We've all probably said some version of that a thousand times or more. After all, the best way to earn the business is to show that you are better, right? So you jump right in and find where the in-house team or the agency team didn't see everything that you see. Therefore, you show yourself to be BETTER & in a perfect world, the prospect would swoon at the magnificence of your insight and intelligence, ask you how much to get started, and write a check three times as big because they are so enthralled.

Ok, Sparky, I've got some news for you. Buyers don't really buy better. Better is so squishy, subjective, kind of fluffy and soft. “Better” has the same structural integrity as a squishmallow (I’m partial to the Charles Pickle Squishmallow, myself…).

Okay, if that's the story you need to tell yourself to make the world feel okay, then go ahead. But think about it this way - there are something like 400K agencies of all stripes in the world - if the bar to hire an agency was just better, there would be very few, because all the “not better” agencies would never land any clients.

Let's imagine you are the CMO of Best Buy, and for all intents and purposes, you have an unlimited budget for agencies. You feel like you need a new paid search partner, so you go out and get pitches from three amazing agencies - Tinuiti, WPromote & Power Digital.

They all do incredible audits. They all have terrific insights. They all basically forecast the same set of results for you, and their pricing is all within 10% of one another.

There is no BETTER.

If one of those agencies claimed to be significantly better than another, the buyer would think, "Dude, we've seen the other agencies. You aren't better."

If there's no better, how do prospects ever make a choice?

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I ran agencies for years and I talk to a few hundred agencies every year, & I’ve learned prospects don't love being sold to by an agency. On top of that, I was a client-side CMO and have run multiple agency searches for brands, I can tell you for a fact, being on the other side of an agency sales pitch just isn't all that much fun.

Brands don't do an agency search for incrementally better results. They do an agency search because something is missing from their current approach. What that is precisely, the brand might not know, but they do think that whatever is missing will be a difference maker.

Better results might look like 3.7x ROAS versus 3.4x ROAS - that is a meaningful and measurable better result. But is that incremental change worth the risk of upsetting the apple cart? Is that incremental change is worth disrupting a relationship that is generating completely fine results? The answer, from a former CMO? “NO FUCKING WAY!” Change always introduces risk, and I'm not going to risk downside for a touch more upside. That is CMO suicide.

As a matter of fact, when I was the CMO of Karmaloop, our affiliate program was killing it. A rival to affiliate network kept on begging for our business. They promised better and better and better and a little bit cheaper, and even more better. I never made the switch because any chance that we would lose a single affiliate would introduce the concept of us losing a lot of affiliates. The promise of better and a small percentage cheaper didn't justify the risk of having any friction with the affiliates that were driving an incredible amount of revenue. The rival affiliate network wasn't showing me a different outcome. They were showing me the same outcome with some promises layered on top. That's not really a winning business proposition, IMHO.

Well, thank you for asking a question with WTF in it, because you know that's my favorite…but here is how we get to selling different outcomes - ones that aren't incremental, but rather meaningful.

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These concepts aren't things that I just imagine work. I've built this library of approaches over time.

For many years I pitched “better“. We had a crazy good audit solution that we leveraged as much as we could. We would dive deep into an AdWords account and come up with oodles of suggestions and show how fixing those things or approaching it differently would generate more revenue. That changed one day when a prospect pulled the ol' switcheroo on me…and asked me to review an audit from another agency they were considering. That agency had slightly different opinions than we did, but I would say that we agreed on 75% of the changes needed. He asked me bluntly, "So why should I pick you? You cost a little more, but not enough to make a difference." I was caught off guard, and I didn't have a really good answer, so I said, "What's the price difference? We'll beat it." Now that's really fucking stupid, because he already told me that the pricing wasn't the issue. He wasn't pushing back against the changes we were suggesting, because they were mostly validated by somebody else. He was asking why he should work with me instead of someone else who is delivering something very similar.

I choked. I couldn't come up with anything meaningful other than "We're better, we're faster, blah blah blah blah bullshit." We didn't win that deal. I don't know what the other agency said, but I know that he didn't hire us because I didn't have a meaningful reason for him to believe that we would be better. Nor was I able to point out how working with us would change things for him.

Another time, after working with a major fashion retailer for about a year, we decided to start digging into the connection between ads that people were clicking on and the things that they purchased. the correlation was surprisingly low, but we also found something else really interesting. We found that the majority of buyers of men's clothes were women. The only segment that really seemed to be self-purchasing were really high-income men with no children. To be honest, that insight didn't matter to our performance at all. But we brought it to the client, who used this information to make a magazine ad back when people used to do that sort of thing. They we're having a sale on men's clothes, and they put out an ad showing a put-together woman and a schlubby guy. The tagline was something like, "You look great. Help your hubby keep up.” That ad campaign was pretty successful for them, so we started working directly with their Insights group to uncover more fun facts about their customer data. we were able to spin that experience into a benefit that clients got because we would inevitably spin up something about their customer data in our work. Once that had happened once or twice, we could then offer an analytics and customer insights add-on to our paid search services. Investing our time helped our client create a new messaging strategy that did not directly impact us.

Were our paid search results are better because we knew this data? Absolutely not. and quite honestly, I didn't think that we were really killing it for this client (they were, arguably, the lowest performer in our portfolio, but their spend was enormous…so scale & saturation may have played a role there), but they stuck with us because we were generating something that made their business better, not just their search better.

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I thought you'd never ask…we offer DemandOS and SalesOS. One of them builds your pipeline because you present yourself differently, and the other improves your sales outcomes because you learn to sell differently. It would be awesome if you wanted to check one of those out…

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