Paul McIntosh Podcast Transcript
Paul McIntosh joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
[00:00:00] Brian Thomas: Welcome to Corzuant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Paul McIntosh, the Founder and CEO of Bridgehead Agency. Paul McIntosh is a go to market expert, mentor, sales leader, and advisor. Bridgehead Agency, formerly Mustard, is a leading international go to market agency that guarantees to help startups and scale ups succeed in international growth.
Paul has over 25 years world class experience in business development, sales, and marketing at the highest levels in both blue chip companies such as Cisco, BBC, and Lego, plus startup and scale up businesses spanning both B2B and B2C tech sectors. Over the past 13 plus years, Paul has helped drive countless new brands, products, and services to market very successfully with his team.
A mentor and advisor to startups and scale ups is a patron of the Caring Cancer Trust charity.
Well, good afternoon, Paul. Welcome to the show.
[00:01:05] Paul McIntosh: It’s wonderful to be here, Brian. Great to meet you. And thank you very much for the invitation. Fascinating to talk with you.
[00:01:11] Brian Thomas: Absolutely. Thank you. And really making the time coordinating schedules, I’m in the middle of the U S and Kansas city area, and you’re over in the UK, so I love to do these international podcasts are always fun.
So, thanks again. So, Paul, let’s just jump right into your story here. You’ve got quite the career in business development, marketing, you’re a senior executive, now you’re the founder and CEO of Bridgehead Agency. Could you share with our audience the secret to your career growth and what inspires you?
[00:01:40] Paul McIntosh: Yeah, thanks very much. It’s been very interesting corporate background over the years and, at senior commercial board level at some wonderful brands. But I started sales actually back in as far back as 1989, which seems like a a totally different lifetime. And that’s when the Berlin Wall fell and.
George W. Bush was sworn in as as American president. So, it’s a long time ago. But I was taken under the wing of a gentleman by the name of John Jones, who’s an ex-Coca Cola and 7up exec. And he coached and mentored me in the world of sales and what sales and business development meant. Working with John was a great privilege at that early phase. And as my career rapidly grew, I’ve had the great pleasure of working with some wonderful blue-chip corps, such as Cisco, BBC and Legos, as you call it in North America and Legos, we call it here in Europe. So, it’s been some fascinating growth in a number of those key areas.
And as I evolved in that executive and more senior side of things, it became Really apparent very quickly in a lot of corporations that sales goes off in a left direction and marketing goes right and then always align. So, I spent quite some time whilst I was leading those commercial teams to research why that happens and fundamentally found out that it’s broadly because those corporations don’t craft, create and implement go to market strategies. So, the inspiration came from that. So then craft my own business and move out a corporation where I really wanted to spend 90% of my time being productive and in action. And there’s a real passion from my side. Through my twenties and thirties helping scale ups and startups.
So that was the reason and throw in the go to market with the startups and scale ups into the pot is how Bridgehead was formed.
[00:03:33] Brian Thomas: I love, sharing that backdrop. The career we’re traversed being in corporate I know sometimes that’s a struggle, but that’s where we all cut our teeth and learn so much that allows us that opportunity to start our own company.
So I appreciate the share. Paul, your company Bridgehead is an international go to market agency that specializes in helping scale ups expand in new markets. You offer market discovery and boot camps through to market entry audits, acceleration, and transitioning. Can you talk to about the keys of your success?
[00:04:05] Paul McIntosh: Yeah, there’s a real balance between working with an external agency that, that wants to craft a strategy and give you slides of PowerPoint, the real success from bridgehead side. And the reason we get 98% of our business via recommendation and referral is. We have a process and methodology on go to market we use for every client that consists of no more than 40 slides of PowerPoint when the client finishes it.
But the big difference with us, we have a team of sales and business development people across the UK, Europe and transatlantically that actually secure sales for our clients. Whether that’s in consumer packaged goods or whether that’s in the B2B environment. So that sort of magical source that sits in behind it is a real differentiator to help the clients.
[00:04:53] Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate you getting into some of the nuts and bolts. Obviously, it won’t give away all your secrets, but I love how you explain. How you tackle this. So thank you. And Paul, we are a technology publication platform podcast. And we like to ask anybody on our podcast, if they’re leveraging any of that new and emerging technologies, if not, have you found maybe a cool tool or app you found useful you could share with us?
[00:05:18] Paul McIntosh: Yeah, absolutely. Outside of quite interestingly, Brian, we’re taking our way of working and our go to market process and methodology and actually investing in turning that into software ourselves to help scale ups, but that’s for, 18 months down the line, yeah, we get involved in using lots of different.
Technology and try and bring it all together from, one of the tools that we use quite a lot in our business is is Rocket Reach that allows us from a lead gen and contact relationship perspective that integrates into our CRM, which is a great one for startups and scale ups, which is Sales Mate.
So those combined really give us some powerful data. An insight on any clients. We’re looking to work with and most importantly for our clients, helping them find customers and secure some revenue. So those are the key ones that I wanted to make you aware of today.
[00:06:07] Brian Thomas: Thank you. Appreciate that. And someone in our audience obviously will take that to heart or maybe leveraging similar technology.
You may want to check that out. So thank you and Paul. Last question of the day. Could you share something from your career experience that would be helpful for those listening today, looking to grow their career in sales or entrepreneurship?
[00:06:27] Paul McIntosh: Yeah, I think there’s a couple of very quick things. And again, the great thing talking with yourself today, Brian is obviously this snapshot viewpoint, but I mentioned it early when we spoke that.
If I relive time again from a commercial perspective, having one commercial team underneath that umbrella opposed to separating sales and marketing distinctly, I think super important. And we’ve experienced with over 80 clients that we’ve helped. Grow significantly in the last 10 to 15 years is when they’re cohesive and combined the amplification of what they can do from a commercial perspective is incredible to see.
So, when everything’s aligned and sales and marketing in the right direction, you can really see accelerated results. And that, for me, is something I would certainly have done. In my twenties and thirties, opposed to just riding a sales route separately. So, making sure that cohesive, 2nd aspect to that away from that commercial side is if anyone’s.
Planning to then go from Corp and do their own aspect. My recommendation is do it and do it today. So by all means, plan and prepare, but create in real action is what it’s all about. So I would get that done and get it done straight away and not take too long to make those decisions.
[00:07:49] Brian Thomas: Thank you. Appreciate that perspective. And like I said, there’s a lot of great gems. That we can pull out of this podcast today and share with our global audience. So, thank you so much. Paul, it was a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
[00:08:03] Paul McIntosh: Thanks Brian. Best wishes to you and to everybody, in the U.S. Take care.
[00:08:07] Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Paul McIntosh Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
