I've got to tell you something. You might think that I'm full of shit, listen up…

I used to be the CMO of a $200 million fashion brand. I have been a fractional CMO for furniture companies, for travel companies, for fintech startups. The way think about and choose agency partners doesn't match how agencies think they work.

The way you think clients find you? It's wrong. Not a little wrong. Not "needs some tweaking" wrong. It's fundamentally, structurally, embarrassingly wrong.

You think it goes like this:
Pospect sees your ad/gets your cold email, clicks your landing page, reads your case studies, fills out a form, hops on a call, signs a contract. Beautiful. Linear. Makes total sense on a whiteboard.

I don't know about you, but I don't know anybody who lives on a whiteboard.

Here's what actually happens:
Somebody in a meeting says, "Holy shit, we have a problem. We should probably do something about that." Somebody else says, "You know what, at my last job we used this approach." Then somebody's brother's friend apparently does something similar. And a fourth person chimes in with, "I keep seeing this company everywhere…maybe check them out?"

That's the consideration set - that's how it actually forms. It pays no mind to your meticulously optimized landing page. Consideration sets start through people talking to other people.

I can already hear you "But Tim, we're a direct response shop. We know how funnels work!" Cool. You know what? Fuck your funnel. You know how your funnel is supposed to work. Your only data comes from people who are in your funnel. - you have absolutely no idea about the buying process of 99.997% of the target market who doesn't come to your funnel. What you know about your funnel and what you don’t know about the people who never make it to your funnel could be the difference between barely surviving and totally thriving.

Even in the most sterile, buttoned-up, governmental-procurement-deadline RFP situation …where the entire point is to strip away personal opinions and make everything apples-to-apples…the RFP didn't come out of nowhere.

It came from a consultant. Or from discussions with a previous agency. Or from somebody who attended a webinar three years ago and remembered a framework. The whole freakin’ RFP is colored by past human experience before a single vendor ever sees it.

This is going to make you jealous, but, there are agencies that are so fucking good at building non-transactional relationships that the RFP-generating client actually asks their advice before writing the RFP. The agency inadvertently or purposely shapes the RFP in their favor, and then, SURPISE!, they win it.

It's not because they had better answers to the RFP questions, it's because they invested in trust when there was zero pressure to sell.

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No. Calm down. Don’t be a silly goose.

Cold outreach works. But it works the way a slot machine works… it's more a function of scale, not neccessarily skill. If you do outreach at a big enough volume, you will occasionally hit somebody at exactly the right moment. They are ready to buy, you showed up in their inbox, and suddenly you are on the shortlist. Congratulations. You are good at what you do, but you also got lucky.

That puts smaller agencies at a disadvantage, right? Bigger shops have more relationships, more reps, more spins of the wheel.

To some extent, yes. But here's what big agencies don't have - flexibility.

If you're under $10 million in revenue, the market's opinions about you are less well-formed. That's not a weakness. That's a superpower.

Big agencies have reputations. People have already decided what they cost, who they work with, and how good they are. Sometimes those opinions are wrong, and those agencies lose opportunities they deserved. The market's perception is a cage, even when it's a gilded one.

You? You're a blank canvas. You get to define your presence from scratch. And you can do it faster and more creatively than any agency with a legacy brand weighing them down.

Let me walk you through how.

Let's say you want to break into the branded hotel space…Hyatt & Hilton franchisees, that world. It's mature. It's well-defined. There are behemoth incumbents like TravelClick and deep experience shops like Cogwheel Marketing and Analytics who've been in it forever and know everybody.

Your instinct is to think, "I can't compete. I don't know people like, these people know people."

You know what? When those agencies started, they didn't know these people either. They just invested themselves into the market before they expected anything back.

Here's how you do the same thing:

1. Partner Up: Go to a bigger agency in your space and say, "Hey, we work with folks below your minimum spend threshold. Can we create a referral agreement?" You aren’t competing with them, you are catching what they can't serve. Suddenly you are leveraging their authority and getting real client experience. Case studies start accumulating. Relationships start forming. Momentum starts building.

2. Lead With a Hot Take: Come up with an approach or a perspective that challenges conventional thinking, and then pitch yourself to every hospitality podcast on the planet. Reach out to industry influencers. Send emails…not to close business, but to create awareness around your thinking. You're not selling. You're becoming interesting.

3. Go Deep on Their World: Jump into every forum, every subreddit, every publication that your audience reads. Learn what they're learning about. If you are focused on hospitality marketing, you presumably have some insight into marketing hopitality businesses. But if you invest time in understanding their OVERALL business, not just their marketing, you'll suddenly have ten bazillion ideas about solving their problems through your lens. That's intellectual property. That's what creates micro-authority. That makes you even MORE interesting.

4. Become the Best Commenter on the Internet: Follow people in your industry on LinkedIn, on blogs, on newsletters. Comment. Respond. Show that you have something to say. The content creators will notice you. More importantly, their audience will notice you. You're leveraging someone else's stage to build your own credibility. It costs you nothing but time and thoughtfulness. Even more INTERESTING.

5. Outreach Becomes the Cherry on Top: Now, after you've done all of this, when you send that cold email or that DM, you're not a stranger. You're "that company I keep seeing." You are capturing the attention of people who happen to be recopgnizing that they have a problem OR are building their consideration set right now. And every conversation teaches you something that makes your thinking sharper and your outreach better. It's a flywheel of awareness and INTERESTING.

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Founders are great at this stuff. But founders also have to, you know, run the agency.

Here's where it gets exponential: get your whole team involved.

Your developer who knows hospitality platforms like Amadeus? Holy guacamole…have them write about development challenges in the hotel tech stack. Your project managers who understand the chaos of launching a new property site? Have them share what gets in the way.

While marketing decisions are made by marketers, the consideration set is influenced by more people than you think. Your developer talking to their developers. Your PM talking to their operations team. Suddenly you're drawing attention from multiple angles inside these organizations.

Here's the mental model I want you to take away:

Cold outreach is the candy at the checkout. It catches people who are already ready to buy right now. It's impulse. It's timing. It works, but it only works on one person at a time.

Relationships are how people remember you. When someone starts the process of considering a change, they don't want to add more chaos to an already chaotic decision. Change is hard enough. Vetting unknown partners on top of operational upheaval? That's a lot. They're going to gravitate toward the name they already know…even if all they know is your name and that you do hospitality marketing. You are miles ahead of the stranger who stumbles in with a cold email.

Engagement multiplies. Even the best cold email generates one relationship per open. One. Engaging with an audience, you know, commenting, publishing, partnering, showing up on podcasts & conferences, etc. generates engagement with dozens, even hundreds of potential partners in the same amount of time.

People gravitate toward transactional tactics because they feel easier. More direct. More measurable. Send 1,000 emails, get 3 meetings, close 1 deal. The math is simple, even when the math sucks.

But transactional is less efficient, less powerful, and less authentic than investing in visibility, expertise, authority, and insight.

The whole DemandOS philosophy, and the entire WTF sales process is built around a single idea: relationship-based understanding, engagement, and insight wins fastest, best & most. Not manipulation. Not volume. Not luck.

All of it requires investment, but relationships generate yield over time. transactions generate return right now. Generating a relationship that turns into a three-year client relationship and twelve referrals dramatically outpaces the benefit of generating a cold relationship that manifests in a three-month engagement

So lean into growing your visibility. Your expertise. Your authority. Your insight. Get your team involved. Make those investments. Because when someone in a conference room says, "Holy shit, we have a problem," you want to be the name that comes up next.

Not because you sent the best email. Because you were already there.

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