Ghost kitchens, renaming 737s, and airport TV gaming – The Sales Lead Digest Vol.

This week we were bombarded with articles telling us what we should be doing for 2020, what we should have done in the 2010s, and a lot of TikTok stories. The whole thing made us hungry and the new billionaires from Uber going public took notice. This week we’re talking ghost kitchens for food delivery, we’re thinking about exactly when you need to drop your brand and start again, we’re thinking about data silos, and finally we’re wondering if a rogue gamer is giving us a peek into the future of screens. My youngest spends a lot of time on Twitch, so rogue airport TV gamer may just be on to something.

food delivery

Uber’s pre-IPO holders cash in

“Kalanick sold his entire remaining stake in the company and resigned from its board of directors. His windfall was in the billions…”

What exactly do you do with billions? You try to make more billions! In this case, our founder is going big into food delivery:
“Travis Kalanick just announced he’s leaving Uber’s board to focus on his business pursuits. Here’s a look at his secret ‘ghost kitchen’ startup that’s backed by $400 million from Saudi Arabia”

While having billions of dollars is no guarantee of being able to predict the future, it is interesting to see how the retail landscape continues to be changed by technology. In the 2010s we asked why have a restaurant if you can just put it on wheels like a food truck? In the late 2020s we may be asking why have a rolling food truck if you can just have food delivered? Since businesses are made of people, B2B sales will follow these same trends. Keep and eye on them.

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Boeing customer Air Lease says ‘damaged’ MAX brand should be dropped

“We’ve asked Boeing to get rid of that word MAX,” Udvar-Hazy told the Airline Economics aviation finance conference in Dublin. “I think that word MAX should go down in the history books as a bad name for an aircraft.”

When is your brand name so badly damaged your best served by starting over? It’s a hard question to answer, especially hard when you’re borrowing another $10BN to shore up finances while you troubleshoot a giant machine. Bold negotiating move by the airplane leasing guys though. “Well, if you don’t change the name I’ll need you to sharpen your pencils a bit…” READ MORE

Three Marketing Mistakes B2B Firms Made In The Past Decade

“If leaders in marketing within B2B firms want to continue to build on the gains made in respect and performance over the past decade, we must address the issues of fragmented data between marketing and sales, as well as our past focus on leads (not accounts) and our tendency to measure the wrong things.”

I’m a little leery of opinion pieces from industry people but this guy co-founded Marketo which defined a lot of activities the big B2B marketers have taken, so I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt. The point I find myself nodding my head most vigorously to is his first point – we have data all over the place and when sales and marketing teams were allowed to create their own silos of info, it puts the company at a disadvantage. Getting these data silos to communicate is harder than it should be. Amen to that, brother. READ MORE

Passenger takes over airport monitor for video game

“A passenger waiting for a flight at an Oregon airport needed a bit more screen space for his video game so he plugged his Playstation 4 into a computer screen that had been displaying a map of the airport.”
Evidence that screens are still too small or a new business opportunity? I drive by a set of electronic billboards that have some pretty sketchy business advertised making me think they aren’t getting top dollar for that space. Maybe they need to let the kids finish their video games for a few extra bucks after the afternoon drive time? 
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