Name: What to Do When You Have a Budget Surplus by The Accidental Marketer Podcast
Duration: 20 min 42 s
Description: This episode tackles the year-end dilemma: use it or lose it. Learn how to turn your budget surplus into strategic advantage with smart investments in insight, innovation, and team capability.

Many B2B firms stop short of customizing their value props—even after strong segmentation. This episode explores how AI, used with the right strategic tools, can transform value props from generic to segment-specific—and prove ROI before you launch.

Using AI to Strengthen (and Streamline) Your Value Proposition

Sales and strategy often operate in silos. But with AI-enhanced playbooks, the handoff becomes a continuous loop—where strategy shapes execution, and sales sharpens strategy.

Why Your Sales Team Isn’t Using Your Strategy

How do you price with confidence when markets shift, competitors undercut, and customers demand more for less? In this episode, the team explores how AI—combined with the right strategic tools—is making pricing smarter, more precise, and more aligned to real customer value.

AI-Powered Pricing: More Precision, Less Guesswork

Too many B2B “stories” are just fact dumps. In this episode, we explore why real storytelling matters in strategy — and how to make your customer the hero, build around tension, and use emotion to make your message stick.

Why Storytelling Makes or Breaks Strategy

This episode explores the storytelling tools that transform strategy into narratives customers believe in. From trends and personas to competitor analysis and AI, the team shows how to craft stories that resonate, persuade, and stick.

Storytelling Tools That Win

This episode explores why your best storytelling might not mention your product at all. Learn how to craft stories that build credibility, spark curiosity, and make audiences want to hear more.

Why Your Best Storytelling Should Not Mention Your Product

This episode tackles the year-end dilemma: use it or lose it. Learn how to turn your budget surplus into strategic advantage with smart investments in insight, innovation, and team capability.

What to Do When You Have a Budget Surplus

This episode explores why great companies fall behind — and how to avoid the same mistakes. The team breaks down the forces that cause once-dominant brands to lose their way and the practices that keep customer-aware companies on top.

Why Great Companies Lose Their Way

This episode breaks down the rise and fall of Quibi — and the strategic lessons behind its rapid collapse. You’ll learn how trend shifts, assumptions, and lack of customer testing can undermine even the strongest ideas.

Why Quibi Failed — And What It Teaches Us About Strategic Blind Spots

In this year-end discussion, the team unpacks what 2025 really highlighted about organizational strategy. They examine how high-performing teams used AI to widen the range of strategic choices, why uneven economic shifts made scenario planning a necessity, and how Nike’s distribution reset underscored the importance of understanding influence systems. The episode emphasizes that the organizations that made real progress were the ones prepared to act without perfect clarity — because they had built readiness long before they needed it.

The Year in Review: What 2025 Revealed About Strategy and Readiness

I am Tom Spitale, a Partner at Impact Planning Group - welcome to our Podcast!  Along with my colleagues and Partners Mary Abbazia and Sean Welham, we are the authors of "The Accidental Marketer" published by Wiley.  Through our book and our consulting practice, we help (mostly B2B) Accidental Marketers create unique and compelling strategies that differentiate their products and services from the competition.  Our podcast addresses important B2B strategic marketing issues and is designed to help listeners maximize profits in their area of responsibility by creating, communicating and capturing (via pricing strategies) more value for customers than competitors do.

What to Do When You Have a Budget Surplus

The Accidental Marketer Podcast

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