An ICP is just a starting point, figuring out the combination of positioning, messaging and market engagement that's going to create interest in your services takes a bunch more thought.

It's really like a game of Clue. There's a bunch of different variables that you have to account for. When you've eliminated all of the ones that don't work, you end up with Professor Mustard in the library with a noose.

Let’s work through each of the variables so we can get you thinking in such a way that your positioning & lead gen messaging is helping the market accelerate towards you rather than just getting lost in the noise.

Despite what you might hear on the interwebs, there isn't really a difference between positioning and what you do for lead gen from a thinking perspective. It's really the same thought, just pressed into a different mold.

All of the tactics that you might associate with lead gen are just containers for the messaging that you've developed in your positioning, and that is a really, really freeing construct. You don't have to clutter your brain with "this is who we are" and "this is how we attract attention" because they are the same.

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Here is the sentence you want to hear from a prospect: "I found you because you do X for Y."

Most agencies cannot say "we do X for Y" out loud without some serious hemming and hawing and just plain old FLAB.

What does flabby actually mean?

Take this X for Y: We do paid social for ecommerce. "Paid social" means about nine different things. "Ecommerce" covers Amazon, DTC brands, B2B ecom players like Grainger and the dropshipping bro hanging out in Bali.

That X for Y is so flabby, we might as well be describing Fat Bastard (shoutout Mike Myers). In Clue terms, you have just announced that the murder happened in a house as a solution.

Firming up your X for Y starts with WHO, and the WHO has to get pretty particular:

Once you know WHO, X and Y are OBVIOUS.

Y is beauty brands that want to break the $50mm revenue plateau. X is UGC, influencer, and brand video ads on Meta and TikTok that maximize subscription growth while keeping CPA in the first-transaction profitable zone.

Put together, the tight version reads like this:

We create and manage UGC, influencer, and brand advertising on Meta and TikTok to help DTC beauty brands break the $50mm revenue plateau.

And for all you A+ students out there, adding a "without Z" gets you to be Alan Ritchman of Reacher level tight:

We create and manage subscription-focused UGC, influencer, and brand ads on video-first social channels to help DTC beauty brands break the $50mm revenue wall without sacrificing first-transaction profitability.

Now you can say with some confidence, the room, the weapon, and the suspect.

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With all due respect to Alex Hormozi and his $100M Offers book, I don't think that it's your offer that wins. (You can fight me on this one, if you like, and Alex Hormozi has made a fuck-ton more money than I have, but I'm really confident here…). Somewhere along the line, we conflated lead generation and direct response copywriting. in the high-quality, sophisticated client types that I suspect you all want to land, a “home run” offer isn't going to do shit.

What does win attention is understanding what's relevant, needed, and urgent inside of your prospect's world. (That’s why it's so important to know exactly who your prospect is.)

If you look at the tight versions of the ICP above, you can almost imagine the meeting agendas of those people. You know that they are concerned about revenue growth, subscription growth, and first transaction profitability. You don't need to build a home run kitchen sink kind of offer here because you know the things that are going to grab their attention. If you show true insight about those things. They are probably gonna stop scrolling TikTok for a minute and respond to your email because you are speaking the language that they use every day. This relevance is going to permeate every interaction you have with your target prospects & is your most sustainable advantage.

That relevance and insight gives you a way past the crime scene tape to collect evidence. All of the other “30 day money-back guarantee” & “increase your revenue by 50% or you don’t pay!” vacuous offers are gonna get ignored. Because your approach isn't offer-based but rather insight, expertise, and understanding-based, you stand a much better chance of being invited in for a discussion.

And once you are in, figuring out who murdered Mrs. White is pretty easy - all the evidence is right there.

Everybody wants the “magic” solution - so you'll hear people talking about cold email as the most efficient & scalable way to generate leads. Others will swear that LinkedIn DMs are the only way or ads or AI-powered whatevers are the only thing that works.

Most of the time, those solutions, miraculously, are the thing that, whomever is talking about, happens to sell. But if you really, truly want to do effective lead generation (and leverage your tight ICP & your insight/expertise driven messaging) as well as enhancing your market visibility, you’ve got to start recognizing that your target market is full of people - with jobs, and preferences, and limited time.

Being able to think about your ICP as a collection of human beings really allows you to change your thinking around what's possible. Too many years ago, I was the CMO of a nine-figure e-commerce brand.

I was busy AF. I didn't answer my phone unless it was a number I knew & I let my voice mail fill up so no one could leave a message. I didn’t respond to cold email.

I was hard to get in touch with…but I did pay a lot of attention to events, webinars, and, believe it or not, direct mail. I went to trade shows to learn. I talked to my divisional marketing leaders about how they saw things changing, I talked with my platform reps & I talked with the CMOs of the brands we sold. If you wanted my attention, you needed a non-standard way in.

Because you’ve got a tight ICP, you've made the prospects on your list real human beings, and because you are insight and relevance-driven, you know the topics that are going to resonate with them. hi

You don't have to rely on hands-off, scalable prospecting like cold email or LinkedIn DMs. You can get more personal. With some elbow grease, you can figure out what events the top 50 prospects you lust after might go to. Maybe go there. You might find out that they are more likely to listen to a particular podcast - so maybe you want to make content that is specific to the audience podcast. There’s probably a publication like AdWeek or The Drum that they trust - try submitting an article, or maybe do an interview with a reporter at one of those publications. Talk to your platform partner reps and see if they might be willing to make an introduction. Find out what other agencies that the brand uses, and see if you can make friends with that other agency…

There are so many ways in that the limits really are your willingness to be empathetic (so you can collect the yield from your Return on Understanding) & your willingness to explore the depths of what marketers truly value - CREAT-FUCKING-IVITY (that’s the big takeaway from AIC #161 - Elon Won Capitalism - IDGAF).

If you aren't willing to put in the work, you are never going to make the right deduction to win Clue: Who done it, How they done it, and Where they done it…

The thinking shifts that we're talking about here aren't major - they are just more thoughtful and put more emphasis on the preparation for positioning and lead generation than they do on the execution.

The marketing world is full of tactics - you can think of that like moving your pieces to various rooms on the Clue game board. You are limited in which direction you can go and how many steps forward you can take. That’s just part of the game design.

But the real work in Clue doesn't happen on the board - it happens in your ability to pay attention, to notice your other players, to keep track of guesses that they have made. Because the game of positioning and lead generation is really based on deduction.

By eliminating the flab from your ICP, sharpening the point of your messaging and outreach, and embracing your problem-solving skills to find the way in, you've done a pretty amazing thing:

You've created positioning and messaging that is specific to the people that you can help most, and you have invested effort into finding the things that work. The result of all that “deduction” is that you are left with positioning and messaging that is uniquely yours.

And the marketers that resonate with it will accelerate in your direction.

We built DemandOS to help you deduce the positioning that is uniquely suited to your agency, and we help translate that point of strength into messaging and outreach that drive real interest and real response.

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