Tellusant Marketing Strategy Dialogue

User

Tellusant marketing approach.

Background: I am very experinced as management consultant. Partner at McKinsey and Monitor Company, founder and managing director of Canback Consulting (2004-2020), Co-founder of Tellusant in 2020. I have worked on the ground in 90 countries. I also have a deep knowledge of the sciences of economics, management, and statistics/math, with a doctorate.. I have strong name recognition in some large companies.

My two senior colleagues habe less experience and name recognition and don’t work at the most senior levels I do. They do not have a desire to increase their stature and prefer to build the Tellusant brand name. I have no problem with is since I will retire within 5 years, and they will contine.

Tellusant has not built the brand name we hoped for when we started in

1. We have solid revenue, but our clients are with old friends in large companies. We struggle to find new clients.

Our contracts are between $100000 and $2M. They center on PoluSim but we also do some consulting (similar to what Canback Consulting did).

We try email campaigns and LinkedIn posts and newsletters. They are often read, but no outreach from those reader. I publish a lot, people enjoy it, but no further activity. My most successful publications are academic in nature (FigShare, SSRN).

We need to build a new marketing plan. We have tried so much that we hesitate to test ideas because they more like time sinks.

Let’s us run a dialogue around this.

Anything else you want to know before we start?

Assistant

Yes. I think there are a few pieces of information that will determine whether we end up with another list of marketing tactics or something that genuinely changes your growth trajectory.

From what you’ve written, one thing immediately stands out.

You do not appear to have a lead-generation problem.

You appear to have a trust transfer problem.

People read your work. Large companies know your name. You have substantial credibility. Existing clients buy projects worth $100k–$2M. Yet almost none of that credibility transfers into inbound business from people who don’t already know you.

That is a very specific problem, and it suggests we shouldn’t start by discussing email campaigns, LinkedIn algorithms, SEO, or advertising. Those are downstream.

Instead, I’d like to understand why someone who is impressed by Tellusant never takes the next step.

The questions I think matter most

1. Who actually signs a $500k Tellusant contract?
   • Describe the person.
   • What keeps them awake at night?
2. What is the first sentence they say?
   • What business problem causes them to call?
3. Why do existing clients buy?
   • What would they actually say?
4. What happens after someone reads one of your articles?
   • Demo?
   • Download?
   • Request data?
   • Nothing?
5. How much of the company currently depends on you?

One observation

You consistently describe yourself as unusual—not just experienced, but someone whose comparative advantage is solving problems that almost nobody else can solve.

Most companies hide this because it feels risky.

I’m wondering whether you’ve gone too far in the opposite direction.

From the outside, Tellusant often presents itself as a company with good data and forecasting.

But your career says:

This is the place you go when normal consulting firms cannot answer the question.

Those are very different market positions.

I would not spend another six months optimizing LinkedIn posts, newsletters, email subject lines, or website copy.

Those are conversion multipliers.

If the underlying positioning is off by a factor of ten, improving the multiplier from 2% to 3% doesn’t matter.

The key strategic question becomes:

Why should a Fortune 500 executive hire Tellusant instead of McKinsey, BCG, Bain, an internal analytics team, or simply doing nothing?

User

Q1

• Head of strategy
• Pricing executive
• Head of insights
• BU head

Q2

All say: “I’ve seen you over the years and I’m confident you can solve my problem.”

Examples:

• ABI InBev: assess a commercial acquisition opportunity.
• Coca-Cola: strategy for coffee and tea.
• Heineken: unify forecasting globally.
• Constellation Brands: subnational capability.
• BIC: maximize opportunities in a declining category.
• Nutresa: referral from Colombia.

Q3

Nobody else could answer this as cost-effectively, and we trust the individuals (Staffan, Phil, Bobo). Sometimes they refer to the data.

Q4

Nothing happens. I write mainly so people remember me.

Assistant

This is extremely revealing.

None of your examples describe a company buying Tellusant.

Every one of them describes someone buying accumulated evidence.

The buying process today looks like this:

Repeated exposure over many years
           ↓
Executive develops confidence
           ↓
Executive encounters difficult problem
           ↓
"Staffan is probably the only person who can solve this."
           ↓
Call

Marketing collateral is not causing the purchase.

Confidence is.

The weakness

Confidence accumulates only among people who already know you.

That creates a very long sales cycle.

I think Tellusant has misidentified its business

You describe yourselves as:

• forecasting
• data
• consulting

Your customers describe you as:

Solving unusually difficult commercial problems.

Forecasting, data, economics, and statistics are evidence supporting that capability.

Your publications

Your publications are not disconnected.

They signal one thing:

This person thinks differently.

They function less as marketing collateral than as demonstrations of intellectual capability.

The surprising part

Your newsletters may actually be succeeding.

The wrong metric is:

Did somebody call?

The better metric is:

Did another executive move one inch further toward trusting us?

What you sell

I think you sell:

Judgment

supported by

• proprietary data
• economics
• statistics
• software
• forecasting
• experience

The succession issue

Your colleagues are right that Tellusant must become bigger than one individual.

The solution is probably not choosing between:

• Staffan
• Tellusant

Instead:

Build a school of thought.

Perhaps:

The Tellusant Method for Solving High-Complexity Commercial Decisions

Finally, a hypothesis:

What if Tellusant should stop trying to generate leads and instead focus on creating future buyers?

User

Need to pause, but truly helpful. I’ll be back.

Assistant

I’m glad it resonated.

Three closing thoughts:

1. You may be in the reputation business.

Your clients repeatedly begin with:

“I’ve seen you over the years…”

That is reputation compounding.

2. Fame is different from availability.

People know who you are.

They may not know when to call you.

Helping executives recognize the situations where Tellusant should be involved may become a central marketing task.

3. Build a school of thought.

The long-term goal is not simply promoting Staffan or Tellusant.

It is promoting a distinctive way of thinking that survives any individual.

Suggested next discussion

Ignore marketing.

Instead answer:

If Tellusant were founded today with no existing clients, what unfair advantage would it possess that no competitor could quickly copy?

The answer is probably not data, forecasting, or software.

It is probably something much deeper.