Win on Sunday, sell on Monday

The late 90s were the golden era of the British Touring Car Championship (BTCC). Ford Mondeos, Vauxhall Vectras, Renault Lagunas, Volvo S40s, and Honda Accords battled for position, driven by legends like Jason Plato, Alain Menu, Rickard Rydell, and Yvan Muller.

Manufacturers poured up to £19 million annually (inflation-adjusted) into the series, embracing the "win on Sunday, sell on Monday" philosophy. But it wasn’t just about the spectacle—BTCC races featured on BBC’s *Grandstand*, attracting 1.5 to 3 million viewers and up to 40,000 trackside fans. Ford, determined to dominate the 2000 season, invested heavily and reaped the rewards. Over the following decade, they produced Britain’s best-selling car. Mondeo Man had never had it so good, and neither had nine-year-old me, standing in the snow at Britain’s fastest racetrack, grinning ear to ear with my dad.

Six years and countless warming cups of Bovril later, I was watching Dragons' Den during the post-dot-com bear market. Amid the usual critiques, one of the Dragons repeated a well-worn maxim: "Turnover is vanity, profit is sanity." Recently, it struck me how this applies just as well to most marketing strategies.

A lot of what we see online, particularly on LinkedIn, is vanity-driven. Companies proudly showcase their new offices, acquisitions, conference appearances, and team-building events. While valuable for employer branding, this content holds little relevance to the organisations actually buying their products or services. If the goal of an online presence is to drive sales and advance a business's mission, then vanity content is just noise.

In The Little Red Book of Selling[1], Jeffrey Gitomer dismisses "value add" as a hollow afterthought, instead urging salespeople to give value upfront, consistently, and without expectation. His approach has only grown in relevance. Today, personal branding dominates, with educational influencers, bloggers, and content creators offering free insights to audiences who may eventually buy from them. If you work in sales or entrepreneurship, this book is a must-read (I’m on my eighth re-listen).

Gitomer’s approach works because of reciprocity—one of Robert Cialdini's six principles of persuasion, detailed in his 1984 classic, Influence[2]. Reciprocity has played a major role in my own business success. Some of my biggest deals originated from helping potential clients secure their own contracts before they ever hired me.

Examples of reciprocity in action are everywhere, but one of the most unexpected comes from the world of espionage. During World War II, Allied intelligence officers treated high-ranking German prisoners with surprising hospitality, housing them in stately homes with luxuries and social freedom. In these comfortable settings, prisoners inadvertently revealed critical military intelligence, which the Allies then used to their advantage[3].

The principle is simple: repeatedly offer value to those who are or might one day be in a position to return the favour. Ford applied this strategy, building trust with customers and becoming the UK’s best-selling car brand through the 90s and 00s. Today, the same principle underpins the $18 billion[4] influencer marketing industry.

With that in mind, I’m launching this column, delivered straight to your inbox every other Thursday morning. My mission is to provide actionable insights you can profit from—by listening to you, drawing on my experiences, reading, successes, and, of course, the many mistakes I’ve made since starting my business.

Alex is a director of Penpole Consulting, a Digital Transformation and Cyber Security service provider. Penpole helps clients increase productivity and reduce organizational risk through expert CISOs, programme and project managers, change specialists, data migration experts, and technical specialists in testing, training, integration, and configuration.

Want to connect? Reach out to Alex directly at md@penpole.co.uk.

Photograph Credit - Neil Wager (2025)