Embracing Marketing Mistakes · 2026-05-28 · 6 min
Chris shares a humbling story from his Hotwire days that contradicts his professional identity as a trained salesman. He had arranged a face-to-face pitch meeting with a France-based technology company and assembled a small team to travel via Eurostar, but failed to check his spam folder where the client's detailed proposal brief had landed. Arriving at the meeting room, Chris realized he hadn't prepared a formal proposal and had fundamentally misunderstood the scope - he'd assumed they were merely walking the expanded team through a credentials plus presentation they'd already done via Zoom. The mistake cost both direct expenses (Eurostar tickets for 2-3 people) and significant indirect costs (the team's time and opportunity cost). For someone who builds credibility on being "the only professionally trained salesman in the PR industry," where most agency new business people treat pitching as a hobby while he treats it as a professional discipline, this oversight felt particularly egregious. Chris emphasizes that true sales expertise encompasses everything from pipeline building through contract negotiation - not just the pitch itself.
He arrived unprepared because the client's detailed brief had gone into his spam folder; he'd only planned to walk them through a credentials presentation, not deliver a full formal proposal as they expected.
He took 2-3 people (he mentions "two or three, I can't remember" and later says "three or four people").
He believes he's one of the only professionally trained salespeople in PR, while most others either like pitching casually or treat it as a hobby, lacking the broader sales discipline he's built his career on.
Computed from the transcript - who did the talking, and the words that came up most.
A missed brief. A room full of decision-makers. A team fresh off the Eurostar waiting to present a tailored proposal that never existed - because the client’s detailed instructions were quietly filed in spam. We tell the whole story with candour, including the costs, the embarrassment, and the uncomfortable gap between personal brand and reality when a simple system failure derails a big moment. We dig into what professionalism really looks like in sales and agency life: not bravado at the pitch, but the boring brilliance of process. You’ll hear why “creds plus” only works at the right funnel stage, how attendee lists hint at evaluation versus discovery, and where most teams stumble when meetings evolve without explicit re-qualification. We break down practical safeguards - 48-hour objective confirmations, shared inbox rules, whitelisting, pre-flight checklists, and backup comms channels - that make important emails unmissable and keep live meetings aligned with buyer expectations. There’s also the human layer. Pride takes a knock when your edge is process mastery and the basics fail; we talk openly about that ego hit and how to respond without excuse-making.
Transcribed and scored by The B2B Podcast Index.
What's what's one mistake you've made in your career that you've learned quite a lot from? I'm looking for a nice anecdote here. Chris, I think I love this uh question and I love the the sort of basic premise of the um of the podcast, right? Because I say all the time, I learn far more from my failures than I do from my success.
Success is ultimately a function of how you deal with failure. Uh, I'm going to tell you something that I've never where I failed, where I've never shared this with anybody, and I actually made a point of saying to the team at Hotwire, please, who were with me on this, please can you not tell anyone like this happened? They're the best ones. Yeah.
So uh we had the opportunity to pitch a large French-based technology comp France-based technology company while I was at Hotwire. And we did a like creds plus and sent it to them. And uh, we then got a meeting in the diary for a pitch. Um, but um in that time, I hadn't seen any correspondence from the folks that we were going to pitch.
And I um all we'd uh but we had like agreed who else was going to be in the meeting, and my understanding was there was just like more people who weren't in the original like Creds Plus presentation that we did via Zoom. Okay. And we bought tickets to go on the Eurostar to go all the way to France to pitch to these folks face to face. Um we got there, got into the room, sat down.
I had we hadn't done any like formal like proposal or whatever, because my understanding of the meeting was the creds plus that we'd done is what we were going to be taking folks through. Oh, okay. They'd sent me a detailed brief of what they expected to see in terms of a proposal or the rest of it, and it had gone into my spam and I'd not seen it. Oh so I've dragged, you know, uh an account team all the way to France um to do this, uh to do this, to do this pitch.
And you hadn't done the pitch. And we had we hadn't done the like full pitch because I thought it was you know that we were taking people who hadn't been in the first thing through the creds plus. And how many people did you take to to France with you? Oh, it's two or three, I can't remember.
But yeah. The whole day out of the office, it's uh it's the it's the direct cost of the Eurostar for you know two or three people, three or four people, sorry. It's the um it's the indirect cost of well, what would we have done all day if we hadn't have done you know, done that? And it's a professional embarrassment for me.
Like my whole shtick, right, when I was at um was at uh was at Hotwire is I am one of the only professionally trained salespeople in the PR industry. Most other um people that do newbies for agencies are either people that like pitching, so they like, you know, but they don't understand that like pitching is 10% of sales in for for an agency, right? There's all the stuff you've got to do to get into the pitch, and there's all the stuff you've got to do after to like make sure to negotiate a contract, get the right commercial terms for both sides, you know, um all the rest of it, right?
To give the confidence that you're that they're making the right decision, you're the right people to go with, dealing with procurement, all that stuff, right? Spent my my life as a professional sales leader doing that stuff. So I was always I have this enormous advantage over these part-timers, right? Yeah, I'm a professional, right?
You do this, you know, you do this is basically a hobby to you. I do this for a living, pal, right? Yeah, and uh I I made that kind of like absolute school, you know, like error, basically. Yeah, so yeah, but you it went into your spam, right?
So you didn't see that. So I can I'm on your I'm on your team here. Like what can you do with that? So d did you not get it then?
Funnily enough, we did not. I did I did think though, I was thinking about when you gave me the opportunity to think about other like you know, f ups or whatever that I've done in my career. It's not necessarily a complete F up by me, but it's one that I love.
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