Wow

... at the age of 16.

And, uh, it was a, it was an accountant or a finance director at the architects that taught me about business and finance and money.

You know, I, I learnt very early on that cash is king, and anybody who owed you money was literally strangling your business of opportunity.

Uh, and he just taught me so much about business, but it was him that said at 17, "Don't stay here, because you could stay here for 10 years but there's no career growth for you.

You've got to find a new opportunity." And he introduced me to someone running a purchasing department for a manufacturing company six miles away.

It was a long bike ride up through the hills in Brighton, and I, I started there, and again, it was hard.

Yeah.

so yeah it's um it's fascinating to understand that and and it's a ultimately humans at the back at the end of all of this all the way through yeah we still whilst ai is powerful we need to keep that in mind so you know you were you were we started joshing a bit about mps um but let's dig into that a bit more because that's where this has come from right mps has been um has been around for 25 years i remember the the guys at uh the company that that created it selling it to me and pr you know way back when before you even launched b2b marketing um and it's something that at b2b marketing.net you know and for our for the awards the events that we run uh that are run by that company um that it's a very important metric for them um so it's kind of got this it's it's been around for ages it doesn't look like going anywhere we talked about creating something new but nothing's actually happened about that tell us what you think is wrong with mps not in not in theory but actually what it What are the issues you find are in practice with it?

So not to be contentious, but I actually don't think there's anything wrong with NPS.

It's probably the things that are wrong in the way that people implement it or think they can gamify it rather than actually looking at it as root cause.

It's really interesting.

It's like the simplest question with the simplest answer.

But it's not the number, the numerical number.

It's actually how you relate it to the data behind it.

They're not quite the same thing, are they?

yeah such an interesting point and it takes me on to my next question which um we've kind of already touched upon but how are you seeing b2b buyers evolving how are they what are the changes that you're seeing in b2b buyers at the moment

Yeah, I think like the last three, four years, we've been able to do a lot around looking at, say, first-party intent, which is sort of what you see on your own sites, or looking at these sort of third-party intent data sources where you get an indication that organizations might be looking at certain technology or technologies.

It gives you sort of that lift into sort of, say, who from your target account list is potentially a market target.

I think that's going to become harder and harder.

I think that element of those intent sources will become less and less clear in terms of outcome.

They're already a little bit sort of obfuscated.

You don't really know, are they actually in market researching for those things or are they...

So what's a bet then, Tony, that you think more B2B marketers need to make over the coming years?