About Peter

Peter Keyes
Peter Keyes

Peter’s career over the last 25 years has been primarily focused on helping clients manage their most critical asset: their relationship database. These are relationships internal to the organization such as employees (HR database) and external to the organization such as clients (marketing database). Peter works to prolong the longevity of these relationships as the best path to sustainable profits. His focus has been in the following industries: Financial Services, Hospitality, Debt-credit counselling, Automotive, Nonprofits, and Retail.

Peter’s career began in the field of database marketing long before technology began to influence how it is we come to understand the nature of the customer. Starting out working with Donald Keyes, a celebrated and award winning marketer with the American Marketing Association (and his dad), this early mentorship and knowledge shaped his insights which are still very relevant to this day.

Peter first recognized the importance of maintaining quality relationships when he co-established a financial services company Canale Keyes & Associates. The young company was going through some growing pains as it faced exponential growth. Peter hired a respected Human Resource/Organizational Development consultant to facilitate a Work Styles program to produce a more high functioning team. The results were immediate (especially to the bottom line). It became quite obvious that sustaining quality relationships equaled longevity of profits. The experience also added a new dimension to traditional Direct Marketing principles.

Direct Marketers know that the longer you keep a client the greater the opportunity to sustain longer term profits. At Canale Keyes & Associates it was clear this also extended to employees (suppliers) and he saw the opportunity to look at traditional HR through the lens of Direct Marketing. This discovery resulted in Peter making a bold move from Direct Marketing into the field of human resource tools and development.

Training in this new discipline, he mentored and coached over 300 people. It was after this experience that Peter gained new insight into understanding how one can evaluate a marketing database in a much different way than done before. Beyond evaluating a database based on Recency, Frequency and Monetary value, Peter was now able to review a client’s marketing database based on the buying and selling behaviours of the customer base.

In order to gauge reaction to this new found discovery of incorporating psychometric strategies in evaluating databases, Peter held a successful workshop on Database Marketing for Financial Advisors at Simon Fraser University. The president of this venerable institution was one of the attendees. The director of the executive education program was so impressed with the workshop Peter was commissioned to re-designed the program to reach other vertical markets.

In exploring other vertical markets on his own, Peter went to work for New Canadian Energy (NCE), a financial planning company focusing on the oil and gas industry. It was at NCE, that Peter led the charge to expose Financial Planners to the power of marketing database speaking at two NCE sponsored conventions – one in Whistler with 60 planners and at the main National Convention held in Vancouver. This was a critical time in Peter’s career as technology was beginning to overshadow core principles in understanding how to build a marketing database. Representing NCE as one of three expert panelists at a workshop entitled, Critical Analysis of Contact Management Software, Peter presented a challenge to the 250 member audience about how technology (i.e. contact management software & CRM) may be getting in the way of the primary strategy which emphasizes putting the customer first and using technology as enabling tool.

At the core of building a great marketing database it must start with creativity and imagination. For Peter, this brought him back to his studies at McGill University forever curious how great minds work. Peter went on to incorporate creative thinking strategies in the building of a marketing database thus adding another methodology in his arsenal called, Creative Planning. Forever a student of the great thinkers such as Edward de Bono and Peter Drucker, he went on to bring together two great principles from two great thinkers advising clients how to use lateral thinking to fulfill the primary goal of any business, to create a customer.  Peter has written unpublished volumes on the subject of mathematics and how it applies to creativity; hence the establishment of this blog.

For the last two years Peter has been a practicing management consultant transforming businesses in multiple areas such as finance, corporate restructuring, HR, marketing and information/communications technology. Many of the articles you will read over the coming weeks, months and years will be based on the exciting accomplishments with Peter’s top client. The case studies will be a shining example of how the relationship is not only achievable but necessary. Peter will also talk and expose readers to his Work Style program in great detail.

On the personal side, Peter is a trained Cordon Bleu caterer, is a fervent believer in volunteering through his own work with street kids and continues to mentor and coach many, without charge, on living a life with purpose and credibility. Peter lives in beautiful British Columbia and enjoys spending his time cooking and keeping one step ahead of his brilliant young daughter, “Bear.”

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