I had a call today with a really experienced agency executive. She's really smart, a little quirky, and she has about 20 different irons in the fire. She was pretty awesome. I loved talking with her. We are both on the post-agency side of our lives. We've got tons of operating experience. It was a great discussion.

This wasn't a sales call for me. It was a networking call. We hadn't ever spoken before, and at one point I asked, "What do you do?" That led to her naming at least 13 of the 20 irons in the fire. I was hoping I could introduce her to someone who might be able to take advantage of her experience and her wisdom. But she wasn't really sure how to corral all of that into something that was powerful and, maybe more importantly, recognizable.

This lady can do anything: C-suite work, strategy work, creative leadership, speaking, writing, leadership development, business development. There is really no part of agency work that she couldn't completely crush.

That question is sort of a uniquely American way to identify yourself. When you meet someone, you ask them what they do so you can put them in a cubbyhole in your brain. You've created some sort of identity around them based on their description of what they do.

My brother-in-law, Greg, a retired school superintendent, has a very simple categorization method. In Greg's world, you are either a teacher, or you do some insurance thing like his brothers, or you are a doctor, or a lawyer, or you work in the trades, or you are "a computer guy." Because I have worked in digital marketing since the end of the last century, I have always been "the computer guy." One of my nephews is a serious programmer for a three-letter agency in Northern Virginia. According to Greg, my nephew and I have the same job: "computer guy."

He knows there are other jobs, but he doesn't feel the need to create any more cubbyholes. A few Thanksgivings ago, over a spirited game of cribbage, Greg asked me what I really do because he knows I'm not really "a computer guy." So I started talking about working with agencies and marketers to make their businesses better. About 30 seconds into the discussion, I saw Greg's eyes glaze over. He started nodding and said, "Yep, you are a computer guy."

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During my chat with my new agency exec friend, I was thinking about Greg and his very limited number of cubbyholes. I realized that with the breadth and depth of this woman's experience, I couldn't put her into a cubbyhole, so I felt like my ability to help her was limited. I couldn't introduce her to someone and say, "This is my friend, and she does {job}."

In one respect, defining my new friend as {job} is incredibly demeaning. It ignores so many of her dimensions. It sands off the quirks that make her enjoyable to talk to, and it sets aside the excitement of an idea when it pops into her head. So she, like all of us, doesn't really fit in a cubbyhole. The cubbyhole is constrictive and incomplete.

But in other ways, a cubbyhole buys you shelf space.

In grocery stores, there are slotting fees and end-cap fees. CPG brands pay grocery stores for specific shelf space because they know that being at eye level or being on an end cap drives more sales. That happens because there's more awareness of your brand if you sit at eye level in the middle of the cereal section versus on the bottom shelf next to the weird puffed rice that comes in a bag. On an end cap, you aren't competing with everybody else in your category. You sit all by yourself, and that makes you sexier.

The cubbyhole you fit into inside of other people's brains is your shelf positioning. The more comfortably you fit into a particular cubbyhole, the more likely you are to fill up all of the space around that topic. If you happen to be a great plumber, like my plumber Angel, you fill up the plumber referral cubbyhole in your clients' brains. My last plumber, Charlie, is also a great plumber. And for years he occupied the "I need to make a plumber referral" spot in my brain. He totally filled up that cubbyhole.

Over the years, Charlie's business changed. He started doing a lot more commercial work and much less residential work. He was even stepping into some general contracting. So over time, Charlie started to not fit the plumber referral cubbyhole anymore. The last time I referred somebody to Charlie, they were told their job was too small for Charlie's company and that they should find someone else. That really surprised me, and I understood that I didn't really know what Charlie's business was anymore. On that very day, Charlie completely left the "Refer A Plumber" cubbyhole in my brain. I went searching, I found Angel, and now he fills that cubbyhole.

Your target market, your ICP, likely thinks about problems and solutions the way my brother-in-law Greg thinks about job types. If they think they have a traffic problem, they are going to call an SEO company or a paid search agency. If they think they aren't getting enough new customers, they might check in with a paid social agency. If they aren't getting enough repeat customers, they might check in with a retention marketing agency.

They see their problems as cubbyholes, and they see agencies that can solve those problems as the things that fill up the space in the cubbyhole. But what happens when your agency looks more like my former plumber Charlie and less like my current plumber Angel?

As I mentioned, I don't know exactly who is a great customer for Charlie right now. All I know is that it isn't my neighbor who asked me how I solved a plumbing problem.

If you run an agency with a broad assortment of skills (and a lot of agencies do), it can be really hard for in-market folks who have a problem to know that you can solve it. If you bill yourself as an integrated communications and creative agency, that's awesome. But a manufacturing business that is acquiring a new company, rebranding, and launching an aggressive go-to-market campaign may not know that an integrated communications and creative agency can help with the press releases, the messaging to the acquired company's employees and customers, the rebrand, and the compelling assets for the go-to-market push.

The Integrated Communications and Creative Agency is a really neat wrapper that holds thousands of outputs that could help a client grow their business. That wrapper makes the breadth and complexity of your skills palatable. Those five words, "integrated communications and creative agency," are so neat that you'd think it would be easy for someone to put you in the cubbyhole that holds their business needs. The problem is that the wrapper has a different shape than the cubbyhole that holds a potential client's needs, so they don't see you as a solution.

On the other hand, my multi-talented, multi-hyphenate friend is sort of like a sea anemone, with arms waving and dangling all over the place, full of different skills and talents that don't necessarily seem connected. That wriggling star shape doesn't look like any specific business-need cubbyhole, so somebody can't see her as a solution to a business problem. Arguably, she's too messy. You can't imagine how you could get that complex shape into the well-defined cubbyhole that you have.

So what's the solution then? Whether you are too neat or too messy, you can't possibly anticipate the exact shape and size of every business-need cubbyhole in your target market.

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In the world of agencies, the market is incredibly fragmented. There are something like 400,000 marketing agencies across the globe. I would imagine that most potential clients of marketing agencies could name no more than 10 agencies without some prompting.

It's incredibly difficult to build a very broad brand as an agency. You don't believe me? Here's a test: without looking, what's the brand difference between VML and Code & Theory, or between Allison Worldwide and Assembly Global?

You have no idea, right? I think about agencies all day long, and while I could tell you some of the differences between these agencies, it wouldn't be an especially strong discernment. This lack of brand and this hyper-fragmentation give you an incredible opportunity to be neat and messy in a completely fluid and coherent way.

You've got to be neat insofar as you solve particular problems for a particular kind of client, and you do it in a particular way. In your neat presentation, you might solve growth problems for enterprise-level e-commerce clients through more efficient acquisition. That's pretty neat. You fit in an acquisition-focused growth cubbyhole that belongs to an enterprise-level marketer.

But once you get in front of someone and start having a conversation, you can let your messy, writhing sea anemone tendrils out. You might solve this enterprise-level growth problem with enhanced data, or better creative, or a different distribution mix.

That complexity doesn't fit the cubbyhole at any individual prospect in your market. Before talking with you, the prospect probably has a pretty well-measured set of cubbyhole dimensions. Based on your neat presentation, they will decide whether or not you fit into their particular cubbyhole well enough. You might be too big and not fit in. You might be too small and not fill up enough of the cubbyhole.

But once you engage with them, you can provide more specificity around your exact shape and size and flexibility. While your organization might be too big to fit into their cubbyhole, one division of your company might be the perfect fit. Or if they think you are likely too small, during your discussions you can take up more space by sharing the complexities that you understand and the multitude of ways you solve problems.

That really only happens in a fragmented market. If marketing agencies looked like supermarket brands, there certainly wouldn't be room for 400,000 of them.

Greg is never going to build a cubbyhole shaped exactly like you. Nobody is. Your job is to look neat enough to get pulled off the shelf, and then be messy enough to become irreplaceable once you are in their hands.

This is a really simple quiz: you get 1 point for each affirmative answer.

Are you ready?

Scoring:

0-1 points: We've got some work to do. You need to do some ICP and value prop work, and Agency Studio might be a great fit for you.

2 points: OK, you are on the right track, but you need plenty of work on neat and messy. DemandOS will give you the thinking and skills to show the market your neat and messy sides effectively.

3 points: You are probably in a good spot. But if your roster isn't completely full, I bet you aren't quite as effective as you think at showing your ability to fill that cubbyhole completely. SalesOS will sharpen that saw.

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