Phil Preston on Watertight Marketing

One of the advantages of my job is that every now and then I run across a speaker at a CIM event who blows my socks off. May I introduce you to Bryony Thomas.

In her own words Bryony has “extensive marketing experience; as a marketing agency bod, working on clients like Microsoft and Dell, as client-side director of marketing for ClarityBlue and then as director of marketing in the integrated marketing division of Experian.s”  

Bryony spoke about Watertight Marketing at a Greater London event for small businesses on 25 April and at our second annual Small Business Marketing Conference held at the University of Hertfordshire on 23 May.

Watertight Marketing is the title of her best-selling book in which she explains how you can identify the 13 touchpoints where a business may be leaking profit and how to plug the holes.

Her genius is in the simplicity and clarity of her approach. She has transformed the much-vaunted sales funnel from the functional sounding “Audience, Respondents, Leads, Qualified Leads, Proposals, Sales and Rewards” to the more thought-provoking “Awareness, Interest, Evaluation, Trial, Adoption and Loyalty”. Those of you who are followers of Dr Philip Kotler will recognise his AIETA adoption model.

The 13 touchpoints, in order of importance (i.e. plug #1 first) are:

Stage	Touchpoint
Loyalty	1. Forgotten customers
Adoption	2. Poor on-boarding 3. No emotional connection
Trial	4. No gateway 5. No critical approval
Evaluation	6. No proof
Interest	7. Information overload
Awareness	8. How 9. Where 10. When 11. Who 12. What 13. No emotional impact

Here’s an example – leak #5 No Critical Approval. Quoting directly from Bryony’s book, “Considered buying decisions aren’t made in a vacuum. Before people go to the trouble of undertaking a Trial, they’ll often consult others … in a business, people don’t just consult but will often need to get formal approval from colleagues or bosses. Whenever your potential buyer seeks the opinion of a third party, you risk losing the sale. At this stage of the process, other people can’t just influence the decision; they can often veto it altogether”. So you need to convince not only the buyer but also anyone else involved in the purchasing decision – in the book Bryony explains how, including how to equip the buyer to win over others within the business.

To get the full picture you need to either read the book, available from the CIM Online Bookshop, or visit her website www.watertightmarketing.com, as I can’t do the concept justice in the space I have available for this article.

You can also download a copy of her conference presentation here.