When it gets right down to it, we are always selling something. Many years ago, during the start of my last agency, I wrote a blog post that somehow got lost to the ravages of time called "Chief Selling Officer." That post talked about my role as a CEO, where I had to sell my vision to co-founders, employees, my wife, clients, referral partners, and even myself.

In that case, I was really focused on thinking of selling as creating a vision and showing the vision in such a way that people would buy into it. My job, as I saw it, was to make that vision so inviting and so empowering for all of my various sales constituencies that it would be easy for them to say, "Yes, I support that and will join."

In that moment, I was full of ambition. I wanted to create an organization that helped my clients create results that they could not create on their own. I wanted it to be a place where my team could create competencies and excellence that they would not have created anywhere else. (And, well, for my wife, the vision was mostly that I wasn't an idiot. Quite frankly, I'm not sure that I have articulated a vision well enough that it doesn't allow her to think that I am not an idiot - so clearly, my work isn't done yet.)

In the last three days, not counting spam, I've received:

Listen, I appreciate the hustle. These people are trying to create an opportunity. A few of the cold outreach I received were good - thoughtful & clear. (Notably, Alisa Cook’s outreach was REALLY well researched and written…I’m just not a guy who wants to outsource that stuff - but she seems pretty freaking good, IMHO.)

The thing that I would say is the through line of all of these offers is that they are designed to generate a transaction ASAP. I'm sure that you've heard this statistic that only 3% of your target market is in market for what you offer at any given time. I don't know if that statistic is true, but it feels true.

So all of these outreaches and offers bring the transactionality to the forefront. These are all sales-first communications… When it's clear that you are a TARGET in a market, you sort of feel hunted.

When I was a client-side CMO, many (all?) sellers would ask me, "What's your budget for this?" Miraculously, if I ever told them, their suggested engagement would always match that budget to the dollar. I stopped telling them what my budget was because I did not want to feel like somebody's quota-filling prey. As soon as I mentioned a budget number, I would immediately transform like something in a cartoon where a person turns into a hamburger because someone else is starving.

No one wants to feel HUNTED…that’s the inevitable consequence of being

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I was at a 4As (American Association of Advertising Agencies) event earlier this week where the topic was sales. (Editor’s note: If you are a smaller agency you should look into joining this organization because the opportunity to meet & potentially partner with much larger agencies is right there at your fingertips.)

I was listening to the speaker talk about the sales process that he uses. Part one of his qualifications for cold outreach is “Based on what I know about the recipient and their company, is there anything helpful that I say?”

In what was a real surprise to me, I saw agency leaders & business development folks from very successful, very large agencies, writing down that nugget feverishly. During the Q&A Portion of the talk, these very accomplished advertising professionals were asking questions like, "Do you have a template that we can repurpose?" or "How do I know what's helpful?".

We've obviously lost the thread. We are just so freaking SALESFUL™.

Done well, sales is a service. As a seller, you offer solutions to a problem, and the buyer exchanges fair value for them. They get the benefits of your expertise, and you get the benefit of their money and the opportunity to get better at what you do. Everybody wins.

Much of the way that I have really focused my teaching and my philosophy on sales is all based around that experience that I had as a CMO (and there was that time I was working at Wayfair, the $6 billion furniture retailer, and some ambitious salesperson followed me into the bathroom at a conference to strike up a sales conversation while I was peeing - nothing had ever made me feel more like prey than that.)

So I put together the WTF Sales Methodology. At its core, it’s really based in these three things:

But as I look backwards to the sales success that I & my agencies have had over the years, a key component has been the offer of true help before there was ever a commercial offer on the table. I think that the idea of helpful as the first offer, and perhaps really the only offer, needs to become the dominant sales paradigm.

Most sales philosophies are built around the idea of qualifying a prospect so that you know they can effectively afford you. Pipedrive has a good breakdown of the BANT sales framework - where the 1st part of the framework is BUDGET. (SO SALESFUL). Keenan’s GAP Selling is better, for sure, but it really focuses on emphasizing the gap between where a potential client is today and where they could be after they make a purchase.

I don't think that's enough. Today’s sales environment is brutal, and the only true differentiation is trust (that’s why I built the WTF Sales Method around that core idea.)

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I don't know how this particular sales process is going to work out, yet, but I've had a few great conversations with a really terrific design and build agency. We are at the point where I have given them what I call an “alignment document”, which is basically a recap of everything we've talked about, the solutions that I might imagine, and a rough guide of pricing so that everybody's clear on what a potential engagement looks like.

Part of what I do when I am engaged with a potential client is I try to learn as much about what they do and what they say so I can be helpful. Towards that end, I signed up for this agency's newsletter. It had promised to talk about design trends, impact, and that sort of stuff.

The welcome series, however, has been a set of emails that are trying to gauge my urgency for a website redesign. That was totally not what I thought I was signing up for (and they do 250 to 750k website rebuilds. That is so far out of my league that it's unimaginable that I would ever be a prospect for them.)

So I dropped them a note today, telling them that there's an incongruity between what they appeared to promise and what they were delivering. I don't know if that will have any impact on the actions that they take around their newsletter, or if it will have any impact on whether or not they and I work together.

But I didn't send that email with the expectation that it would create a faster sales process…I sent them that email because I wanted them to know that even if we don't work together, I'm trying to help them get better. I must have sent out similar emails a thousand times in my career…and not because I am trying to make a sale, but rather because I am trying to create more trust.

It’s this kind of approach that has generated referrals from prospects where there was no fit between us. It is this kind of approach that has me share specific, actionable things with you twice a week in this newsletter, my blog, my LinkedIn feed & my YouTube channel. So sure, yes, this content is a marketing, but I never hold anything back behind a sale.

I’m not trying to virtue signal in any way. I just know that helpful beats the crap out of salesful every day and in every way.

Is being helpful perhaps a little self-serving? I’m not so sure it is.

Helpful iss just providing an environment in which real trust, which is completely 100% essential to the work that I do, can grow. Having owned agencies for the better parts of three decades and logging time at the senior level of client side marketing orgs, I can tell you without a doubt that trust is the driver of great partnerships and long-standing relationships.

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