The New Price Of Being Believed
Hi there,
A lot of business language is built around persuasion. Better storytelling, sharper positioning, stronger pitches, smarter funnels. All of that still matters, but the stories that caught my eye this week point to something more basic: proof is getting more valuable.
Buyers want proof before they pay. Customers want proof before they stay. Teams want proof that new tools make the work better, not just faster. That is the thread running through this week’s issue.
Enjoy!
Buyers are still paying, but only when the evidence is there
PizzaExpress has reportedly appointed Rothschild to explore a sale that could value the business at up to £500m. Its owners include Bain Capital’s special situations unit and Cyrus Capital, which makes this a useful reminder that exits do not start when the sale process begins. They start when the business can show credible recovery, durable demand and a story buyers can diligence without squinting.
The market is not simply rewarding scale. It is rewarding evidence that the model works again. For founders, that means the sale narrative should be built in the operating numbers long before anyone writes an information memorandum.
Read the article here.
B2B brands are rediscovering that logic alone rarely sells
Marketing Week’s State of Brand in B2B survey found 85.8 per cent of respondents see emotional storytelling as important to effective brand building, second only to strong positioning and differentiation at 88 per cent. That is not soft thinking. It is commercial realism.
Complex buyers still need facts, proof and rational justification. But they are also human beings deciding who to trust, remember and defend internally. A B2B brand that only explains features is forcing the buyer to do the emotional work alone. The better job is to make the value easy to believe and easy to retell.
Read the article here.
Attribution is not the same thing as incrementality
The Drum reports that commerce media is moving beyond the old habit of claiming conversion credit and towards asking whether advertising made a genuine difference. That distinction matters far beyond retail media. Plenty of dashboards tell you who touched a sale. Far fewer tell you whether the sale would have happened anyway.
I think this is one of the most useful marketing questions for founders: what do we know we caused? Not what we were near, not what our software can attribute, but what changed because we spent the money. The more expensive attention becomes, the less room there is for comforting measurement theatre.
Read the article here.
AI services are starting to eat the software budget
TechCrunch reports that Ema has raised $77m for AI agents that automate corporate processes across HR, IT and finance. The interesting part is not another funding round in AI. It is the shape of the promise. Ema is not selling a better screen for people to click around. It is selling work done across the systems companies already use.
That should make every software business pause. If the value customers want is the completed process, not access to the tool, pricing and product strategy both shift. The defensible company is the one that can own the outcome, not just the interface.
Read the article here.
AI changes the economics before it changes the org chart
Harvard Business Review’s interview with HCLTech’s CEO is useful because it treats AI as an economic shift, not a novelty. HCLTech recognised that gen AI would alter the economics of IT services, break old delivery assumptions and force a pivot in how work is structured.
That is the part many companies underplay. The question is not whether a tool can help somebody write faster or analyse more data. It is whether the cost base, delivery model, margin structure and customer promise have changed. Once the economics change, the organisation has to follow. Waiting for a perfect adoption roadmap may be slower than the market allows.
Read the article here (paywalled, Archive).
The manager slump is a business risk, not an HR footnote
Gallup’s latest State of the Global Workplace report says global employee engagement has dropped to 20 per cent, with managers under particular pressure. The useful lesson for founders is that culture does not usually fail in the abstract. It fails at the layer where strategy is translated into the daily work.
Managers carry the ambiguity, absorb the noise and explain decisions they often did not shape. If that layer weakens, everything else gets more expensive: hiring, retention, execution and customer service. Treating management capacity as overhead is a false economy. It is one of the load-bearing parts of the company.
Read the article here.
Loyalty programmes are leaking value in plain sight
HyperFinity research covered by Retail Technology Innovation Hub estimates that 51 leading UK retailers are missing out on £806.9m in gross margin each year through loyalty programmes that fail to turn member engagement into commercial return. The average retailer is sitting on £15.8m of untapped gross margin opportunity.
That is a useful warning about vanity engagement. A loyalty scheme can look active while doing very little to change behaviour. Members, points and app opens are not the prize. Incremental visits, bigger baskets, lower churn and better margins are. The test is not whether customers joined. It is whether the programme changed what they do next.
Read the article here.
SaaS waste is becoming a pricing objection
Zylo’s 2026 SaaS statistics round-up argues that organisations are now focused less on how many tools they use and more on controlling cost, risk and value across complex software portfolios. That is bad news for vendors whose main case is convenience and good news for those that can prove usage, adoption and return.
Software used to benefit from inertia. Once it was bought, it often stayed. Now procurement teams are hunting overlap, wasted licences and weak adoption. If you sell software, the renewal conversation starts on day one. If customers cannot see the value being used, they will eventually see the spend being wasted.
Read the article here.
Weak confidence still changes how people buy
CPA’s latest UK business round-up points to the mixed picture many SME owners will recognise: encouraging signals in retail sales and mid-market investment confidence, sitting alongside expensive finance, weaker fiscal headroom and pressure on hospitality. Conditions are not uniformly bad, but confidence remains fragile and uneven.
That matters because weak confidence changes buyer behaviour before the numbers fully deteriorate. Customers delay. Finance teams ask harder questions. Buyers narrow the shortlist. Suppliers with unclear value propositions get cut first. Make the case easier to approve, the payback easier to see and the risk easier to understand. Confidence may be outside your control. Clarity is not. That is useful work.
Read the article here.
Succession is easier before it becomes urgent
Real Business has a practical piece on succession planning for founder-led UK companies. Its simplest point is the most important one: handing over a business deserves the same care as building it. Yet many founders delay the work until circumstances force the issue.
That is understandable and dangerous. A founder can be the engine of growth and the biggest source of fragility at the same time. Buyers notice. Teams notice too. Succession planning is not an admission that the founder is leaving tomorrow. It is evidence that the company can survive, develop and make decisions without one person carrying the whole system.
Read the article here.
|
The Numbers
Week on week, to 25 September 2026. Figures that move what your business is worth.
US government borrowing costs moved more than UK ones this week, and the risk-free rate is what sets the ceiling on what any buyer can justify paying you.
|
That is your ten for this week. If there is one question I would keep close, it is this: what proof would make the next decision easier for the person on the other side of the table?
Build that proof and a lot of the selling gets simpler. Have a great week ahead.
Cheers!
Adam