Have you watched this freaky TV show Severance?

If not, stop reading this, & go watch. I’ll wait. (No I won’t, but you should still watch it.)

If you've watched it or if you haven't, here's the premise in a nutshell. Lumon Industries employees undergo a surgical procedure that severs their work memories from their personal memories. Their "innie" (the person who shows up to the office) has no idea who they actually are outside the building. Their "outie" (the real person) has no idea what happens at work.

It’s two completely separate identities sharing the one body. One is authentic & the other is manufactured. (Not gonna tell you which one is which, tho...) The whole thing is kind of a mindfuck, honestly.

I bring this up because I’ve been working with an agency that had its own Severance thing going on.

THE INNIE: This Agency is full of brilliant, passionate, deeply invested humans doing extraordinary work. They have true emotional intelligence, clients that stay for a decade (the average at their size is under three years) & a team that clients describe in beatific terms like "commitment," "leadership," and "truly strategic thinking."

THE OUTIE: A website that says "data-driven, ROI-focused, extension of your team."

The are two versions of this agency & everyone sees the OUTIE version, but you have to jump over a biz dev and contract hurdle to experience the benefit of working with the INNIE version.

This isn't a branding or web content issue. It's a major freaking disconnect between what the agency really is and how the market sees them. And, sadly, that disconnect is really, really expensive and in rampant in agency land.

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Okay, I know I sound a little bit like a skipping record, but I'm going to keep on writing about this until it finally sinks in…too many agencies are still selling like it's 2018, 2019, or 2020. The market was ripe for growth, yeses came easily, and it was almost impossible to not grow your agency. I happened to look at the calendar this morning, and it seemed to say it is 2026. Holy guacamole, nothing looks the same.

Because all of us marketers are control freaks, we build these carefully constructed awareness-to-consideration-to-decision pipelines. They look really good in presentation decks. They make your pipeline easier to manage, and it gives you the illusion of control because you can measure stuff. But prospects have their own timeline, their own process, and their own shortlist. If they ever even touch your website or your funnel, I can almost guarantee the only thing it can do is flip their decision from “maybe” to “nah”. No quality buyer is going to land on a page on your website, watch your six-minute video, and decide to hire you right away. I don't know if the “optimized funnel” has always been a story that we tell ourselves for comfort, but I can tell you it's a tall tale right now.

At the risk of sounding like Gary V, Noah Kagan or other marketing gurus, distro matters more than ever. The agencies that win are the ones which are already visible in market before a prospect starts looking. It might be because they did SEO really well or spent money on ads, but most of the time it's because the agency said smart things, showed that they know their stuff and became impossible to ignore. When a prospect already knows everything about you before the discovery call, that is a sale that is on the fast track.

When I dug into what CMOs and VPs of marketing actually want from their agency partners, it was not "data-driven ROI-focused extension of your team." It’s strategic thinking & a defensible point of view based on market experience. Marketers want to work with agencies who are going to push back if that's what the situation demands, brings creative and well thought out ideas ideas, and cares about outcomes as if the client P&L belonged to them.

Here’s the TL;DR:

Your market isn't looking for the best agency because they can't really judge who the best agency is. Your market is looking for an agency it already knows, trusts, and believes in before the sales conversation even kicks off.

So that client I mentioned, the INNIE/OUTIE agency? Take a minute and think about their dilemma - because MOST agencies I know have some version of this severance going on. I bet the INNIE version of your agency is fantastic, but the OUTIE version probably sounds like meaningless MBA bizno-babble that doesn't really say anything. Most of the time, this happens because you are more afraid of saying the wrong thing than the true thing.

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I'm not a tattoo guy, but if I were, I might get this on the inside of my lip:

Demand is not generated. It is uncovered.

Except in very rare circumstances, there is no such thing as demand creation. You capture demand by doing all of these GTM things, you know…running ad campaigns, creating nurture sequences, or sending cold emails. You excavate and uncover demand through your identity, positioning, words, and actions.

I think the biggest agency growth hack is being yourself. When you can speak to the market in honest, direct, and clear terms, that uncovers the demand and puts you in a position to capture it.

I'm a marketer too, so, it’s really tempting to start using words that sound good but mean nothing. This isn’t techno-corporate speak, but I’ve built this DemandOS framework to help agencies attract more great clients. But more than some kind of step by step marketing prescription, DemandOS is a story. Like all good stories, it has a beginning, a middle, and an end (except not really - it's more like "Stay tuned for Volume 2.”):

You might be a little bit tired of hearing about Vibes, Vision, & Values. but if you are new here, VVV isn't a positioning statement or branding exercise or conversion rate optimization. This is Chapter 1 of your agency story. You start telling the actual experience of working with your agency.

I'm going to bet that the story of your agency, your team, your insight, your expertise, your culture is a really good story. But most agencies skip this thinking all together. Instead, they conjure up intelligent-sounding but broad, fluffy themes like "full-service ROI-focused data-driven-growth-service-channel-experts", and then they wonder why nobody ever reaches out.

This story of your agency’s exciting adventures, told in the rich language of your vibes, vision, and values is where you hook your reader. You grab their attention and show them that you can heroically make their business the hero of their industry. You back it up with stories and insights that make them believe in you.

Once you know who you are and can tell that story, you have to figure out where people are going to be able to read that story. You probably aren’t like Emily Dickinson, who kept an oeuvre of literary masterpieces trapped inside her notebooks that scholars would celebrate decades and centuries later. Your story needs to be told now (after all, you’ve got payroll to meet - something that Emily didn’t have to deal with…), so we’ve got to figure out how we can get some eyeballs on all your tales of adventure.

You get visibility not by following some bullshit, use this LinkedIn template and a fill in the blanks cold email mad lib. No, sir! You've got to learn how to share the story of your VVV in a social-first way. It doesn't really matter which channel you use, but you've got to start telling your story so people can hear it. In case you didn't know, my first job out of college was as an English teacher. One of the rules you have to impart to your students to help them become better communicators is "show, don't tell."

You might be screaming, “Wait, Tim, I was a bad student….what do you mean!?”
Here's the difference:
TELL: Our client generated 5X return on ad spend.
SHOW: Let me show you one of the reports from our clients. As you can see, before we started, they were trending around a 2.5 return on ad spend. After we did our customer survey and did a strategic creative overhaul, you can see how the return on ad spend grew rapidly, and they were in a great position for the last holiday.

To grow your agency well, you've got to become a master storyteller. In DemandOS, we do this social first, because that's where you get the fastest feedback. You get to learn which stories people love and which ones put them to sleep. (If you have a team, after we get founder and senior staff storytelling sorted, together, we create a system so your team can start telling great stories about your agency in their voice to their peers and colleagues. We amplify those stories throughout your target market at every single level. And that's really freaking cool.) Then we use that information to create other nifty pieces of content too.

3. The End - Let’s Chat

After you've discovered what your story really is, and learned which stories people love, a weird thing is going to happen. Prospects who know something about you, who are predisposed to work in the same way that you do, and who are invested in your stories already, are going to start showing up. they are going to start showing up with respect for who you are and what you bring to the table, and they are curious, not judgmental (shout out, Ted Lasso).

When you get curious people who already have an understanding of who you are and what you stand for, the sales process is no longer an exercise in persuasion, cajoling, or guiding. It becomes (and I am coining this, so consider it trademarked, service-marked, copyrighted, and whatever else) a cooperative excavation of opportunity.

Both sides show up curious, both sides invest. The prospect is not evaluating & the agency is not pitching. They are working together to create the work they are going to do, together.

That's what happens when you share the great things about your agency: its people, its thinking, its culture, and its insight. Those elements draw right-fit prospects to you. When you expose all of this, that right-fit prospect has much lower risk avoidance and much lower resistance. By the time you say, "Should we put some paper to this?" they are going to say, "Hell yeah.".

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Earlier, I mentioned a client of mine and their INNIE/OUTIE conundrum. They are a great eight-figure agency that does better work than 9-figure agencies. TBH, they do better work than most brands.

It's awesome that they got to eight figures, but all their business came from founder networking, a couple of referral partners, and frequent flyers. This truly extraordinary agency has been creating a pipeline based on introductions & bumping into somebody getting a drink at some sort of horrendous mixer.

When we started, their agency presentation was boring AF. You know - “Data-driven, extension of your team, we really care, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” But behind that aggressively beige, neutral, jargon-filled experience was an agency full of incredibly passionate people who were so invested in client success that they had multiple relationships with clients that lasted over a decade. In today's world, that is for-freaking-ever.

We started with their VVV (here is a sample VVV, if you are interested) by talking to their leadership, the staff, and their clients. I heard these wonderful stories of an incredible culture of commitment to service, strategic thinking, and ownership that their clients cherished. based on all of their external presentations, everything from their website to sales decks to emails, unless you'd been introduced by one of their partners or happened to meet them randomly, it was really hard to tell them apart from any other agency.

So we did something radical.

We stopped allowing them to use any words that sounded like any other agency and gave them permission (and a mandate) to sound like themselves.

We did social-first content, client video case studies, monthly roundtables to expand their presence in their target market. We developed some assets that felt like IP, found some podcasts for them to talk on, and we found a stage or two on which they could present.

Seriously, it was nothing crazy.

More than anything, we empowered the team to show that they know their shit better than anybody else. (BTW - here's a great way to know if you sound like yourself: stick another agency's name where you say "we" or "I." If what you are about to say sounds okay with another agency's name in it, you are not saying the thing that's true about you.)

Their inbound conversations changed started to change. Discovery calls were deeper and revealed the things that really needed to be fixed. With more real presence in the markets, a few more distro channels, and a true message, the pipeline changed from morose to massive. Then the revenue changed.

As much as we made changes to their language and their visibility and their sales messaging, a lot of stuff didn't change:

What changed is the way the market could truly understand them. Amazing, huge brands were thirsty for somebody who was all in with them. These household brand names could not wait to chat with people who truly give a shit.

That's the whole story. Be yourself. Don't be shy, and right-fit prospects are gonna show up and ask to get started.

Okay, there's no 47-step implementation plan for homework (even though the English teacher in me wants you to write a 5 paragraph essay about the importance of being yourself), here are three things that you can do this week to test this out:

Write down what your best clients said about your team during their last quarterly business review. And the look at the home page of your website.

If there's not a really high overlap in the language, intent, and impact, you just proved that your clients get to see your INNIE agency, but the people in-market who desperately need to see the real you, gets to see your OUTIE agency.
Even though they have the same name, those agencies are not the same.

If you you can't answer these questions easily? That's your big problem - you don't know who you are. And if you don't know who you are, you can't be exactly right for someone. Your identity attracts their business.

Not the founder or employee #1, but somebody who's really good at their job and has a real passion for the work.

In Severance, the whole point (spoiler alert) is that having an INNIE and an OUTIE, isn't sustainable. Shocker, I know.

In Severance, the OUTIE keeps intruding on the INNIE. But for agencies, the opposite happens. That boring MBA speak that litters your website and your sales decks seeps inside and pollutes the thing that makes you perfect. Instead of allowing that OUTIE, boring, gray-beige, safe, offensive-to-no-one, message to infiltrate the magic of your marketing agency, start right now and get rid of every shade of beige, taupe, or eggshell white - let your true colors shine through. (A little Cindy Lauper, anyone?)

Is being yourself riskier than being boring, like a gray linoleum floor? Yes, it is riskier, but nobody loves a gray linoleum floor. They love intricately crafted Turkish rugs or gorgeous hardwood with an aged patina.

You are a marketing agency. Market the things that you alone have & fight against Lumon Industries and their dastardly Severance.

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