Thursday, November 12, 2026
You follow up on every lead the same way, hoping persistence wins the deal. The best salespeople do something closer to the opposite — and it's why they close more while working less.
Last updated 15 November 2026. Published by Simple-Growth (Motherbase Limited). Market: United States.
This is a story about an owner who wants to be remembered — but whose ads, website and socials could quietly be swapped with a competitor's and nobody would notice the difference. You've posted. You've boosted. You've even paid someone to "make it pop." It still doesn't land, and you've started to suspect the problem isn't the budget. It's that nothing about what you're putting out actually looks, sounds or feels like it could only be you.
A 2026 US survey of 1,000 small business owners and workers found 52.5% say their marketing has at some point looked cheap enough that they suspect it cost them customers (UPrinting, US, 2026). "Cheap" rarely means poorly made — it usually means forgettable: the same stock photo style, the same three colours every competitor uses, the same generic claim about quality and service that every business in the category also makes. Customers can't choose a brand they can't tell apart from the one next to it.
Jenni Romaniuk's work on distinctive brand assets, built on the evidence base behind how brands actually grow, makes a deceptively simple case: the sensory, specific details customers can spot from across the room — a colour, a sound, a shape, a line — do more for recall than another clever headline ever will.
Kevin's seen a distinctive asset work in its most literal form. A light-and-sound installations team, competing in a crowded, technical category where every competitor's site looked identical, put one sign on their wall: "We Are Big In Japan." It wasn't a mission statement. It wasn't a value proposition. It was odd enough that every client who walked in asked about it — and every one of them remembered the business because of it, long after they'd forgotten which competitor they'd also gotten a quote from.
"Kevin, you distilled business, marketing and sales strategy into powerful simple concepts and actions with real life stories of your start-up business and corporate life. You walk the talk with empathy and passion. Feedback has been off the charts. The energy in the room was palpable."
Nikki
MahiTahi / Colab
Something odd and specific feels riskier in the room than something safe and polished, even though safe and polished is exactly what's failing to get remembered. This isn't for you if you've already got a distinctive asset customers mention unprompted — some owners have built that without ever naming it, and it shows in how easily people refer them. It's for the owner whose marketing could be screenshotted, have the logo removed, and nobody in the industry could tell you whose it was.
You don't need a bigger budget to be remembered. You need one specific thing, repeated on purpose, until it's unmistakably yours.
A specific, sensory detail — a colour, sound, shape or phrase — that customers associate with a brand strongly enough to recognise it even without the logo attached, drawing on Jenni Romaniuk's research into how brands build recall.
A logo only works if someone's already looking at it. A distinctive asset works in the background — in a sound, a colour, a turn of phrase — and gets noticed even when a customer isn't actively paying attention to your marketing.
Screenshot it, remove your logo and name, and ask whether a customer in your industry could still tell you whose it was. If the honest answer is no, that's the gap this post is about.
If your marketing could belong to any competitor in your category, that's the first thing worth fixing.
Tuesday, September 08, 2026
New 2026 consumer data shows most shoppers are value-seekers, not bargain hunters — yet 95% still rate brand trust as important. Here's the six-point test your FMCG brand must pass to earn the sale without discounting.
Tuesday, September 08, 2026
New 2026 grocery data shows branded FMCG products are being promoted twice as often as private label — and still losing share and loyalty. Kevin D'Ambros-Smith on why discounting harder is the wrong fix, and what pricing architecture looks like instead.
Monday, September 07, 2026
A 2026 Fed survey of 6,525 small businesses found owner confidence at a 6-year low — while actual revenue, employment and profitability held steady. Why the gap, not the economy, is the real risk for SME and FMCG owners.
Sunday, September 06, 2026
Burst campaigns reset to zero every time. Here's why a sustainable weekly cadence beats an intense one-month push, and how to protect it through the slow months.
Sunday, September 06, 2026
Most SME sales forecasts are built by adding up pipeline value — and it's almost always wrong. Here's how exit criteria, deal age, and weighted forecasting fix it.
Sunday, September 06, 2026
Most of what fills an owner's calendar isn't driving results. Here's how to run a structured 80/20 audit that identifies the real 20% — and what to do with the rest.
Sunday, September 06, 2026
One-on-one coaching diagnoses and designs strategy. A peer accountability group enforces it. Here's why the combination produces follow-through that neither achieves alone.
Sunday, September 06, 2026
Organic growth isn't the only path. Here's how well-chosen SME acquisitions can compress years of growth into one transaction — and where most owners get the due diligence wrong.
Sunday, September 06, 2026
Most SME roadmaps fail from what they never remove, not what they add. Here's the three-question kill list to run before your next planning cycle — and why pruning, not adding, is what actually frees up growth capacity.
Sunday, September 06, 2026
Paid social and search rent attention you don't own. Your email list is the one channel most SMEs already have permission to use — and almost never invest in properly. Here's how to turn it into a real asset.
Sunday, September 06, 2026
Most sales training focuses on the pitch and the close. The call is usually already lost in the first five minutes. Here's the agenda-set and diagnostic sequence that fixes it — at the team level, not just for one rep.
Sunday, September 06, 2026
Delegation doesn't fail because your team can't do the work — it fails because nobody defined what "done" looked like before the task started. Here's the four-part handoff that fixes it.
Sunday, September 06, 2026
Self-funded expansion runs out of capital and management bandwidth before it runs out of market opportunity. Here's the franchise-readiness test and how to compare licensing against scaling it yourself.
Sunday, September 06, 2026
Business coaching has borrowed a lot from therapy's language, and it's blurred an important line. A coach uses psychology to find what's blocking you — then converts it into a dated business action, every time. Here's where the line sits.
Sunday, September 06, 2026
A 2026 survey of 1,500 business owners found 32% have never taken a full week off. Kevin D'Ambros-Smith on why that's a systems problem, not dedication — and what the regret data reveals about coaching and support.