We were lucky to catch up with Guy Powell recently and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Guy thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. Can you talk to us about a risk you’ve taken – walk us through the story?
The biggest risk I’ve taken other than starting a business was to write a book. The year before I began writing the book, I was in marketing and as a marketer we always wanted larger budgets. As we were in the budget negotiation process, the CEO challenged me with the statement, “Why would I spend more on marketing when I can get better results by hiring more salespeople.” This statement hit me in the gut. How could I best respond to this statement? It was clear that the CEO thought that marketing was simply an expense and that sales was the driver of growth in the company. So I started to work through a number of issues to start to prove that marketing was also a driver of sales. I had to re-do the accounting of marketing services, start tracking the impact of any marketing we did so that I could prove that marketing did contribute to sales growth. Did marketing generate an ROI? This was a tall order back when the Internet was just coming of its own. But this led me to start writing a book on the process. It was titled Return on Marketing Investment: Demand More From Your Sales and Marketing Investments. It would take over a year, working nights and weekends and what if it wasn’t published? Would I have wasted all that time? It was a big risk, because I had never written a book and I never thought my writing skills were all that good. Well I was wrong. My writing skills and logical thinking skills were just fine and the book was a great success. Within a year of the launch of the book, I was being invited to speak and teach around the world. Since then I have written three additional books, each one better than the last. And I have a fifth book just about the be published.

Guy, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
Marketers worth their salt need to connect their actions to sales. They have to show that they are moving the needle, that their efforts contribute provably, accountably and profitably to the company’s sales and profits; that an investment in marketing is more valuable than an investment elsewhere in the company. This is what I do. After that fateful question of ‘Why should I invest in marketing when I can just hire more salespersons’ I have spent most if not all of my time trying to answer this question. Answering this question is valuable for all sorts of marketers in all sorts of industries. Whether it’s insurance, utilities, consumer packaged goods, or just about any other industry, marketers need to know this answer. Over the years, I have spoken at many conferences, trained many marketers around the world and have now written four books on the topic with a fifth just about to be released. We have made a difference for many companies, delivering incremental profit in the hundreds of millions and incremental sales in the billions of dollars. It’s making a difference by being able to provide critical answers to strategic business questions.

Can you share one of your favorite marketing or sales stories?
When Covid hit, we had a problem. We could no longer do business development the way we used to. Normally we would attend a conference on marketing in some form. The best was a conference on marketing analytics and data sciences. With Covid these conferences disappeared. My source of new income was gone. That was it. What to do now. In the new Covid environment, we still had to develop relationships, get past the voice mail, get past the gatekeeper. We did this by growing our social following on LinkedIn, but in a way that allowed us to have good conversations with executive level marketers with large organizations. So we tried a new tactic. A virtual wine-tasting, scotch-tasting, beer-tasting, bourbon-tasting. Voila. It was a great success. We were able to have friendly conversations and be able to talk about marketing in a very valuable way. We could build a relationship over a shared experience in a way that we never before thought of. And we were able to have fun at the same time. From this simple series of events we have been able to meet some great marketers, get a deep understanding of the problems facing the marketing function and win some new clients.

We’d love to hear about how you keep in touch with clients.
Service industries deliver intangible items. We provide knowledge, understanding and insights that our clients can make large strategic decisions on. We help them to decide how to spend tens and hundreds of millions of dollars in marketing to drive sales growth in the billions. These aren’t small decisions. They can only be delivered through trust that we have done the homework, that we understand their business and that we are providing value critical to those decisions. We do this through a high touch delivery model. As founder in the company I am personally involved with every client. We make certain that we continually deliver the absolute best, crossing every t, dotting every i. We can’t be wrong, because the stakes are high. Company growth is on the line, marketers careers are in the balance. It is only through this high touch that we can deliver better value and keeps our clients asking for more.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.ProRelevant.com
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/guyrpowell/
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/guypowell