Read Paul's Blogs
Insights, learnings and stories from the world of B2B marketing and communications, direct from Velo’s B2B agency team
Paul Crabtree
An IDM-qualified senior sales and marketing professional who has held board positions in various marketing agencies since 2005. Although he claims not to look old enough, the emerging silver locks tell a different story. As MD, founder and owner of Velo, his role is to lead the agency maintaining our quality standards to be the level that means we continue to be built on recommendation. He has a particular focus on new business, overseeing all our client relationships and leading our strategy function to make sure that our team has the skills and capabilities that our clients need, so we continue always craft great work to be proud of. Find him on LinkedIn here.
B2B Marketing Agency Selection
Future-proof or already obsolete? How to assess an agency’s shelf life
Appointing an agency is meant to make your life easier. You bring in expertise, fresh thinking and additional capacity. Someone who understands your market, challenges your assumptions and helps move things forward. Yet many agency relationships quietly drift into something else entirely. Instead of shaping strategy, they wait for instructions. Instead of anticipating change, they react to it. Instead of driving results, they produce assets. When […]
B2B Advocacy, B2B Marketing in Professional Services
Does your customer advocacy programme really pay back?
Customer advocacy shapes commercial performance in ways few other initiatives can. Get it right and you strengthen win rates, reduce acquisition cost and protect lifetime value. Get it wrong and margin quickly starts to slip. Buying and renewal decisions are no longer made on spreadsheets alone. They’re influenced by first-hand experience and credible proof of […]
B2B Marketing in Professional Services, B2B Marketing in Technology, B2B Marketing Leadership, B2B Strategy
Why the orchestration of strategy into activation matters more than ever in B2B marketing
B2B marketing is evolving — because it has to. Economic uncertainty, shifting buyer habits, and a talent gap post-pandemic have reshaped the expectations placed on marketing teams — and the agencies that support them. Today’s successful B2B marketers are prioritising four things: 1 -Agility — to respond quickly in an uncertain macroeconomic climate. This is […]
B2B Branding, B2B Marketing in Insurance, B2B Marketing in Professional Services, B2B Research, B2B Strategy
Does brand matter when selling into a B2B niche?
Like Brexit-era Boris, there are two short answers here: yes, and no. But in B2B, short answers rarely get you far. No: Specification trumps story In industrial B2B – whether you’re selling sensors, safety signage or software – brand often takes a back seat. Buyers are responsible for production lines, compliance officers and procurement frameworks. […]
B2B Advocacy, B2B Audiences, B2B Branding, B2B Campaigns, B2B Content, B2B Marketing in Technology
How Tech Marketers should prepare for 2026
Most B2B tech marketers are optimising for the wrong outcome. They’re chasing reach, perfecting attribution models, and testing endless variations of the same campaign. But when a prospect is ready to shortlist, when a customer is asked for a recommendation, when a board member needs a supplier, your brand either comes to mind, or it […]
B2B Advocacy, B2B Audiences, B2B Branding, B2B Campaigns, B2B Content, B2B Marketing in Professional Services
How Professional Services Marketers should start 2026
There is a hard truth. Nobody wakes up excited to hire a facilities management company. No finance director celebrates finding a new insurance broker. Building services, business services, B2B insurance – these aren’t impulse purchases. They’re considered decisions about who you’re going to trust with something important: your operations, your risk, your reputation. And when […]
B2B Advocacy, B2B Campaigns, B2B Content, B2B Creative, B2B ESG, B2B Marketing in manufacturing
How Manufacturing Marketers should approach 2026
When your value is invisible until something goes wrong The best health and safety equipment never makes the news. Precision-engineered components that perform flawlessly for twenty years earn no headlines. Medical devices that work exactly as designed don’t generate case studies about dramatic turnarounds. In manufacturing sectors where success means nothing goes wrong, marketing faces […]
Christmas comes once every year. In B2B, so does the January scramble – spend December getting ahead.
Here’s the thing: you’ve got a budget sitting there. Money that vanishes towards the end of a quarter. We’ve wrapped up a set of small, strategic projects that you can sign off on today, ensuring your Q1 is calmer, sharper, and more successful with minimal work from you. Think of them as a gift to […]
ABM, B2B Branding, B2B Sales Enablement
What we learned about influencing LinkedIn’s algorithm with an unscientific test using SSI
TL:DR We ran a quick internal test to understand LinkedIn’s Social Selling Index (SSI) and what actually drives influence on the platform. Our goal? To find out whether it’s worth the effort for B2B marketers, especially in niche sectors to invest time into personal posting. The headline takeaway: yes, personal posts often outperform company ones, […]
B2B Advocacy, B2B Audiences, B2B Research
Customer recommendation is the main metric that matters in B2B marketing.
In B2B, there’s one signal that matters. Not your CTR. Not your MQL count. Not even your pipeline size. Just one thing – would your customer recommend you without being asked? If it’s no, the rest of the metrics don’t matter. You’ll have issues with retention and repeat business. Recommendation is the real signal of […]
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