Chief Marketing Officer / India
The commercial answer was more particular than the report
- Marketing team through four leads
- 22 staff
- ₹6.3 crore FY27 expense, including campaign allocation
- Trade accounts and service propositions
- 31 years
- Career begins July1995; CMO since January2020
- Provisional board capacity
- 23 days
- Consent, relationships and actual calendar still to examine
Decisions & consequences
01Rebuilding an engineering brochure around the organisation's decision
In 2021 I approved a service brochure that explained our assessment methods and professional expertise. Technical readers understood it, which I treated as evidence that the proposition was clear. Conversations with other members of prospective buying organisations showed the omission. Operations wanted to understand access and disruption arrangements. Finance wanted to know which later decision the proposed expenditure would support. We had supplied a technically informed reader with work to do before colleagues could consider the service together.
We funded ₹74 lakh for selected research and revised communication. Thirty interviews across ten organisations included an engineering, operations and finance representative from each. This was a deliberately selected group, not a representative market survey. The creative lead wanted one concise brochure that retained a consistent explanation. I chose connected material addressing the different decisions, with technical scope and operating assumptions supplied by their responsible owners. Marketing could explain a proposed assessment without claiming that its eventual report would establish a predetermined building conclusion.
The revised account linked the professional purpose, practical arrangements and the owner's cost decision. In twelve later account discussions, eight involved two or more buying functions and four remained pending at review. Those meetings were not orders, and we had not designed a causal evaluation of the communication change. The supported outcome was the revised material and the observed discussion status. Fees, contracts and technical acceptance still belonged to the appropriate commercial and practice owners.
The choice produced more material to maintain and a less uniform customer journey. It also exposed my original assumption that the engineering reader would translate our proposition for everyone else. I would now ask about the buying group before approving the communication architecture. The point is not to send every prospect three documents or impose identical roles on different organisations. It is to understand the connected decisions and ensure that a technically correct description does not leave the people funding and accommodating the work without a usable explanation of their part.
Asking lost buyers before calling every refusal a fee problem
In 2022 our proposal reviews regularly described lost assignments as price losses. The explanation was plausible in a competitive market, and it gave commercial colleagues an obvious response to discuss. I wanted to know whether the buyer's account supported that summary. We selected fifteen closed, lost assignments for a study funded at ₹29 lakh. Eleven organisations agreed to a conversation and four declined. The refusals remained outside the evidence rather than receive an inferred reason.
Among the eleven respondents, four described a mismatch with their shutdown window as the main reason, three identified ambiguity in the proposed scope, two cited fees, one said procurement had been deferred and one preferred the incumbent relationship. These were the reasons people reported in selected conversations. They did not establish the full cause of each decision or represent all lost proposals. The sales sponsor worried that the study would distract from an urgent need to improve competitiveness. I agreed that the two fee concerns deserved examination, while resisting the claim that a discount would answer every problem in the group.
We revised the questions asked about timing and the explanation of scope before a proposal was prepared. Commercial owners retained decisions about fees and negotiating conditions. The research did not authorise publication of the respondents' identities or confidential circumstances, and it did not create a recovery forecast for the fifteen assignments. No regained orders are asserted in this case. The supported result was a more differentiated account of the selected losses and specific changes for the next proposal discussion.
The study was uncomfortable because some explanations concerned our own communication and timing rather than a competitor's low price. It also required us to retain uncertainty: a buyer may simplify an answer or choose not to discuss everything that mattered. I would now use such conversations regularly alongside other evidence, with enough distance from the original sales negotiation to make a candid response possible. Listening after a refusal is useful when it changes the questions management asks, not when it is presented as a definitive explanation of a market that only a few willing respondents have described.
Rescheduling two campaign waves before demand outran the appointment calendar
Our 2024 regional programme proposed six campaign waves with a common appointment window. The creative and distribution plan was ready, but qualified operations colleagues showed that their service calendar could support four waves in that period. Two regions needed later slots. The marketing sponsor wanted to release all six and arrange dates after enquiries arrived, arguing that early interest would help establish demand. Leena warned that the advertised timing would become part of the expectation the practice then had to manage.
The programme had ₹96 lakh of approved authority. I chose to release four waves and reschedule two after discussion with operations. The practice retained responsibility for staffing, methods and the duration required for particular work. My team changed the campaign sequence and the explanation of availability. We did not shorten an assessment to fit the advertisement or imply that a first conversation itself reserved a qualified appointment. Customer commitments still required the normal scope and scheduling agreement.
At review, ₹58 lakh had been spent and ₹38 lakh remained unspent, subject to a later allocation decision. The balance was not reported as a saving because the two waves had been rescheduled rather than eliminated from the programme. We also did not invent an estimate of revenue lost through the delay. The immediate outcome was a narrower release that matched the supported window, with the remaining programme and its money still visible to management.
The decision gave up simultaneous regional presence and required the creative team to maintain more than one schedule. That cost was preferable to creating an expectation that colleagues could meet only by changing a professional decision or disappointing a customer after contact. I would now bring capacity into the campaign brief before production begins, including how the message should change when the service calendar moves. Marketing's authority to generate attention does not include authority to promise the people, access arrangements or professional time that turn attention into a service the business can actually deliver.
Letting a useful client review produce no new assignment
A 2025 relationship proposal treated every existing-client review as the beginning of a new assignment. The sales team wanted a dependable annual contact cycle, and I understood the benefit of not leaving relationships dormant. Leena objected that a marketing calendar could not determine how often a building required assessment. A client might need clarification of an existing report, a discussion about future planning or no additional work. Those possibilities deserved a place in the programme before we described its responses as opportunities.
We allocated ₹38 lakh to a defined review exercise and invited twenty-four consenting client organisations to discuss whether a conversation would be useful. Fifteen accepted, five deferred and four declined. Among the fifteen completed reviews, nine identified future planning questions, three clarified existing reports and three found no new matter to discuss. Those categories described the conversations. They were not findings of building defects, technical recommendations or new contracts. Qualified owners retained the interpretation of any particular building's needs.
The campaign sponsor preferred to report all fifteen reviews as an active sales opportunity. I chose to retain the separate outcomes and allow the client to decide whether another discussion was wanted. A deferred or declined review was not classified as disloyalty. We did not prescribe an assessment interval, infer a safety conclusion from the absence of a new question or claim that the programme had increased retention. The immediate result was a more accurate relationship account with no automatic next invoice attached.
That choice made the commercial pipeline appear smaller than an activity-based report would have suggested. It also required managers to value clarification and an appropriate decision to do nothing as legitimate service outcomes. I would now define the purpose of a relationship programme before agreeing its success measure. Existing access to a customer creates an opportunity to listen; it does not establish a technical need or an obligation to buy again. A CMO should help the enterprise recognise when continued usefulness means explaining what is already known, respecting the customer's timing and leaving the next decision with the people entitled to make it.