Hi, I’m Craig Bailey and this is my personal blog where I write about technology, business systems, HubSpot and general life experiences. You can read my posts here.

(If you are looking for the Content is King post by Bill Gates it is here)

I’m involved with three agencies in Sydney:

  • The first is XEN Systems. We help government departments and mid-large B2B technology companies with their sales and marketing strategy, including implementation and training in HubSpot 
  • The second is XEN Create. We provide premium graphic design services to companies, with a focus on using the latest AI tools, including Midjourney
  • The third is XEN Solar, where we help high quality solar companies (dealers, installers) with their sales and marketing processes.

I also co-host HubShots, the podcast and YouTube show focussed on getting the most out of HubSpot. We are the creators of the HubShots Framework.

Craig Bailey presenting

Latest stories

The boring but impactful things our clients are doing

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Data 3.0 I’m in my mid 50s now, which means I’m in that stage of life where I’m highly focussed on health. I want to live not only a long life, but also a healthy life. One of the books I’ve been re-reading is the excellent Outlive by Peter Attia. If you’ve read it you’ll recall he discusses the topic of Medicine 3.0. As a quick oversimplification:  Medicine 1.0 was the initial medical...

Canva and HotJar price update

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There was a bit of angst on social when Canva announced some price increases last week (up by 300% in some cases). Not to be outdone, I received the following ‘hold my beer’ notification from HotJar a few days later: Admittedly this is less about a price increase right now, and more a removal of a legacy discount against price increases a while back – but to the end user (ie me)...

Personalisation versus Personalisation Tokens

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In marketing we often talk about personalising our marketing activities – which is a good thing. We all want to be like Amazon – those emails all seem like they have been personally curated for my interests and tastes. That’s a good thing. But often the extent of personalisation in corporate email stops at: inserting the person’s first name in the email subject line Which as you may...

Value

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Whenever I start doubting[1] my value[2] to customers, I remind myself that there’s plenty of thriving businesses charging a lot of money for things that would have been laughed at years ago. Here’s a company[3] that sells ‘luxury orthopaedic dog beds’ – I’m not making this up. If you have a dog you probably want to buy them one, if you don’t have a dog you perhaps think this is...

Smile broadly and answer the call

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If you’re out in public and your mobile rings and you recognise the number: smile broadly and answer the call (even if you don’t really have time or want to talk to them).

Although it’s rare, perhaps just a few times every year or so, the person calling has spotted you from across the street, and your reaction will live on in their minds for years to come.

Modern Websites are built on a CRM

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Sales and Marketing websites that is If you’d asked people 10 years ago what was the mark of a modern website, most probably would have ended up talking about how websites needed to work on mobile devices. At that time the conversation was around whether to have responsive websites, versus mobile-specific websites (ie remember all those m.companydomain.com sites).  These days we all take...

Artisanal content

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The Content Opportunity (Artisanal Content lol) I’ve mentioned this previously, but it seems more than ever the rise of AI content slop is creating an opportunity for people who create high value content. With every new, ‘easier’, scalable way to do anything there’s sometimes an equal and opposite opportunity to focus on the old, ‘harder’, manual way to do something. It’s why we have...

Marketing Managers

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Here’s a simple high level job description for a Marketing Manager: Understand the business and the problem it solves Prepare the marketing strategy (who, problem, solution, where, when) Organise the implementation (ie execution including measurement) Glean insights that enable you to improve Rinse and repeat Most of this is done regardless of company size. For small businesses you’ll be involved...

Don’t write for radio

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“Do not ever write for radio. Ever.”

This was Neil Young’s advice to a young Jewel (before her music career took off) as she was feeling the pressure to switch from being true to her self, to some manufactured version for her record company.

Sometimes I wonder if the modern business equivalent could be: “Do not ever write for LinkedIn. Ever.”

RevOps malarkey

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Ask 10 people what RevOps is and you’ll get 11 different answers Perhaps it’s a geography thing, but here in Australia, across our clients, large and small, very few of them have a person with ‘RevOps’ in their title. And when they do, it doesn’t seem like they have much authority – it seems more of a token role that the business seems to be testing. Up there with ‘Head of Special Projects’...

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