Editor's Note: This is the 6th installment of our Business Functions Series. Find the other issues here: Activities To Functions - AIC #178, Client Delivery Function - AIC #179, Admin Functions - AIC #180, Agency Cash Management - AIC #181, Account Management - AIC #182

The Quiet Place happens in some post-apocalyptic world where some sort of giant spider things hunted by sound, so if you wanted to survive, you had to STFU.

I have five kids, and watching those two parents try to keep their children quiet when they are stressed out of their minds stressed me out so much. I was on the edge of my seat for the entire movie, so afraid that the giant spider thing was going to eat a child. It was exhausting. I was terrified.

There's another terrifying quiet place, and I would say it's even more terrifying than The Quiet Place. It's when your agency goes quiet. You are too busy or too stressed to really think about marketing & demand gen, so it falls by the wayside.

In almost every other part of your agency, if you stop doing something, somebody yells at you:

Stop marketing and absolutely nothing happens. Nobody says anything.

And you won't really notice after a week, or maybe even a month. If your pipeline is sufficiently full (maybe not even a quarter), but one day you'll wake up from your period of silence and realize that there's nobody in your pipeline to talk to anymore.

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We started building e-commerce landing pages and doing some meta ads for select clients. The pages were cool, they were dynamic, and I was elbows deep in figuring out how to match client design and voice and how to serve them. Our head engineer decided that living in Boston was not right for him, gave his 2 weeks & moved to Vermont.

We were fucked. We had these huge rollouts happening & shit was falling apart. I didn’t have time to do my regular bullshit on LinkedIn or talk to my favorite referral partners or send out cold email. I just had to shut up because I was too busy filling in the gaps that resulted when I overpromised a little bit and we lost a key staff member to seductive seclusion of the Green Mountain State.

We got through that brutal two-and-a-half-month sprint, and when I picked up my head, the pipeline was empty. To support this stupid technology play, I had to hire other engineers and programmers, so we had a bigger payroll, & no pipeline. That is a very bad place to be.

So I went into biz dev overdrive. I sent out approximately 11 million cold emails. I cold called people, which I hate to do and am very bad at. I talked with every single referral partner & all of my former colleagues trying to scare up business.

Before the “Tim was too busy to blab” period, our average monthly retainer was about $7500 and we were comfortably profitable. After I went into overdrive selling mode, our cost to acquire a client skyrocketed - it went from about $3800 to about $10K. And guess what happened to the quality of those clients?

You guessed it. It went right in the crapper. The average monthly retainer for these new clients was under $4,000, and our net profit on them was approximately 5%. My wife was so delighted when I told her that we could only go to Nantucket for one week instead of two because we weren't making nearly as much money…

OK, Sparky, listen up - marketing/demand gen is the only function in your agency where the payment (actually, punishment) is delayed. The awareness and interest you didn’t build in January may not bite you in the butt until April, but that bite is hard.

I call this The Quiet Quarter.

When other stuff goes awry, you can fix it. You can rebuild a process. You can hire an account manager and fix a shaky relationship. You can’t go back in time and create awareness and relationship that you skipped during the quiet quarter.

Unlike the Escalation Ratchet from last issue, there is no client on the other end teaching you a lesson. There is no signal at all. The quiet feels fine…for a while. If only Marty McFly & Doc Brown were available:

This is from my Agency Research page

ONLY 21% of agencies have anyone on staff whose job is marketing the agency.

BUT 70% of agencies are still founder-led on sales.

HOWEVER ONLY 14% say they have a healthy pipeline.

Here's the straight skinny. Only one-fifth of agencies make marketing a priority. Almost three-quarters of agencies are engaged in founder-led sales, but only one in seven agencies report a healthy pipeline. Do you think that's a coincidence?

There's a direct correlation between lack of attention on building awareness, overreliance on a founder, resulting in six out of seven agencies having an unhealthy pipeline.

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Back in AIC #57, I told you that what you are doing is content mining, not content creation. I want to put that right in front of your face so you can’t miss it.

Your experience is a gold mine. Every time you talk to a potential client, there's more gold in the mine. Every time you coach an employee, there's more gold in the mine. Every account call, there's more gold in the mine. Every podcast you guest on or newsletter you send, there's more gold in the mine

Here's where so many agency owners get it wrong….you are the gold mine, not the miner.

It's completely awesome that you want to write a LinkedIn post or a newsletter, and I want you to do all of that stuff to sharpen your own expression and to get direct feedback, but you should not be in charge of extracting all of the gold from the goldmine. You've got a team, you've got tools, and you need to start thinking about awareness as a function, not as stuff that you do.

Your insight & point of view are the things that you can refine bits of from time to time to create incredible value. But using your team and effective tools, you can unearth & deliver so much more value to the market that your agency becomes unavoidable.

Marketing is the second function on this list where you stay inside the machine on purpose. Finance was the first, back in AIC #181, and you stayed in because you're the capital allocator. Here you stay in because you're the goldmine. In both cases, staying inside the function is not the same as doing the function.

No matter how big you get, as the CEO/Founder you will always own:

What we want to get off of your plate:

Back in AIC #127 I made the case for founder brand and agency brand as two different assets. If the only channel your agency has is your personal channel, you don't have a marketing function, but rather you’ve got a shit-ton of marketing tasks on your to-do list.

Every function in this series has an artifact. Delivery has the process. Admin has the RACI. Account management has the score. Each one is the byproduct of getting the standard out of your skull and into a series of thoughts, actions & insights that someone else cand do.

If you can't actually express these things. You aren't doing your job of setting the standard. In order to create a machine that generates great marketing that sounds, feels, and looks like you and attracts the kinds of opportunities you want, you have to commit to creating the standard

You have to be able to show your team the difference between gold that's in the mine and iron pyrite, which is golden but worthless. You have to be the teacher.

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I’ll pull up a RACI chart again. You are accountable for the agency being known, but your team is responsible and the tools are the resources they need.

In AIC #181 I gave you a bucket system, and I gave marketing an actual line item: GROWTH, at 10 to 20% of revenue, which explicitly includes marketing for your own agency and not just for your clients.

Let's do the math together, shall we?

Agency Revenue: $1,400,000

Growth Bucket (amount you spend to drive growth): $140K to $280K.

So you've got to spend that money that you've allocated. You gave that money a job, and so your growth is going to be powered by time and tools that you have to intentionally create.

You have to give your team the time to do the things that you are asking them to do. In this instance, you are asking them to mine the gold that's in your brain and in the meetings that you and they have collectively, along with information that's available in the market.

Here's how we turn that into a function:

Phase 1 - Mining Your Brain: Use your favorite AI tool, give it your ICP, and ask for ten questions that your ICP needs answered about the things that your agency does. Record each answer on a webcam and target 5 minutes or less per answer. Ten questions × 5 minutes, that's 50 minutes of time needed from you.

Phase 2 - Finding The Gold: Get a Descript subscription, and have two people on your team, or a contractor, get the full transcript of the video and then turn each one of those answers into a short-form video. This really will take them about an hour. Now you have ten video shorts and a full transcript that can be mined.

Phase 3 - Start Excavating: Give the transcript and the videos to everyone on your team and tell them to use whatever tool they want (even their own brain!) to create answers to similar questions from their own perspective. They don't have to make a video if they don't want to, but it's cool if they do. Their answers shouldn't be replicas of yours…they should be inspired by yours.

Phase 4 - Bring The Gold To The Market: Let’s imagine that you are that $1.4 million agency and you've got a team of eight. You generated 10 pieces of video for social distribution and a 50-minute-long transcript that could be repurposed into a minimum of 20 LinkedIn posts, 5 blog posts, and probably a newsletter. The the other seven people on your team have also generated 10 pieces of content that can be similarly repurposed. Get yourself a tool like DemandBird that can adapt content to for all sorts of social channels, and it your agency feed, your feed, and your entire team’s social feeds can serve as inspiration for one another.

Phase 5 - Repeat: By the time you have exhausted that initial push of content, it's time for the next month. Pick ten different questions and go through the process again.

Make The Team Responsible: This becomes a function rather than an activity when part of the standard you set is that everybody participates. If you need to do something like time block from 10:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m., on the first Tuesday of the month is the day that you create your 10 pieces of content as a team, so be it. But make it clear that the expectation is that once you have delivered your video and transcript, it's incumbent on the team to create theirs. A quality tool like DemandBird will allow for scheduling and multiple-channel publishing for the entire team, and everybody will see the feeds that other team members publish. If one of your seven team members isn't publishing, it will be obvious. You might have to remind them, but eventually it will become the expectation because you have set The Standard.

That is EXACTLY what we build in DemandOS. But do me a favor, take 5 minutes to fill out The WTF Assessment - it will give us a bunch of information that will help us create a great demand gen function for your agency

Sales: The finale of the Business Functions Series. Get a sneak peak by checking out my Agency Sales Playbook.

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