I’ve worked with all kinds of CEO’s and C-level teams since launching ScaleHouse in 2015. Some were amazing sales leaders and understood how to engage and convert high value prospects. Others….not so much. Although I often encourage the C-suite to get involved in sales and marketing activities, in truth this strategy can either drive, or kill, deals.

It’s easy, in the more senior stages of your career, to fall victim to the fallacy that you know more than you really do. I wrote about this common mistake in a February 2021 blog post where I highlighted a podcast featuring Professor Adam Grant called “The Easiest Person to Fool”.

ESOMAR member, Priscilla McKinney, the Founder and CEO of Little Bird Marketing was kind enough to have me on her podcast last week to talk about my candidacy for ESOMAR President.

Although there are over 100,000 results on Amazon if you type in “business growth book”, one of my top growth reads is from Tiffani Bova, Global Growth Evangelist for Salesforce and her 2018 book “Growth IQ”.

For those of you in the market research, marketing technology or marketing services sector, the abrupt impact of the pandemic on the overall economy brought these combined industries to a near standstill for a period of time in early 2020. That said, we remain a nearly $80B industry.

Although ESOMAR, the global business community for insights and data, originally predicted up to a 30% downturn in research revenues, a stronger third and fourth quarter than predicted (particularly among tech and digital businesses) have generated current indicators of an overall 6% decline, with the industry not returning to 2019 turnover levels again until 2022.

Although the definitive impact is still yet to be seen, what CAN be confirmed by both forecasts and industry experts’ perspectives is that the pandemic is fueling the industry’s revolution, serving as an accelerator to the dynamic shifts we were already seeing – the increasing divide between digital or technology focused segments and the established market research segments.

Physicist Richard Feynman once said, “The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” One way we fool ourselves is by imagining we know more than we do; we think we are experts in subjects that we are in fact, not.

One of my favorite quotes is from Nolan Bushnell who said “the true entrepreneur is a doer, not a dreamer”. Bushnell knows a thing or two about the difference between dreaming and doing: He founded Atari in the ’70s and is considered one of the founding fathers of the video game industry…before going on to start the Chuck E Cheese pizza chain.

Back in 2019, Wharton’s J. Daniel Kim published research that the average age of the most successful entrepreneurs is…..45. This bucks the long-held belief that to be an entrepreneur (or at least a successful one), you need to start a firm in your teens or 20’s– and because the stories of entrepreneurs like Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates get so much media attention, it’s easy to think of their stories as the norm rather than as the exception.

Back in April we published a blog with our top tips for selling and marketing in a pandemic. Seven months later, with COVID surging again around the world, we’re doubling down on our previous advice.

It’s tougher than ever to land new clients, whether you’re in a services business, a technology business, or you do a little of both. The truth is, when there’s massive disruption from external forces (in this case a virus that just keeps on kicking), it becomes more challenging to get buyers to adopt new ways of doing things, or working with untested (at least by themselves) technology and/or services.

Well, here we are; Q4 2020. When staff first started to work from home in Q1 (depending on where you are in the world), it’s unlikely many of us imagined we’d still be managing an almost entirely remote staff today.