DaveStevensNow

Blogging about Profitable B2B Marketing | Branding | Digital | Team-Building

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about

Dave is an experienced global B2B Chief Marketing Officer / Marketing Director with an established reputation for delivering commercial results in start-up, mid-tier, and blue-chip businesses across technology, and business services and professional services sectors. Dave has worked for major brands such as Telefonica O2, EY, and Barclays and held posts from Chief Marketing Officer to Director of Online, has run his own business, and managed a P&L for a major corporate. He is chair and co-founder of the Business Marketing Club (www.businessmarketingclub.org.uk) – a network of B2B marketers. In 2019, he was named one of the top 100 B2B European marketing leaders (https://www.hottopics.ht/34199/top-100-b2b-european-marketing-leaders-2019/). He is a graduate of Cambridge University, a Chartered Institute of Marketing (CIM) Chartered Marketer and holds a MBA with Imperial College, London. Dave is a keen cyclist and adventure traveller, is married, and lives in Buckinghamshire. You can read his blogs at www.DaveStevensNow.com.

Category: b2b

  • The B2B Marketing Magpie

    The B2B Marketing Magpie

    In La Gazza Ladra, an 1817 opera by Gioachino Rossini, servant Ninetta is taken to the scaffold for the theft of silver-ware, a theft really perpetrated by a magpie attracted to something shiny and new. There’s a magpie gene in marketers too. And while the scaffold is perhaps a bit too drastic a reaction to…

  • “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” George Bernard Shaw

    “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” George Bernard Shaw

    Great marketing is about understanding your audience’s needs and preparing the interactions that will respond to them. Here are four things for B2B marketers to think about in preparing those interactions. First, build pauses into their customer messaging to allow their audience to reflect. That’s pauses between key parts of your messaging, between your messages,…

  • By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail…

    By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail…

    A good B2B Marketer goes beyond the brochure, the website, the direct mail and into every interaction that their business has with a customer. Every interaction is important because every interaction has the potential to be a moment of truth that could acquire, retain, or lose a customer. So B2B marketers need to ensure that…

  • Why B2B Marketing makes me feel like Indiana Jones

    Why B2B Marketing makes me feel like Indiana Jones

    Look I’m clearly no Harrison Ford. I haven’t uncovered any implausibly powerful religious artefacts recently, fought off any Nazis, or raced through any abandoned mine shafts. But occasionally – when things are going well – the B2B Marketing profession makes me feel just like Indiana Jones. That’s because B2B marketers are in the business of…

  • What’s in a name?

    I sometimes find myself helping businesses that use an abundance of naming conventions for their companies, products, and services. Where the target market for all these names is the same, using a large number of names in your marketing simply confuses your customers. Simplification rules. Always. It’s always worth thinking about differential advantage where your…

  • Even my blog is asking me for my goals for the year…

    It’s the time of year when businesses like to ask for your objectives for the year. How they do this varies from organisation to organisation. Sometimes it’s a tick-box exercise run by the HR team. Sometimes there’s a protracted exercise to ensure that objectives cascade down or up the business hierarchy so that your goals…

  • How I became a Marketer at the age of ten

    My story as a Marketer started when I was ten years old. When I was ten, I got an illness which ate away at my hip sockets and left me in a wheelchair for five years. I was kicked out of my first school because they could not handle having a disabled person as a…