Intelligence Hub
Research, methodology, and the thinking behind the work
No theory and no recycled trend pieces. Just what is actually working in B2B marketing, written by someone who builds the data, sends the campaigns and makes the calls.
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Featured articles
How a one-person agency outbuilds a ten-person one
The advantage is not effort. AI carries the routine load and a senior person keeps the judgement. How a specialist network delivers agency-grade work.
ReadWhat AI says about your business, and why your Google ranking no longer tells the whole story
ReadWhy most cold email fails, and what a predictable pipeline actually takes in 2026
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llms.txt explained: the one file most B2B sites are missing
A plain text file at the root of your website that tells AI assistants who you are and where the key pages live. Most businesses have never heard of it.
ReadWhat to automate, and what to never automate, in your marketing
Automation should carry the routine load so a person's judgement goes where it actually matters, not replace the judgement itself.
ReadWhy your cold email list is quietly wrecking your deliverability
A bounce-heavy list does more than fail to deliver: it teaches inbox providers to distrust everything you send, even to people who want to hear from you.
ReadThe five questions to ask ChatGPT about your own business
Most business owners have never asked an AI assistant what it knows about them, and the answer usually reveals more than a Google search ever would.
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What Your Marketing Agency Isn't Telling You
Agency strategies built from templates, retainers that go quiet by month three, and reports full of vanity metrics. What to ask for honest answers.
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The Satellite Strategy: How One Client Became Six Markets Overnight
One website competing across six sectors loses to specialists every time. Here's how a business brokerage became six separate, sector-specific brands.
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How We Use AI (Honestly)
AA2 uses AI for roughly 60% of its operational work. An honest account of where it earns its keep, where it fails, and what a human handles every time.
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The Telemarketer's Secret: Why Your Best Salesperson Might Be Someone Else's Voice
The caller matters more than the script. What separates effective outsourced B2B calling from the kind that gives telemarketing its reputation problem.
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Automation Without Strategy Is Just Faster Chaos
Automating before the strategy is clear doesn't speed things up, it scales mistakes. Why getting the thinking right has to come before the wiring.
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The One-Person Agency Model: How AI Changed Everything
Two years ago, if you'd told me that a single person could run data builds for a seal manufacturer, email campaigns for a print provider, telemarketing...
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Your Prospect Data Is a Product. Start Treating It Like One.
Prospect databases decay at 25 to 30% a year. Treating data as an ongoing asset rather than a one-off purchase changes what every campaign can do.
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The Year in B2B Marketing: What Actually Worked in 2025
Twelve months ago, in this publication's December 2024 issue, I made four predictions for the year ahead.
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2026 Predictions: The Year the Small Business Catches Up
Last December I published predictions for 2025 and graded myself honestly in last month's retrospective.
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Why I Fired Our Email Platform (And What Replaced It)
Inconsistent deliverability led to a switch from a shared email platform to dedicated infrastructure. What changed, and who should consider the same move.
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Writing for Robots: How to Make Your Content LLM-Ready
AI search tools pick sources based on structure and authority. Here's how to get your B2B content cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews.
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The Dashboard Revolution (And Why PDF Reports Should Be Illegal)
Monthly PDF reports arrive weeks late and let agencies shape the story. A live dashboard is more honest. Here's why agencies rarely offer one.
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AI Agents Are Coming for Your Marketing Agency (Including Mine)
AI agents are doing real marketing work now. What they do well, what they cannot replace, and why lean agencies are best placed to benefit.
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The BADR Clock Is Ticking: What It Means for Business Owners Thinking About Selling
BADR rises from 10% to 14% in April 2026. For owners thinking about a sale, the 12 to 18 month transaction timeline means the window is already tight.
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What I Learned From Sending 50,000 Cold Emails
Fifty thousand cold emails produced clear patterns. Short subject lines, no links in email one, a real sender name, and Tuesday mornings consistently win.
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The CRM Nobody Uses (And How to Fix It in a Week)
Every business has a CRM and almost none use it properly. Here's how to fix that in a week without a consultant or a six-month change management programme.
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Small Business Marketing Budgets: Where the Money Actually Goes
Most B2B marketing budgets are split the wrong way. Here's how the spending should actually be divided and what returns look like by month six.
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The White Paper Is Not Dead. You're Just Doing It Wrong.
Most white papers are brochures in disguise. A genuine one, built from original data, fuels a year of campaigns. What that process actually looks like.
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Your Competitors Stopped Cold Calling. That's Your Advantage.
Roughly 73% of B2B sales teams reduced or eliminated cold calling from their outreach strategy between 2020 and 2024.
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Content That Gets Saved, Not Just Liked
LinkedIn now weights saves above likes, which changes what content is worth making. The formats that earn saves, and why utility beats performance.
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Data Ownership: You Either Build It or You Rent It
Data subscriptions keep rising while contacts decay. For most UK SMEs, a verified prospect database built from public sources makes more financial sense.
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The Automation Paradox: Why More Tools Often Mean Less Pipeline
More tools rarely mean a better pipeline. They usually mean more time moving data between systems that don't connect. Why a smaller, connected stack wins.
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The Return of the Phone Call
LinkedIn InMail rates fell below 10% and inboxes are full. Why 2025 is proving the phone is still the most effective channel for B2B director outreach.
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What Google's AI Overviews Mean for Your B2B Website
Google's AI Overviews cut click-through rates by up to 25% on some queries. The right response is to become the kind of source those overviews cite.
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Building a Prospect List That Actually Converts
A good prospect list is verified, scored and built from an ICP before a campaign launches. The process that produced 12,600 contacts for one client.
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The AI Content Arms Race Has Started (And Most Small Businesses Are Losing)
AI content flooded the internet in 2024 and most of it reads identically. Voice and genuine expertise are the only differentiators left for B2B businesses.
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Predictions for 2025 (From Someone Who Actually Sends the Campaigns)
Prediction articles are usually written by people who've spent the year reading about marketing rather than doing it.
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The Budget Conversation Nobody Wants to Have
The marketing budget debate goes wrong every year when spend is treated as a cost, not an investment. A framework for making it a numbers conversation.
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Email Personalisation: Beyond First Name
There are four levels of B2B email personalisation and most businesses stop at level one. How to reach level three, and what that requires from your data.
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The Companies House Goldmine
Every limited company in the UK is required to file accounts, annual returns, and director information with Companies House.
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Why Your Competitors' Clients Are Your Best Prospects
There's a category of prospect that most businesses overlook entirely: people who are already buying what you sell, just from someone else.
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Your Dashboard Should Scare You (A Little)
A useful marketing dashboard shows pipeline velocity, conversion gaps, and stalled prospects, not just open rates. Here's what that looks like in practice.
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AI Killed the Marketing Intern (And That's Fine)
Twelve months ago, a junior marketer at a typical SME might spend their week doing data entry, pulling basic reports, drafting social media posts...
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The Quiet Months Are When Smart Companies Get Ready
Most businesses go quiet in July and August. The ones that use those months to clean data and build prospect lists reach Q4 with a real head start.
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Cold Email Deliverability Is Now a Technical Skill
Two years ago, you could send cold emails from your main business domain with a basic email platform and get decent inbox placement.
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The Follow-Up Problem Nobody Talks About
Most leads die from lack of follow-up, not lack of interest. Here's how to build sequences that plug the pipeline leak most B2B businesses never measure.
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The Subscription Data Trap
Subscription data looks efficient until you do the maths. When platforms like ZoomInfo and Apollo make sense for B2B prospecting, and when they do not.
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Why I Still Start Every Client Engagement With Research
A previous agency spent six months targeting the wrong audience. Two weeks of research would have caught it. Why the Client Blueprint always comes first.
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Stop Sending the Same Email to Everyone
There's a version of email marketing that goes like this: write one email, send it to the entire list, hope for the best.
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Your Website Isn't a Brochure. It's a Qualification Tool.
Most B2B websites describe the company instead of helping visitors decide if there is a fit. What a qualification-first website looks like in practice.
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The Data You Bought Last Year Is Already Wrong
B2B contact data decays at roughly 30% per year. A list from twelve months ago could be 40% invalid, quietly damaging every campaign you send to it.
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AI Won't Write Your Emails For You. But It Might Write Better Ones.
AI helps with subject lines, segment drafts and scale, but tone and market knowledge still need a human. The workflow that actually produces results.
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The Phone Still Works
Digital channels got noisy and most B2B marketers stopped calling. Why the phone still converts interest into meetings better than any email sequence.
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What Your CRM Is Actually Telling You (If You'd Listen)
Your CRM is tracking engagement signals most businesses never look at. Here's how to turn that data into a priority list of who to contact this week.
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