The discount isn't the question. How does it fit the plan?

If someone's offered you a good deal on advertising, a sponsorship or a stand at a show, the price is the least useful thing about it. The question that matters is whether the people who'll see it are the people you've already decided to sell to.

If that's written down somewhere, the answer takes a minute. If it isn't, you can't answer it, and the deal ends up deciding for you.

One email against a year of strategy

Years ago, when I was running my own marketing agency, I'd spent about a year on strategy work with a business owner. He's a bright man and a successful one. Between us we'd agreed who the business was for, and we'd written it down.

In a meeting, he mentioned that someone had emailed him the night before about some advertising. Around £20,000 of it, and they were going to do him a deal.

I asked him one thing. We've done the strategy, so how does this fit?

It didn't. The magazine's readers weren't in the target audience we'd defined.

Nobody in that room had done anything wrong, and that's the useful part. Look at how the decision arrived. It came by email, to the one person who could sign it, with a discount already attached. It went round every step the strategy had set up, and not because anyone had ignored the strategy. Nothing in the business sat between an inbox and a yes.

The offer goes to whoever signs, and a document can't say no

Anyone selling advertising, sponsorship or exhibition space knows who signs the order, so that's who they talk to. And a discount quietly swaps the question. "Does this reach our buyers?" becomes "is this a good price?", which is easier to answer and nearly always the wrong thing to be asking.

The strategy, meanwhile, lives in a document. A document can't say no to anything. It only works when somebody holds it up against the offer, at the moment the money is about to move.

The campaign was rarely the problem

When marketing spend disappoints, the usual suspects are the creative, the channel or the agency. I ran a marketing agency for 22 years, and the campaign was almost never the problem.

What clients told me mattered most wasn't the campaigns at all. Managing directors and board directors said the more valuable part was having a process, because before it their spending had been erratic. Clarity on who they were selling to, and a structure that stopped them wasting money.

So the money usually goes wrong earlier than anyone looks. It goes wrong at the yes.

You can check this in your own business. Take the last five times you spent marketing money. For each one, find the line, written down before you paid, that said who it was for. Not who it reached afterwards. Who you'd decided to sell to before the offer turned up.

If you can find it for all five, your plan is doing its job. If you can't find it for any of them, the offers are running your marketing and the plan is a document in a drawer.

A year of strategy didn't stop one email

The strategy didn't stop that email. A year's work, agreed and written down, and one message from a stranger walked straight round it.

What put the offer to the test was a question asked in the room. And the question only worked because the answer was written down somewhere both of us could point at. Without that page, "how does this fit?" is just one person's opinion against another's, and the person who signs usually wins that.

So a strategy is necessary and it isn't enough on its own. Somebody has to ask the fit question every time money is about to move, and it has to be somebody who's allowed to say no to anyone, including the person who signs.

The spend you'll find hardest to cut is the spend you already do

Once there's a written target, some of what you already spend money on will fail it. Often it isn't the new offers. It's the regular ones: the show you do every year, the directory listing that renews itself, the publication you're in because you were in it last year.

Nobody decided those were wrong. Nobody decided they were right, either. They carry on because nothing stops them.

That's uncomfortable, because some of it has a long relationship attached, and some of it is money a supplier has been counting on for years. It's still better to find out before you set next year's budget than halfway through it.

Put the fit question before the price

1. Write down who you sell to, on one page. Use words someone outside the business could check against a readership. "Manufacturers" isn't a target. "Operations and engineering directors at UK food manufacturers turning over £10m to £50m" is.
2. Ask every offer the same first question, before the price. Who will see this, by job and by sector? Ask the seller for their readership broken down that way, not the total. An audited business title can show its readers by job title on its certificate, but under the ABC reporting standards that table is optional, so ask whether it's there. If they can't tell you, you've learnt something.
3. Treat the discount as information about the seller's calendar. A price that runs out on Friday tells you when they need to sell the space. It tells you nothing about who'll read it.
4. Change the plan on evidence, never on an offer. If your wins keep coming from somewhere the page doesn't mention, change the page. An email with a discount in it isn't evidence of anything.
5. Then decide who holds the question. That's the real choice here, and it's the easiest one to leave to chance.

There are three sensible answers.

You can hold it yourself, if you've got the time and you'll ask it of your own ideas as hard as you'd ask it of anyone else's.

Your marketing manager can hold it, if you give them the page and the authority to say no to anybody, you included. Most would welcome that. It's usually what they've been missing: a written reason to turn something down that doesn't sound like a personal opinion. If you're not sure your team would even write the same page, there's a quick test for that in growing without a commercial director.

Or you can bring someone in for a fixed period to write the page with you, set the question up and hand it back. That's my own work, so treat this as a declared interest rather than a neutral recommendation. The method is Revenue ReSET, built on three pillars [mindset, skillset, toolset], and it's fixed-scope because a commercial function you can't run without me isn't fixed. How I work sets out how that works. For whether it works, a multi-year programme with Unifrax / Alkegen, the specialty materials business, was built around the same industry trade fair, cycle after cycle, and produced more than 900 leads at an average order value above £350,000. There are other examples across manufacturing, logistics and recruitment.

If you've already got the page and someone who holds the question, you don't need me or anyone like me. Put it on the agenda and keep asking it.

Questions people ask

Isn't a good deal still a good deal?

Only if it reaches people you'd sell to anyway. A discount on the wrong audience is just a smaller amount of money spent on nothing.

What if the target we wrote down is wrong?

Then change it, on evidence. Look at who actually bought last year and why they bought, which is its own piece of work and I've written it up in making sales growth repeatable. What you don't change it on is an offer that turns up in your inbox.

Does this mean never trying anything new?

No. Try new things on purpose: a set amount, a question you want answered, and a date you'll check the answer. That's an experiment. A discount with a deadline isn't one, however new it feels.

Who holds the question if we haven't got a marketing manager?

Whoever can say no to anyone in the business, the owner included. If the answer is nobody, that's the gap, and it's worth closing before the next offer arrives.

Stick to the plan, and write the plan down

There's a line I've used with clients for years: when the demons come at night, you don't doubt yourself. Stick to the plan.

It only works if the plan exists somewhere other than in somebody's head. Write down who you sell to. Ask how every offer fits before you ask what it costs. Then decide who gets to say no, before the next good deal lands in the inbox of the one person who can sign it.

Nik Stapleton, FCIM. Managing Director, Sapius Commercial Ltd.

Nik has spent 31 years in B2B commercial work, 22 of them running his own marketing agency, across more than 70 engagements. He is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Marketing and Managing Director of Sapius Commercial Ltd, company number 17046077. He works with UK B2B businesses in short, fixed-scope engagements, fixing the commercial function and handing it back. More at about Nik Stapleton and on LinkedIn.