Lessons from London

• As an industry we are still trying to work out how to conduct ourselves effectively in the post-Covid and now intra-Trump era. There doesn’t seem to be any established route to getting attention, showing value, and differentiating. People are having to get highly creative (which is always a good thing).
• The market is still suffering from over valuation during the Covid era. Many companies still haven’t grown into their valuations a few years post investment and so have had their attention turned from innovation to cost cutting and recovery. The result is now an era of lower valuations and nervousness to invest and to be invested in.
• Profitability, or near profitability is now valued more highly than year on year growth. Around the room, relative weightings of between 2 and 3 times were cited as to how much profitability is valued compared to YOY growth. The era of ‘grow at any cost’ is long behind us.
• Buyers are becoming more risk-averse and engaging successfully requires patience, consistency, and a tangible relationship between your people and your brand.
• Trust is key and the beginning of the process of establishing trust comes through engagement with your brand. Companies need to think about how future customers can get a strong and accurate sense of what you will be like to work with before they’ve even met you.
• Buyers need evidence of capability. The sales approach of selling ideas or software which is 90% PowerPoint doesn’t work. Evidence based selling is key, and you should be thinking more about how you prove your product, or service works than it’s features and functions.
• Given the above two statements, Sales and Marketing need to work more closely together than ever – Marketing is a vital part of the sales cycle, and their processes need to be tightly integrated with sales processes.
• Peoples’ screens and feeds are increasingly becoming saturated with AI generated content. We are still (though I am not sure for how long) at a point in the development of AI where most humans can instinctively tell what AI is generated, and what is not. The need to be authentic and thoughtful in your content development is therefore particularly important to get any attention.
• Being a ‘partner,’ being ‘end to end,’ being ‘full service’ are not differentiators. Leading with those sorts of messages will have consumers switched off before they even get to the important messages about what makes you special.
• Your marketing team is your entire employee base – think about that for a while – do they know your values and your core proposition? We live in a very connected world and if you think the only people communicating with the market are your sales and customer success teams, you are mistaken.
• The network of networks (the sum of all the relevant contacts of all your employees) is probably your most under-utilised resource. It shouldn’t be just your BD team who are incentivised to engage with their networks, it should be everyone. Why not pay a small bonus to anyone who sets up a meeting which results in new business?
• AI is already costed in – what do I mean by that? Well, most of us are already using AI tools (Chat GPT, Gemini, Co-pilot, etc) as part of our daily working practices. Therefore, for non-commoditised activities there isn’t a ‘with AI’ and ‘without AI’ price – we’re using AI to do the heavy lifting and it’s enabling us to focus on the quality, innovation, and relevance of what we’re doing, resulting in a better outcome.
• Everyone should be thinking about their AI story. What’s an AI story? Three simple considerations:

• • How is AI impacting your target market?
  • How is AI helping your business to be more efficient?
  • How should you leverage AI in your product or service?

• Finally, there are a lot of creative, passionate and incredibly intelligent people in our industry who genuinely care about progressing science and protecting humanity. They want to add value every day and are just trying to work out how to do that in a rather unpredictable world.

I hope some or all these points resonate and cause you to think and consider your own businesses. I know that I get stuck in the day to day for most of my working week and writing this has helped me think about the bigger picture – I hope it does the same for you. I also thought you might appreciate a bit of writing which has been nowhere near an AI engine!

Best regards,

Duncan