Issue #25

In This Issue: Vile Rumour & Gossip | Retail Technology Show (UK) debrief | A reminder about “brand”

Feb 14, 2025

A milestone of discipline for us. Now we’re on the merry-go-round of content creation there is a temptation to measure, analyse and augment. We resist this wholeheartedly and will merely plough on saying what we think.

Vile Rumour & Gossip

When Marketing controls the BDRs

Occasionally we hear that SDR/BDR (the annoying at-scale phone guys for customer types) are ending up reporting to Marketing. Now then, normally these teams roll up to sales, after all, it’s sales who they feed. But sometimes there’s a kerfuffle about lead quality, messaging and metrics - so Marketing puts its hand up and says “OK, we’ll do it”.

Whatever you think about cold calling, it’s sticking around. Hammer and nail we’re afraid. Marketing will greatly ease the customer’s pain by training BDRs better, controlling the pitch (more customer-focused) and generally aligning ABM through the cycle. However we often see that BDRs lose out on sales promotion opportunities by becoming “Marketing Soft”, or start to churn through frustration in the war between sales and marketing.

In the end, this is a sign that sales and marketing do not absolutely trust one another. Nuff said.

Paid Social makes no money

It’s a fact. Right now every online performance marketer will tell you that no matter how hard they try, Meta and the rest make NO money. Cost of acquisition is now so high that the margin is generally a rounding error and so, these channels should be avoided for those trying to grow profitably.

So far in the last 12 months social channels have raised prices as much by as 90%, we guess it had to end sometime. At the same time, targeting is weaker whilst Meta’s profits have never been greater. We didn’t think we’d ever say it, but thank goodness for Google.

Beware SaaS-owned events

A whole slew of vendor-owned events this quarter. Elevate, Unlock, Incentivize, LifeCycle and many more. The variation in quality of execution is significant here, and the levels of sponsorship and ROI from these events for ecosystem partners vary even more.

Of course, every challenger brand marketing textbook says you should own your path rather than following others, but there is no better way of losing the trust of your ecosystem than by letting partners down (we should know, we let some people down in 2023 and it still hurts). More importantly, customers and prospects are expecting a high-quality experience where they learn, whilst partners are hunting for sales opps, and so the misalignment can be scary and cause lasting damage.

This year we’re being asked to help with 8 of these events at the last count - which we love. But we need to stay true to our spirit of creating learning experiences rather than sales experiences. A reminder to us all.

Retail Technology Show (UK) debrief

A quick summary of this show. Once called RBTE (we never went), but now absolutely rammed. Our participation was amazing, but we're looking forward to 2025 as it gets much more interesting. The show will move to ExCeL London which is much more comfortable, and it is definitely transitioning into an “Anychannel” event.

For those on a Q2 planning exercise for the next year in digital, this is a contender. The guys from eCommerce Expo were at the show looking a little nervous, that’s how good it was. We’ll have numbers about how the visitor roles shifted from store tech people to Omni and eComm in a few weeks.

A reminder about brand

The Commerce Futures community is often referenced by our clients as our secret sauce. They're right of course, but this group is not some weaponised cult of digital leaders, rather the #payitforward bunch who help one another cry about SAP failings, tricky tech for bundles and how much they all dislike Bazaarvoice 🙂

Recently the chatter has turned back to conversations about brand. The group is really varied, from CTOs to CX and eComm leaders, with fewer straight marketers. For these guys to want a debate solely about brand is fascinating - almost like they want to check in again about the state of their brands given how much they’ve been discounting this last year.

When we talk about the current state of play in digital we hear from almost everyone - “We’re flat for growth but we’re profitable”. How times have changed.

Creating Events of Value to You

A final request. We are currently planning our event calendar for 2025 and want to make sure we have events that will actually be of value to you and the audience you wish to engage with. But to do this we need your help.

If you can spare 5 minutes to fill in our events planning survey, it would be much appreciated.