If you are like most agency founders, owners, and leaders, you've been doing what you do for a good long time. So many of us grew up doing marketing for other people, and then we decided to open an agency because we had a better sense of how to do it. But we also got to the point of starting your own business because you are really good at a craft.

You might have spent years working as a paid search expert or analytics expert or incredible designer. Throughout that time, you have developed insight and discretion and taste and experiential pattern matching that gives you an inside track on everything that you do.

You understand the value of the steps you take, the thoughts you have, and the choices you make. You understand the intrinsic value of your deliverables.

I remember back when I was running an SEO agency. I was a very minor big deal in the world of SEO. I would get invited to speak at conferences about technical things, I wrote for publications and was generally promoted as a guy who wore his smarty pants well.

After my agency was acquired and I became part of a larger sales team, I would come in and sell the shit out of SEO. Except for the times I didn't.

We had been on three pitches that I know we should have won, but didn't. The feedback that I always got from prospects and colleagues was “Holy shit, this guy blew me away with his SEO knowledge!” But a pitch that we lost was to a retailer that wanted to capture all of the discretionary spending dollars of teens and tweens in every mall in America at the time.

The feedback that I got after the prospect had chosen another agency was, “That sounded super-impressive, but we didn't really understand it. Plus, it seemed like working your way might have been way too technical for my team.”

Huh, that was not what I was expecting…

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I was a little aghast. I knew I was delivering the right information. I knew I had the right plan, but it all seemed too hard? I stewed on that for days. It made me really angry. How could they not see that I was giving them the stuff that they needed?

After I took a chill pill (actually, I shared a bottle of wine with my wife - same thing) and thought clearly for a minute, I realized that I had hammered this prospect with stuff that I knew.

I used my “I am presenting to a room full of SEO nerds” language and moved quickly to get to what I thought was the fun stuff (server logs! custom analytics! non-scummy backlink development!). I sort of thought that my expertise to see the issues clearly & dive right into HOW we would solve their problem would be enough.

Certainty & expertise, I thought, was enough.

…I completely ignored WHAT and WHO…

I conflated their issues with what they wanted to accomplish. They actually didn't give two shits about SEO. They didn't care about all of the marvelous information and insight we could have gained by sifting through their server logs. They cared about showing up in Google search more than Limited Too did.

They cared about mindshare for teens & tweens.

They cared about showing up in directions & hours searches for the parents who held the credit cards.

They cared about their bestselling miniskirts & boots showing up in organic search ahead of all of the other options in their vertical.

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I understood their market. I understood their competitive set. I had even spent several hours pouring through competitor’s title tags & backlink anchor text to identify the best chances to win the core search terms.

I did all the work and all the prep to lead them to where they wanted to go.

The WHAT they wanted to accomplish was so obvious that I never really bothered to address it. They were clearly getting spanked in organic search - that's why they were talking to us. Even at the time when I was in full on SEO nerd mode, I knew that no one really want to talk about the relative virtues of an H1 tag versus two H2 tags.

But their intention in speaking with us was not to get insight from an SEO expert, but rather, they wanted to know how our agency could help them accomplish what they needed to accomplish.

It seems like a silly thing in the context of a sales pitch to imagine the tactics & remediations we were talking about were directly related to WHAT they wanted to accomplish, right?

I knew the issues. I understood the goals. I presented a step-by-step action plan that would accomplish the task at hand.

But, I had all of the context of how my brilliant HOW dissertation actually accomplished their WHAT. I was delivering complex technical themes and structures to a team that did not have any of the information they needed to know if what I was saying was total fucking bullshit, or not!

The asymmetry of our viewpoints made it impossible for them to confidently say this team understands what we want to accomplish, and the plan that they put forth seems like the best possible course of action.

I didn’t give them any way to understand why my approach was right for them. I was 100% HOW & 0% WHAT.

Way back in AIC #83 Content & Closing - WTF Is Next, we talked a lot about how you need to make content that speaks specifically to each person on the other side of the table that has an opinion around the choice of agency partner.

You'd probably have to make one kind of content for the CEO, another for the CFO, and a third for the Head of Marketing (and maybe more) because you want everybody on the prospect's side to be aligned.

In this desperate tale of failure, I was talking, primarily, to two people:

Today, that stack of leaders might look a little different, and the responsibilities will look different, but I didn't really focus on the things that these two decision-makers needed. The VP of E-Commerce was focused on revenue - that's their job. The Head of Engineering was focused on team capacity and other technical initiatives.

But your old pal Tim was focused on his shit - SEO nerdery.

I didn’t connect server logs to revenue or different CMS templates to technical staff efficiency.

I didn’t sell to their concerns, OR their sense of opportunity.

as luck would have it, about four months later that retailer came back to us because they decided that the SEO firm that they chose didn't have the chops to accomplish what they wanted. But I know that other SEO firm did a better job of selling WHAT was going to be accomplished. And they addressed the concerns and aspirations of WHO they were selling to…

Make sense? WHAT & WHO are magnitudes more important than HOW. Don’t get me wrong - your craft and experience matter enormously, but without a direct connection to what and who, the steps you take to do whatever it is you do don't matter because your prospect can only see the value through their perspective.

Positioning Teardown: I did a positioning teardown (live!) on Adam O’Leary’s Scale With Partners Podcast. During that podcast, I ripped Adam's website apart, and I think it's a really good example of being able to look at what you do in a way that is incredibly empathetic to your audience and to your prospects. Check out the teardown & my positioning framework.

The Seven Minute Case Study: This it is a really simple way to put together the things that really matter in a case study: a) Before State b) After State c) Your agency as the transformative agent. And there is a free Case Study Builder, too.

The Perfect Proposal: This proposal framework puts the how, what, and who conundrum to bed once and for all. It gives you a very specific approach that is focused on your prospect - 100% of the time. This is such an important way of thinking that I cannot stress how much I want you to read this…

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