Megaphone to magnet
If your sales depend on outbound lead generation, you're doing it wrong.
Issue № 82 | London, Monday 8 May 2023
My apologies for the disruption to IMTW’s schedule but, here in freshly minted Carolean London, Monday is the new Sunday.
📸 First, flashback to last month when we discussed Apple’s advantage over financial services brands. This week, the tech giant leveraged that advantage and attracted $1 billion in deposits within a week of launching its savings account.
👉🏻 Now, read on to learn why:
① Anyone who calls you out of the blue to sell to you is either a crook or a fool.
② You should be making yourself easy to find, not shouting to get noticed.
③ The problems with Britain’s stock market may be beyond the LSE to fix.
④ Now it’s investment managers’ turn to stare nervously at ChatGPT.
⑤ Awards, archaic as they are, still have a role to play in your marketing efforts.
⑥ Customer service is marketing too; it deserves the same attention and care.
⑦ Artificial intelligence warrants caution.
What's new
The Government announced this week that it will ban cold calling on all financial products, International Adviser reports.
In short:
“The UK government has announced it is banning cold calling on all financial products as part of a campaign to tackle fraud. This comes over four years after the UK signed into force a statutory instrument banning any unsolicited phone calls for direct marketing purposes in relation to occupational or personal pension schemes.”
“The prime minister announced a range of different measures including the strategy to ban cold calls on all financial products. This will be done ‘so that anyone who receives calls trying to sell them products such as crypto currency schemes or insurance will know it’s a scam’.”
“The UK government will invest £30m in a state-of-the-art reporting centre which will be up and running in 2023, work with tech companies to make it as simple as possible to report fraud online and give banks more time to process payments, to allow suspicious payments to be investigated and stopping people from falling victim to fraudsters.”
Why it matters
One of my first jobs in the City was selling software for trading floors. I had to cold call heads of desks in the middle of the day to try to convince them to book a demo. You can guess how well that went.
Today, in the age of GDPR, I honestly thought that cold-calling had already been banned. Or that it had died a natural death because it can’t possibly work anymore - if indeed it ever did. I haven’t had a landline for years, rarely ever pick up the phone, and wouldn’t dream of doing so if I didn’t recognise the number. Would you?
① This move is part of broader measure to combat fraud and that’s telling since, legislation aside, if anyone calls you out of the blue to try to sell you something, they’re either a crook or a fool. Nowadays, good marketers know that their jobs are to ensure that their customers find them. They build magnets not megaphones.
What to do about it
Take action
② This week more than most, I hope my advice is redundant to you. But perhaps it bears repeating. Ensure your marketing is a magnet, not a megaphone. What does this mean? It means you should go from:
Broadcasting to attracting
Finding new customers to being found
Telling people you have expertise to showing people you have expertise
Mass advertising to 1:1 targeting
Targeting based on demographics to targeting based on behaviour
Offering the same content for all to offering personalised content
One off campaigns to continual engagement that is timely and relevant
Measuring website hits to tracking website visitor’ behaviour and capturing qualified sales leads
Get help
Visit InMarketing, my resource library for leaders in finance or technology who want to innovate, interact and influence.
Join the InMarketing community, either on Twitter or on Substack (you’ll need to download the Substack app and head to the chat tab). Either way, you can ask questions of me and fellow senior marketing practitioners.
Help me
If you found this useful or know someone who would, please share it. Every time you do, it helps me to grow the community of regular IMTW readers.
Top stories
The other articles that are worthy of your time.
FINANCE
Britain is liberalising its stockmarket-listing rules, again
③ The problems with Britain’s stock market may be beyond the LSE to fix.
“On May 3rd the FCA proposed its latest set of changes, which it will consult on over the next two months. These aim to simplify the structure of the stockmarket. At present it is split into four ‘segments’, each of which has a different set of rules for issuers. The FCA wants to merge the top two (‘standard’ and ‘premium’), which contain the largest firms listed on the LSE.”
“This targets two long-standing gripes among investors and companies. First, that Britain’s stockmarket looks offputtingly complicated to outsiders. Second, that the distinction between the standard and premium segments does more harm than good. Firms in the standard tier are subject to less burdensome rules but feel tarred by its inferior brand; they are also ineligible for inclusion in indices like the FTSE 100. That makes their shares less attractive to fund managers who benchmark their performance against such indices.”
“The rot in Britain’s stockmarket goes far deeper than its rule book. Ageing, risk-averse domestic pension schemes have all but disappeared as a source of capital. Founders and their bankers find City investors hostile, citing the number who lined up publicly to declare they would not back Deliveroo, a food-delivery firm, at its IPO in 2021. Executives complain that British shareholders insist on far smaller pay packets than American ones. Dealmakers, after Brexit, no longer see the LSE as a gateway to European capital, so they recommend the vast pool of it available in New York instead.”
TECHNOLOGY
ChatGPT ‘portfolio’ outperforms leading UK funds
④ Now it’s investment managers’ turn to stare nervously at ChatGPT.
“A selection of stocks picked by artificial intelligence has delivered better performance than some of the UK’s leading investment funds. Analysts asked ChatGPT to create a theoretical fund of more than 30 stocks, following a range of investing principles taken from leading funds.”
“In the eight weeks since its creation, the portfolio of 38 stocks has risen 4.9 per cent, compared with an average loss of 0.8 per cent for the 10 most popular funds on UK platform Interactive Investor, a list including Terry Smith’s Fundsmith Equity as well as a range of UK, US and global funds from Vanguard, Fidelity and HSBC.”
“Some 19 per cent of UK adults surveyed by finder.com said they would ‘consider getting financial advice’ from ChatGPT, while another 8 per cent say they had already taken financial advice from the chatbot.”
MEDIA & MARKETING
Why financial services loves an awards do
⑤ Awards, archaic as they are, still have a role to play in your marketing efforts.
“The chance to reward unsung heroes in our profession.”
“An excellent chance for networking and connecting with different people and organisations nationwide.”
“Awards ceremonies provide the chance to experience a memorable evening; entertainment is part of that.”
“Being rewarded and recognised for your hard work is a huge motivator.”
“Winning business awards from credible third parties goes a long way in solidifying your reputation as a trustworthy brand that delivers. Award-winning businesses are consistently seen as more reputable and honest, even if consumers aren't consciously aware of this perception.”
WILDCARD
How to apologise to a customer when something goes wrong
⑥ Customer service is marketing too; it deserves the same attention and care.
“The service recovery paradox is a phenomenon in which a customer who experiences a problem with a product or service, but has that problem effectively resolved, is more likely to have a positive impression of the company than a customer who never experienced any problems.”
“How to craft an apology message
Restore lost value
Acknowledge responsibility
Explain the problem
Describe how you will fix the problem
Express your regret”
“Your apology process should also be shared and shown to outside stakeholders. This phenomenon, known as boundary spanning, is critical to the service recovery paradox because it not only shows vulnerability from the organization, but also shows other customers that the company can be relied upon in times of distress.”
Off cuts
The stories that almost made this week’s newsletter.
FINANCE
✂️ Morgan Stanley to cut another 3,000 jobs as banking layoffs continue
😎 HSBC profits surge as CEO lays out fresh vision for Silicon Valley Bank UK
📈 London Stock Exchange signs multi-year deal with Barclays
🏇 Lloyds Banking Group beats profit forecasts
TECHNOLOGY
🫨 Disruption isn’t the only path to innovation
🛜 Quantum computing could break the internet. This is how
🇳🇬 Nigeria using eNaira CBDC to disperse aid, including farmer loans
💸 Retail CBDCs could pose risks not yet known, IMF head says
🪙 Digitalisation won’t displace commercial bank money any time soon: Moody’s
MEDIA & MARKETING
📊 CMO hiring trends: more women and diverse leaders, but average tenure short
🏃🏻♂️ New tech and social media have power to ‘turbocharge’ bank runs
📰 Media publishers can start charging for one-off articles shared on Twitter
🐦 WordPress drops Twitter social sharing due to API price hike
The last word
⑦ Geoffrey Hinton, engineering fellow at Google who resigned this week, regretting his life’s work on AI:
“Look at how it was five years ago and how it is now. Take the difference and propagate it forwards. That’s scary.”
Don’t settle for marketing.
Strive for InMarketing: innovate, interact, influence.
Wishing you a productive week,
P.S. What’s your go-to drink? I have a weakness for martinis so thoroughly enjoyed this guide to the best ones in Manhattan. Chin chin!