Magnus Wood
Most firms buy attention. I build the thing that earns it, and the engine that turns it into pipeline.
In one company that was a monthly CPD programme. In another it was AWARE, an index of abuse against frontline workers. There were 130 studies of the subject already and none that joined what workers face to what their employer does about it. Different every time.
I am a former consultancy CMO. I help firms win new clients by building what their market will come to them for, and the follow-up that turns the interest into work.
What I build
The asset.
The hard part is not building it. It is working out what your market wants badly enough to come and get, which is almost never the thing you want to say about yourself. That takes the first few weeks. Sometimes what comes out is a programme or a publication. Sometimes it is a number the whole market ends up quoting.
Your name will be on it, so people will expect you to have something to sell. It needs to be useful whether or not they ever become a customer. That might mean giving speakers room to disagree with you or publishing findings that do not support your sales pitch.
The engine.
I bring marketing and sales together as one team, with a shared plan for winning work. That covers who to target, how to reach them and who takes responsibility as interest develops into a commercial opportunity.
- Agreed stages from first contact to won work, with someone responsible at each step
- Reporting that shows what activity produces, where opportunities stall and how much becomes revenue
I establish how the team works together and help them put it into practice. You keep the people, processes and reporting needed to run it after I leave.
At the end you own the asset, the target list, the stage definitions and the reporting. They stay when I go.
What that has meant
Tetra Consulting. A private-equity backed consultancy in a regulated market.
Monthly CPD webinars, a monthly podcast, executive briefings and round tables, all built for buyers who had no reason to take a sales call. I defined the core prospects and built the activity around reaching them, and put it into stages the board could read.
None of it ran as marketing. The briefings put salespeople in front of their prospects, and put those prospects in front of existing clients. They also gave the team a reason to go back to someone without selling to them. Webinar subjects were tied to what the company sold, so people who attended went back to sales as warm leads on a named service. We built sales enablement for each service, new and existing, from sales aids to call scripts.
When the new business function underperformed, I raised it with the CEO and my team assumed practical responsibility for new business. At a board meeting the chair asked who was running it. I said I was, the board agreed, and it was minuted.
Reveal Media. The AWARE Index.
Reveal sells body-worn cameras into retail and healthcare. AWARE measures abuse against frontline workers in retail and healthcare. It is funded by Reveal. It names no employer and recommends nothing. The first reading covers 9,502 workers across UK retail, US retail and UK healthcare, and it publishes monthly from October. Reviewing a year of published work it found 130 studies of frontline abuse, and none that joined what workers face, what their employer does about it and how they are faring afterwards.
The constraint is the product. A measure that could name a competitor or recommend a camera would not be quoted by anyone.
Wild Leadership, my own practice. Gen X at Work.
I built Gen X at Work to bring people to my own business. It is for owners and leaders of my generation, dealing with the pressures of running a company or working out what comes after it. I know those questions because I have had to answer them myself. It tells the story of their working lives, from the world they started in to the jobs they hold now, and what happens when those jobs end. Enter your birth year and you see the events at the age you lived through them.
Alongside that are personal accounts of what people expected the top to be like and what they found when they got there.
Who it is for
I work with people who own the business they run.
You may be winning work through people who already know you and unable to reach buyers who do not. Or making the shortlist regularly and losing to companies whose offer is easier to understand.
Both of those run through you. That is the ceiling.
The shape of it
- First
- I work out what your market will come to you for, and why they are not coming now. You get a design for the asset and what building it would take. A few weeks
- Then
- You decide whether to build it. If you do, I deliver to that scope
- Who does what
- I design and build the asset. Your people run the engine, and I stay alongside them until they do not need me
- How long
- Project dependent. No more than six months
- Rate
- Scoped by project
- At the end
- The asset and the engine, and your people running them
- How many
- I take a small number at a time
Let’s talk
Tell me where you want to win more work and what you have tried so far. We can spend half an hour discussing whether I can help.
Email meMagnus Wood