April 2025 wrap-up
What have I been doing and learning this month? This blog post triples as my notes, a status update, and a way to share the things I found interesting this month.
Highlights
This has been a great month! Three standout highlights:
- Starting a new contract with Bolt
- Reading SPIN Selling (seriously, I loved this book, which sounds crazy when talking about reading up on sales, but it was great)
- Creating a blog post on Docs like code in very basic terms: I wrote it in response to a question, and it seems to have met a genuine need. I'm now mulling future larger projects along the same lines.
Oh, and the geese in my town have had goslings!
Writing
It's been a productive month! I've continued to build out website content around Services and Guides, although there's still a lot more to do (I have a gradually-growing-stale branch with a bunch of additional guides 😬)
Blog posts:
- Thinking first, AI second: a short post that addresses using AI without damaging your own thinking and learning.
- Review: Marketing Week MiniMBA in Marketing: my belated review of the marketing course I took last winter.
- Docs like code in very basic terms: in response to questions from a colleague, I wrote a guide to docs like code that starts from the absolute basics, assuming almost no existing tech knowledge.
And last but certainly not least, I started a new contract for Bolt 🎉
Reading
Scorecard Marketing - Daniel Priestley
This was an amusingly meta read that I picked up free from a meetup. It's about how to generate warm leads, using the product the book is promoting (an app to build quizzes and generate scorecards). So we have a book about warm leads . . . designed to generate warm leads . . . for a product that generates warm leads.
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Joking apart, there was some useful info in the first section, especially for someone very new to this whole leadgen thing. In particular, the idea that it's easier to sell to people when you're the one to awaken their dormant desire for a product or solution (as opposed to selling to people who already know they want something and are actively looking) was a new perspective for me.
How to Win Friends and Influence People - Dale Carnegie
Can you tell I'm trying to skill up in sales? 😅
This is one of those classics you repeatedly hear mentioned, but how many people actually read? I have to admit, I went in with a ton of assumptions: I expected a guide to cuthroat negotiation and networking, arrogance, examples of characters straight out of Suits or Mad Men. Instead, the core message can be summed up as:
- People will like you better, and be more likely to do what you want, if you're nice to them.
- Being aggressive is counterproductive.
- Listen, empathise, put yourself in the other person's shoes.
- And be genuine about it: don't fake interest, compliments, or sympathy. Find a way to be genuinely interested in the other person.
So a weirdly relevant read, given the current hyper-aggressive negotiation that keeps making headlines. Also a bit of a relief that a foundational sales text turns out to not be awful.
SPIN Selling - Neil Rackham
This book seems to make it onto a lot of 'must read' lists for sales reading, so I picked up a copy. And . . . it's definitely the highlight of the month's professional development. In fact, I'm struggling to think of another (profession-related) book I've read that was this good. I love that everything is underpinned by research, and how Rackham is transparent about when the research is lacking. I also enjoyed the occasional light humour.
It sets out a method for handling sales calls, especially for large purchases. This sounds simple, but the book is fascinating: immense amounts of detailed research into why certain techniques work (and others don't), the crucial differences between small and large purchases (which change user behaviour, and thus affect which sales techniques are successful).
To very briefly summarise, the SPIN technique recommends using four different question types during the investigation stage of a call or sales process, to gradually elicit explicit needs from the customer. The book also discusses other stages of the process, and covers when to introduce things like discussing benefits, and how to handle closing the call (or rather, why you shouldn't do a traditional close).
I highly recommend this book: for anyone in sales, anyone with an interest in sales, or anyone who hates sales but has to do it as part of their job.
Watching
The Marketing Meetup: What working in a large corporate taught me about branding growing businesses - Nishma Robb
A little tricky to summarise as this was in conversation format rather than presentation.
Nishma started by talking about her new focus on helping women be more visible and achieve financial freedom through their businesses.
The focus then switched to small business marketing:
- What can you know? And how to process that data? It's important to be genuinely interested in your customer's needs. Allow space for open feedback/comments on forms.
- Don't over-automate when you're small. You want to be engaged and responsive, so don't automate and go hands-off too soon.
- Be consistent with your branding: what codes can you repeat everywhere to build recognition?
- Take advantage of the free stuff that's out there.
- Be constantly learning. Two things she does each week:
- Try something new with AI.
- Meet someone new.
- Build in public, be collaborative, be open.
What makes a great brand?
- Every brand cue should explain the brand.
- People associate brands with how others see them. Reputation matters.
Tell the story. For example, when marketing Chrome, nobody cares about a browser: tell the story about what the browser enables. Your users will tell you great stories, if you listen to them.
The Marketing Meetup: The copywriter's guide to building brands - John Thornton
John is writing for a cereal startup, Surreal. They take a distinctive sarcastic tone, avoiding the more typical happy-sunny tone of most cereal brands.
- On making sure the product stays in focus: esepcially when new, you need to mention the product (can't rely on logo recognition etc.) When it's not natural to mention it, make the awkwardness of mentioning it part of the humour.
- Goes for a fictionalised version of a social media manager as the character behind the ads.
- In the comments, people mentioned that creating a persona for the social media poster character can be helpful.
- Treat organic social primarily as part of long term brand building and awareness building, not as short term lead gen.
- Selling ideas internally: hard to get data for an idea that doesn't exist. So try to find similar projects and campaigns (or elements of the idea) that used similar mechanics.
The Marketing Meetup: Public speaking & speaking to your brand (workshop) - Max Hoppy
Intro
- Loved watching his Dad speak (was an auctioneer). Showed him what a valuable skill it was.
- While working for Iceland, had a panic attack when asked to speak publicly. Quit his job as a result.
- Went and learnt how to be a good public speaker.
- Founded The Keynote Club to help others learn.
Your speaking territory
- Do I have the right to speak on a topic? Yes, if:
- You have lived experience
- You have "belly energy". You have a fire that makes you want to talk about it.
- You have less nerves if you feel you have the right to speak.
- Do I have audience fit? Yes, if:
- Topic is relevant
- You have empathy for the audience
| Lived experience | Belly energy | Ideal audience | Secondary audience |
|---|---|---|---|
| Topic | Score out of 5 | The best audience for this topic | Other audiences it could be relevant to |
Building your outline
Create draft answers to these questions:
- What's the working title?
- How will this help the audience?
- What do you want the audience to do next?
Then create a rough outline. This should not be pretty. All first drafts should make you feel queasy.
| Section | Description |
|---|---|
| Start | Aim is to get people engaged. Don't say good morning, don't tell them yourname, don't do housekeeping (those go in your intro). Try things like: short story, rhetorical question, cool piece of data or quote, contrasting scenarios, list of three. |
| Intro | Title and what to expect |
| Chapter 1 | Title and three bullet points |
| Chapter 2 | Title and three bullet points |
| Chapter 3 | Title and three bullet points |
| End | Three parts: first, the three chapter headings. Second, full circle: loop back to the start and complete the story (gives sense of completion, signals the talk is nearing an end). Third: a call to action. Invite the audience to think, or sign up for something. |
Next, assign timings to each section. You could also do this at the start, if you have a defined timeslot. Err on the side of making it shorter: no-one minds if the talk is under, it's a pain if it's over.
Now take some time away. Sleep on it. Go for a walk. Reflect. Rinse and repeat.
Then start tightening it up:
- Title tweaks
- Start and end link improvements
- Play with the chapter flow
If your prep time is limited, make sure the start and end are strong. These hook people, and take care of the last impression.
Bringing to life
Draft letter:
The Marketing Meetup: How to measure the impact of brand marketing - Matthew Herbert
This was a decent webinar but quite hard to note-take, as it was an interview format. It covered the usual high-level info around what to measure and the value of brand building. Sadly it never really got into the details of how to track, even in the tactics and tools section toward the end.
Metrics
What gets tracked in practice:
- Early stage companies often just measure generic metrics like website visits.
- Measurement gets more sophisticated as companies grow: funnel health, NPS, share of voice etc.
For brand tracking: are your metrics related?
- Impressions don't correlate to brand.
- No correlation between engagement metrics and brand awareness.
- Better brand awareness massively increased conversion efficiency.
Value of brand
Need to balance marketing spend between the small number of people ready to buy right now, and the large number who will be in the future (the long and the short of it again)
Neglecting brand harms you long term: see the example of Nike, who shifted hard to performance marketing, and are now seeing damage to their funnel.
Brand both supports customer acquisition, and builds defensability through customer loyalty.
Brand building means long term thinking, and long term results. But brand is the platform for your performance engine - acts as a multiplier, raises the ceiling on your performance marketing.
Tools and tactics for measuring
What to use depends on product/company stage.
- Early stage: focus on proving product-market fit, maybe don't worry too much about brand.
- As you grow, you want to track perceptions. Are people aware of you?
- Very large brands: you want really detailed metrics, probably using dedicated companies to help you.
There are tools and companies that support companies at every stage.
Founder-led businesses
Founder personal brands can be powerful, but are risky.
Before going founder-led, check your customers will actually care about that.
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