, who is a brand new to the world invention who took away share from lots of the biggest hotels. And so that's an extreme example, but even in a market that's dominated by one brand that have got to be segments and have got to be opportunities to actually develop new offers and to talk to customers in new ways that can drive you growth, yeah. OK, this refers back to something you presented earlier, which is can you explain contextualization further, please, and being able to talk to the customer and sales language. You referred to use of websites for this. Yeah, yeah. This is in both of our books, actually. We have a tool called the Value Stack, and so I'll just talk briefly through that. So what we're saying is that if you're a marketing director or the chief marketing officer, then you have to be able to talk to the whole of the customer base through your broader communications. So what I did when I was at BT in a major business role is I stopped talking about 5,000 products and we started to talk about two big themes, one of those being agility. In other words, we can help you be more agile, and that's what we actually communicated to all customers across the whole of the business landscape. But then as you move towards the actual customer, a person in an organization, first of all, if you split your customers by industry sector, then you need to sort of tailor what agility means for that industry sector, yeah. And then when you move from industry sector, say banking towards an individual organization like HSBC, you have to be able to express that in their context. And then when you're talking to HSBC, if you look at the research, there's any number between six and 10 people will be required to make a decision about what's being purchased. So you need to be able to speak in the context of each of those different people, both from a role perspective, chief finance officer, chief marketing officer, chief technology officer or whatever, and to those people as human beings. So that's the different levels of context. And of course, as a marketer, you've got to be able to talk in the language of the salespeople throughout that to be able to get them to work with you to mobilize some of the campaigns and programs you're developing. Thank you. So this one is really a comment for discussion really. Is the reason so many businesses sound or look so similar because they have to occupy easily identifiable territory to reassure customers. If you look too different, you risk being unconvincing or dangerous. I think that's an interesting point. Yeah. I mean, what we're saying is that we would agree with that to a degree, but we think that a lot of the people are using the same language, but it's the same language that's actually not appealing or resonant with customers. But we do explain in the book why this tendency towards sameness happens. And whoever asked that question has nailed that. As human beings, we have this herd instinct. And just as a piece of gold dust, I don't know if anybody else saw this in LinkedIn. I saw that somebody posted a rejection letter to Brian Ferry, who was lead singer of Roxy Music. If anybody knows that band, Polydor, the record company, rejected Roxy Music, saying that you thought the music was great and different from everything else that was out there, but it was too risky for them to take them on board. And the rest is history. Roxy Music got another label and were a massively successful band. So we're saying out there that there is money to be made by being different. And I'm sure we can all think about companies that have driven performance by being sufficiently different and proud about the brand. Yeah. OK. Probably time for a couple more questions. A lot of the same tactics are applied to B2B marketing, for example, newsletters, white papers, blogs. In order to differentiate, should we move away from the same tactics that are applied by our customers? Our competitors, sorry. Yeah. I think that's interesting. Again, I just sort of refer back to the most recent book I've been reading myself about, you know, humanising business to business. A lot of the research that's been done for LinkedIn, the LinkedIn B2B marketing practice by Lesbian A and Field. So there's talked about the fact that there's too much activation in business to business, meaning the word in a different way that we're talking about in a competence set. But too many programs, too many different campaigns and that we should do more like business to consumer and do more if you like brand and value building. So yeah, think about moving more of the spend away from activity that's sort of straight line, oh, let's do this to try and develop more leads, to think about how can we help our brand stand out and look different, yeah. And therefore try some stuff as well. OK, great. Final question then. I work with SMEs and find that it is often a huge disconnect between business owner, managers and an often junior marketing person focused on mark-ons. Could your approach have a role in healing this rift and helping SMEs see marketing as more than comes? Oh, wow. Yeah, some brilliant questions here. That's great. I mean, we call this phenomenon, and I'm not playing this myself. I worked with somebody called Sheila Hannah when I worked in BT. She was a senior marketer and she used to call this thing, Kids Against Tanks, yeah. It happens in big business where junior marketers have to rub up against account directors who are really experienced and paid lots of money to look after the biggest accounts. And it happens in SMEs because at the outset, the SME owner, a leader, thinks that the marketing job is about communications. And so we often find and we help quite a lot organizations think about, OK, well, who is it you should be hiring next? It has to be a transition from the junior marketer who's just about comms towards hiring people who can help drive and develop the strategy, yeah? Because otherwise, where are you going to get this visionary competence set from to think about where you're going to take your organization going forward? So that's a great question and it's tough. But I think it becomes a time where every startup business moving towards being an SME where they have to make the switch from junior mark-ons people to more strategic marketers. Yeah, yes, that was indeed a great question. And we've had some other great questions and answers there too, Simon. So thank you very much for that. Unfortunately, that's all we've got time for for our webinar today. I'd like to say thank you to Simon for today's presentation. And so I am Yorkshire for organizing the event. I hope you found it interesting and worthwhile. Our next webinar's rest, the science of storytelling is next week on Tuesday the 13th of April at one o'clock. This one's hosted by CIM East of England. You'll find it listed on the events page on the CIM website where you'll be able to find out more information and register for the session. And finally, you'll be emailed a short survey on today's webinar. We'd love to hear your feedback. It'll only take a few minutes and all survey responses are anonymous. So let us know your thoughts. On behalf of CIM, thank you once again, Simon, for your presentation. And thank you for joining us. We hope you enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you very much. Goodbye.