Solving the Puzzle - communications edge

Simon Hunt Bio

I spent 38 years in Corporate companies:

26 years in Sales, Commercial & Product roles.

13 years in Marketing roles.

That gives me a growth engine & pipeline laser like focus.

Why does that Matter?

- Agencies work on areas that deliver chargeable work.

- They will not work on Lead Generation & Pipeline conversion.

- And if they do, they haven't got the sales expertise, to execute properly.

FMCG with Duracell,

Learning the power of brand and processes that just worked.

Services with Europcar Interrent,

Learning Sales from Key Accounts through to Domestic and Global Sales Leadership.

Contract Stationary with HMSO,

Major stationary contracts, core list pricing and big tenders in both the public and private sectors. 19 Major wins both private and public sector.

Property with Regus plc

Sales leadership, Global Product management and all things API & E-Commerce.

So a broad base of sales & product leadership across a wide range of product, service and property.

Before starting my own business co-founding Close.

I rapidly realised those 38 years had taught me a limited amount about SME's and less about startup's.

6 years later, the business was sold, I learnt about funding, the cost to acquire leads, the Lifetime value of customers, which prepared me nicely for, Condeco (Software as a Service) as Global Partnerships Director.

We developed a MESH partnership strategy where the power of the business use case and data, created an ecosystem of partners, that were symbiotic in nature, both interested in deriving value from each others customer bases.

Digital Marketing

Throughout that time I relied on a marketing machine to produce leads and learnt to exploit partners or channel, to generate Leads.

What became apparent was the marketing had moved from "fluffy" to digital and having a desire to continue to push boundaries, learning the cutting edge of digital marketing, was in my opinion, key.

Why?

What business does not need more customers and leads?

And even more important, the reinforcement that in the data were always learns and insights. Those insights/nuggets meant we learnt faster continuing to learn where "the devil in the detail" lay.

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Digital Marketing the evolution

Search Engines

Learning how to dominate search engine rankings was the number 1 learn.
Then came the balance of websites, learning, how design, content and customer journeys had to be balanced:
- Without the right content structure, you didn't rank.
- Without the right content, people weren't interested.
- If the design of the customer journey was right you could convert traffic to leads.
The Search engines started to get more complex 3 categories that influence the Google ranking algorithm evolved into 37.
Now the content not only had to be high quality, but rich in its availability across different formats and end points.
The game became, put content where people learn, usually with their trusted peer group.

Now rapidly emerging is GEO, What is GEO?

What Is GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)?

Definition: GEO is the practice of structuring and refining your digital content to improve its chances of being cited or referenced directly by AI-driven platforms—like ChatGPT, Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE), Gemini, Perplexity, and other large language model (LLM) tools.

Purpose: Unlike traditional SEO, which centers on ranking within search engine result pages, GEO aims to position your content so it becomes part of the AI-generated answer or summary featured in the response to user queries.

GEO vs SEO: How They Differ?

Feature SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

Objective Improve rankings in traditional search results.

Be included directly in AI-generated responses.

Search Optimization = Focus Keywords, backlinks, site authority Structure, clarity, context, and credibility.

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization)

For AI parsing = Content Strategy Keyword-rich, link-driven, ranking-focused,Context-rich, structured, authoritative, conversational. Discovery Platform Google, Bing, SERPsAI tools (ChatGPT, SGE, Gemini, etc.)

Whilst Google still dominates Search, its competition & also its own new secret sauce, is AI generated answers, that needed understanding.

Puzzles

Be it business or pleasure, i've always needed to crack the puzzle.

Not so much how things are done, more how can I influence results?

Business Puzzles

At Europcar the puzzle was "find an edge to differentiate a 1.8 cavalier rental day"

At Regus the puzzle(s) initially, dominate channels for leads and and be efficient in converting them, then it evolved in the dot.com crash into, how to generate revenue in an office demand recession?

Creating a new product line "the on demand Meeting Room in city centres, near transport hubs and beyond."

Then it became distribute that inventory electronically to optimise revenue with online inventory, API's and E-Commerce.

Generate an ecosystem of partners that give us high quality leads for big high status, new business logo's.

And now it is "Generate enquiries for small businesses from every digital channel."