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My 2 Person Agency Won A Contract With A $1B Company…
About a hundred years ago, my agency had two employees. One of them was me & I, generously, called Sam an employee, because what his salary was a pretty poor excuse for compensation (Sorry, Sam!).
Through a warm intro that we weren’t ready for, we landed a call with a $1B consumer electronics retailer. They were part of $100B parent conglomerate, had 900 retail locations & relationships with every major agency in the country. Through some magic that I can only describe as luck, they were talking to our paid search agency even though we were less than six months old and only had two clients.
In prep for the call, I dug through every search ad I could find from this company. Every ad was targeted on high-traffic, low-intent head terms like "tvs” & "PlayStation" - high cost, low conversion words that smart marketers weren't chasing. The conceit of our agency was to avoid that kind of bullshit marketing, so I was feeling particularly empowered and maybe just a little bit “holier-than-thou” during our discovery call.
When the call started, we made small talk and here is the actual sentence I asked, as best as I can remember it:
"You have nine hundred retail locations and access to the biggest agencies in the country, and all the ads I could find were for low-intent search terms like 'television' or 'PlayStation.' So tell me, are you using search marketing to attract buyers, or is this a branding play? If you are trying to build brand, I would look into the TV ads available through your parent company’s cable networks. If you are trying to attract buyers, I would suggest shutting off your paid search until we understand what you are trying to sell to whom. I know we’ve just met, but I didn’t want us to go much further without understanding what you were thinking."
Where Did I Get The Gumption?
This was a huge opportunity for my teeny-tiny agency, but I had lived this problem before. Just prior to launching this agency, I had been the CMO of a large fashion retailer that used a very similar approach. I started this agency based on what I learned about changing internal marketing culture & to fight against this very thinking.
Starting off a discussion with a clear indictment of what they were doing and suggesting they shut down their paid search was totally fucking cuckoo. There was a trajectory-altering opportunity in front of me, and I decided to jump in and talk shit about what they were doing. That’s just crazy, right?
But here's what that approach did:
It Showed I Came Armed With Data (And Opinions): I named the actual keywords, not "your paid search strategy" in the abstract. I focused on the literal keywords that were eating their budget. If I had talked broadly about “strategy” or “messaging”, I might have come off as a YAFA - Yet Another Fucking Agency. (See Issue 112 for the full definition 🤑.)
It Showed That I Spoke Their Language: Brand and direct response aren’t the same. By showing that I knew the difference & saying it out loud, in the first minute, showed that I had a point of view & that I understood the two sides of their business. And, perhaps most importantly, it showed we cared more about doing the right thing more than about being hired.
It Gave Them An Off Ramp: I was all up in my VVV. I had an opinion, I had data, and I had a vision of how things should go. If they didn't agree with me, understand me, or appreciate my bluntness, I gave them a great way to end the call right there and then. Through being unafraid to talk bluntly in the sales process, I showed what it was like to work with us. And I showed it unapologetically. I wasn't trying to soften or minimize our stance, or provide squishy optionality, just in case they had different thoughts. (We stayed true to that approach even after our eventual acquisition.)
It Welcomed Them Into Our Judgement Free Zone: "I know we’ve just met, but I didn’t want us to go much further without understanding what you were thinking." The judgment-free zone is one of the core tenets of our Weapons of Mass Acquisition. And there I was, in the wild, a decade before I wrote it down, showing this prospect that there was no punishment for not having an understanding or a plan around what I suggested. I made an offer of discussion and gave them permission to open up.
I asked one pretty ballsy question, used 30 seconds of conversational currency, and electrified the conversation. My mom always told me that I was clever and handsome, but I'm not sure she ever really meant either of those, so maybe I'll talk about that in therapy instead of here. But cleverness isn't why that question accelerated discovery. It worked because I doubt any other agency on the planet could have said that, meant it, and been comfortable with whatever outcome followed.
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The Irreducible Opener
We've talked about Vibes Vision & Values a lot, but the irreducible opener is the distillation of everything in your VVV which allows your prospect (if they are listening closely) to learn almost everything they need to know about you in one or two sentences.
An Irreducible Opener is the first real sentence out of your mouth on a discovery call that would be a lie if said by any other agency on earth.
That's a pretty simple test, right? Imagine another agency that you know saying the same thing. If the sentence still works, it’s not yours. If someone else can say it authentically, well, and with the same conviction, you don’t have an ownable idea - you have a “best practice” adorned with your logo.
There's another part to the test, and this one is more subtle. The irreducible opener has to be powerful enough that the people who hear it are either attracted to you or repelled by you. When you are articulating your experience, your point of view, your vision, and your way of thinking effectively, it's a positive or a negative. The people who share your vibes, vision, and values should lean in, and everybody else should lean out.
In order to be irreducible, on some level, the way you start the meaningful part of the conversation has to be strong enough that there is some risk involved
I know we've talked about this before, but if your sales process isn’t congruous with your VVV, you are F-U-C-K-E-D, and you definitely earn the YAFA moniker.
Some Irreducible Opener Ideas
A few issues ago, I introduced the idea of GTM themes (weird, insight, results, safe). This is probably a good way to get you to contextualize your idea and your go-to-market feeling with some kind of irreducible opener. here are some ideas so you get the flavor of this. Please don't copy them, because then you fail the irreducible idea test, and that is the exact opposite of what we want:
WEIRD Opener: "Before we go any further, I should warn you that the way we work is going to sound wrong for the first ten minutes. If it still sounds wrong at minute eleven, I’ll tell you who to call instead."
INSIGHT Opener: "I’ve been poring over your previous campaign creative. Two choices look deliberate, three look like leftover decisions from a previous strategy, and one is totally baffling. Can we start there?"
RESULTS Opener:"I don't want to go through results we’ve had with other clients until I really understand the impact that results have on your business. Otherwise I might sound a little braggy, and you might be getting a different idea about how it could work for you."
SAFE Opener: "I'm going to guess that most of the agencies you've talked to have told you that this is all going to be fine. I'm not going to do that until I truly understand how we support your brand, how we support your margins, and what you were trying to accomplish in the next two quarters. After that, we can talk about what we should be worried about and what we shouldn't, because we want to help you sustain and grow your market position, not just focus on KPIs."
These are just examples, but from those couple of sentences, you understand what the agency is like. You give the prospect something to hang their hat on, and it provides enough context so that the prospect can back away if they aren’t feeling it.
You don't have to have this memorized. In fact, you shouldn't, because your irreducible opener is going to change a little bit based on the circumstance. If you sound a little bit insane when you say it out loud, that's okay. It's probably a sign that you are heading in the right direction.
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LFG & Put This In Motion
Record your next discovery call, or transcribe the one you did last week. You probably have a default opener you did not know was a script.
Run the Irreducible test on it. Would the sentence be a lie if said by any other agency? If no, the sentence is borrowed.
Rewrite it as a sentence that makes it clear what it's like to work with you in the first two minutes. Say it out loud. If it doesn’t make you slightly nervous to hear yourself say it, it’s not done yet.
This is exactly what Call Lab Pro does, by the way. It analyzes your actual calls and you'll see the things that are YAFA coded.
BOOM
In that GTM themes issue, I shared that for years I was selling a slice of myself and calling it the whole thing.
As I reflect back on that call with the billion-dollar retailer, I wasn’t selling a slice. I whole hogged that thing in one question. I know for a fact, because many months later our then client told us, that they knew immediately that we were different. We worked together for about 40 months. They were our highest revenue, highest profit, happiest client the entire time. (Our relationship ended when the $100B parent company consolidated all subsidiary marketing spend through their agency.😭)
This isn't a real rule, but those few minutes at the beginning of a discovery call are the only part of the sales process that you own 100% - everything else is a conversation.
Don't waste it.
That center-stage, single-spotlight monologue at the top of the show really helps determine whether or not your audience (aka, your prospect) is going to make it all the way through to the final act (aka, the close).
By the way, if you want to prep better for sales calls, Discovery Lab Pro helps you think about how you set up your discovery calls, the information you bring to bear, and the insights that you can leverage in order to make yourself irreducible
Check out this free Agency Growth Stack.
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Call Lab helps you identify all of the ways that you did not set yourself apart during a sales call.
Discovery Lab is perhaps the most specific discovery call prep tool that you can get for free.
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