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About

Hi, I'm Anant.
I work on the moment
somebody decides to look closer.

Twelve years of making buyers choose one company over the four that looked identical to it. Software, IT services, healthcare technology, industrial manufacturing. Pronounced Un-unt, if that helps.

What this is for

Giving a buyer a reason to pick you.

That is the job, every time, whatever it says on the invoice.

Positioning, go-to-market, campaigns, content, teams and budgets are the means. The end is always the same moment: somebody comparing you against four companies that look identical, finding one reason to look at yours properly, and taking it.

Twelve years of that, across categories where marketing was the last place anyone expected the number to move.

Why that reason tends to land

I sold before I marketed. And I used to write code.

Sales

I closed deals before I ever wrote a campaign. So your words get built for the conversation your salespeople are actually having, including the objection people mutter and the long pause that means the buyer has already moved on. Most marketing is written from a safe distance from that pause.

Code

A computer engineering degree and a year as a front-end developer. So when the idea needs a system behind it, the argument and the machinery come from the same person. Two invoices and a handover dissolve the point. It is also why answer engines felt familiar the day they arrived.

The useful part is not the combination. It is that the same person writes the argument and specifies the thing that carries it, so nothing is lost in a handover. Where that stops being an advantage: a category whose buyers are engineers evaluating on benchmarks, where the specification is the argument and a marketer is in the way.

How it got here

Backwards, which is the honest order.

Now

Leading marketing. Go-to-market strategy, cross-functional teams, brand positioning, budgets, and campaigns judged on results.

Before that

Marketing, then marketing management. Data-driven campaigns, content, social, and the slow discovery that the analytical part and the creative part belong together.

Before that

Sales. Closing deals, reading rooms, and learning that success comes from meeting a need. Describing a product beautifully comes second.

Before that

An MBA in marketing. Kotler and Peter, arguments with classmates, and the realisation that authenticity in storytelling is the mechanism itself.

Before that

A year as a software developer, writing front-end code and sitting with clients to build whatever they had in their heads.

Before that

Computer engineering. Hackathons, and a web app built with Google Maps functionality that got noticed well outside the classroom. Also the college cricket team, which mattered more at the time.

In practice

Who you would be working with.

Three things that are true of every engagement, and one that puts people off.

You get the argument, not a deck. The recommendation goes in the first line and the reasoning follows it, in the order a sceptic would ask. Anything that fits in a paragraph does not become forty slides.

Nothing is published that I would not defend in a room. Including to somebody who knows your category better than I do. That is a hard constraint on volume, and it is the reason there is no weekly content calendar here.

You will be told when the answer is no. When the honest read is that the problem is the product, or the pricing, or that nothing needs doing yet, you hear that.

And the part people find difficult. Positioning that is worth having excludes somebody, so the first draft usually removes a customer type the founder liked having. If that conversation is not on the table, the work will land somewhere safe and change nothing.

My doors are always open.

A question, a proposal, or just an idea worth arguing about. The four services are on what I do.