In partnership with
| ISSUE №191 · AGENCY SALES |
Have You Ever Been To An Improv Comedy Show?
You never know what's going to happen. It's unstructured, it's exciting, it's kinetic, and it never follows the same path twice. Done well, it is a marvel of humor and human creativity.
The folks over at SalesXceleration just released their 2026 State of Sales Report, (worth a quick read, tbh). They talked to 5,263 small business CEOs - not all agencies by a longshot, but all people that have to sell their goods or services through an actual sales process.
Here’s the punchline…66% of those business owners DON’T HAVE A DOCUMENTED SALES PROCESS!
THAT’S THE SMB VERSION OF IMPROV!
Is This Funny?
Well, yeah, it kind of is…because these 5,263 business owners are smart. They run a business! But they are also hilarious jokesters in their own right:
88% can't say what has to happen for a deal to move to the next stage
72% aren't doing any sales forecasting at all
43% don't hold a weekly sales meeting
Now, if you've read this newsletter for more than, I don't know, 38 seconds, you know that I love a good giggle, and rarely do I take things super seriously. I can tell you, for a long time, I was the sales improv master!
I used to joke with my team, “Just point me at the prospect & press the “GO!” button and I’ll do the rest.” And you know, in the early days of SpinShark (my Great Recession era SEO agency), it worked really well.
For the most part, the sales process was:
Find any ecommerce client that would talk to us via email, LinkedIn, introductions, buying drinks at a trade show…
Show them that we understood SEO WAY better than they did, and tell them something about the language of their shoppers that they didn't know.
Make an offer (It was carefully crafted to make it seem like it was custom, but it was really pretty much the same offer every time, with a higher or lower price depending on how price-sensitive I thought that prospect was…)
Join Fin, Anthropic, and Clay at Pioneer on October 7th
Pioneer, the summit where CX leaders redefine what’s possible, is on October 7th.
Join leaders from Fin, Anthropic, and Clay for an insightful conversation on the state of AI transformation.
You’ll discover how some of the most innovative minds in CX have transformed their organizations, learn how they think about CX, and hear how they're planning for what's next.
Join the conversation in San Francisco, or tune in virtually.
That Bit Got Old…
As we won one client after another, we were getting meetings with bigger and better clients. I’m not sure it was entirely purposeful at that point, but as we had calls with bigger and more sophisticated companies, they truly felt that we were expert at SEO. They started to have other questions that I couldn't bullshit my way through.
Typically, it was either the VP of e-commerce (who is typically a marketer) or the VP of Technology (who ran the actual website) that had a BS detector that wanted a little more than insight, a little sizzle, and my insane level of confidence that whatever the issue was, we could figure it out.
We won our 1st big brand deal & so I thought I had this nailed. Then we came in 2nd. Then we were a finalist, but not 1 or 2. Then we didn’t make it past the 1st round.
Luckily, I Got Some Feedback From A Prospect
He didn't hire us, but he told me, "You guys are really smart, but I kind of got a ‘jazz hands’ thing from you. Instead of telling us you didn't know something or didn't understand something, you did a song and dance. You are probably better than the agency we hired - but they had more ‘presence & polish’.”
Clearly, my career as an improv sales guy was over. TBH, it never should have started. I assumed that knowing more about the marketing channel that we were offering services in was sufficient to win the business.
The real issue was that I was selling - me - Tim. I sold as me - not the head of my agency, not the head of a team of reall smart experienced people. I was trying to get the buyers to trust (and LIKE - seriously) ME.
It wasn’t until I thought about the “jazz hands” comment & my very short stint as a standup comic in the early 1990s. I wrote some jokes - they were good. If the vibe of the crowd was good, my 7 minutes of comedy was good. My comedy depended on the audience liking me. But 1991 comedy clubs were full of people that were served too many Mai Tai’s, and had very little tolerance for being bored. If the comic before me bombed and the audience turned mean, my comedy sucked, too. It sucked because I was winging it - I knew my material, but I didn’t own it well enough to help the audience understand that what I was saying was funny. So if they weren't in the mood to laugh, (7 Mai Tai’s can suck that mood right out of you), I couldn't really show them that I was funny. I was relying on their good humor rather than my seven minutes of standup.
I heard this guy - the funniest comic I have EVER seen - Steven Wright (here is a set from 1983 on Saturday Night Live) tell a comic (who had just bombed on stage) that he didn't respect the audience enough for them to believe that he was funny.
The agentic era needs a different CRM. That’s Attio.
Parallel, Turbopuffer, and Wordsmith run their entire GTM motion on Attio, with agents that chase every buying signal, build pipeline, and move deals forward, 24/7.
I Didn’t Respect My Audience Enough For Them To Believe That My Team Kicked Ass & That Working With Us Was A Path To Growth
Because I was kind of winging it the whole time, I was really focused on the energy in the room and how they responded to what I was saying. What I should have been doing is trusting in them enough so they could believe what I was saying.
I really started thinking about sales in terms of respect…
If I show up unprepared, does my prospect feel respected? If I skate past their concern to get to my “REALLY BIG POINT”, does my prospect feel respected? If I promise to follow up after the meeting with something specific & I don’t remember what it is, or the purpose of it, does my prospect feel respected?
(Quick answers to the questions: No, No, No & No, my prospect doesn’t feel respected.)
It Gets Worse When You Want To Grow Your Sales Surface
If you start to grow your sales surface by adding appointment setters or closers or full-stack sales professionals, you can’t be doing fucking improv. Trust me, nobody is so good at improv that people who don't want to do improv can follow along with them happily.
Like my prospects, I wasn't really respecting the skills and talents of the people that I was asking to be part of the sales process because I expected them to do what I did. I expected them to be able to improv.
There ain’t a lot of people who WANT to get into a situation where they have to think on their feet in front of strangers and put their professional reputation into the hands of a process that isn't solid.
In Nearly The Same Words as Comedy-Legend Jeff Foxworthy, “You Might Be Doing Sales Improv If…”:
You’ve never understood why anyone would ever need a CRM…
You don’t REALLY care what your prospect says, you are gonna sell your thing, regardless…
You’ve never said, “I’m sorry, I don’t think we aren’t the right fit…”
You’ve ever said, “Oh, I didn’t know you sold X…” at the start of a discovery call.
You never do anything other than change logos on your presentations and proposals.
You’ve ever had a proposal prepared BEFORE the first call.
Here’s How To Turn Your Improv Act Into A Killer Set
What what you really want, as a small business owner and very specifically as an agency owner, is to have a killer comedy set that is so tight that an understudy can be a star. Right now, if you run an agency, you probably feel like the star of the show. You aren't. You are the stage manager, and your team are the actors that are going to make the audience lose it, but you have got to write an amazing set first.
Have A Clear Storyline: Know the flow of your act through sales stages (you will probably have fewer, but here is a pretty detailed progression). Lead→ Discovery → Qualified → Prospect → Strategic & Business Match → Engaged → Offer → Acceptance → Contract → Onboarding → 1st 90 Days
Know What Makes “Happily Ever After”: Know what constitutes success for your client and have a clear, defensible pathway to get there.
Know What Makes Them Laugh: Understand the way they work and the way that you work, so you can have a relationship that is based on mutual respect.
Have Your Stories, Asides & Callbacks Ready: The best storytellers in comics seem like they are following an organic narrative that is happening in real time, but in fact, it is a highly choreographed, impeccably timed series of stages, setups, delivery, and denouement. If you don't have all the pieces of your act (case studies, proof, insight, market awareness, etc.) prepared. It doesn't matter how good the premise of your set is, it's never going to be remembered.
Know All The Characters: Yes, your clients are the characters, but their customers are characters too. Your team is a character. The market is a character. Technology is a character. Design, brand, shipping speeds, return policies, profit margins, and inventory are all characters in this comedy act. You can't tell a really freaking funny story if you don't know the characters well enough to tell something true and unexpected about them.
Then you've got to practice, practice, practice, practice, practice… And if your are broadening your sales surface, your understudies and matinee players have got to go through rigorous rehearsals just like the lead. as the stage manager or director, it's your job to make sure that when the spotlight turns on, those players are ready to go. The audience will not care if they need to get their bearings. They just want to hear the first line of the set. Practice, repetition, review, and do it again are the only ways to take something that is tightly choreographed and turn it into something that feels completely unrehearsed, natural, and full of respect.
We think is is frickin’ excellent
Did The World Really Need Another Agency Directory? Maybe not, but that didn't stop us from building one. Whenever I perused an agency directory, it was always full of agencies that were promoting themselves, and it wasn't in any way authoritative. It was all pay-for-play placement, and I think that's why agency directories kind of sucked.
So I Put On 2 Hats - My Agency CEO Hat & My Brand CMO Hat and I think I've built something that's helpful to both sides of my professional experience.
For the Agency CEO: Competitor research, named client lists, services, direct links to case studies and maybe best of all, a list of brands and agencies they’ve worked with. (And over time, we will be enriching data with team sizes, revenue bands & pricing guidelines.). We’ve also got guides for pitching business, and more coming all the time. (BTW, you can’t pay for better placement or anything else…)
For the Brand CMO: We’ve got a brand search so you can see what kind of other brands agencies work with, you can see what agencies your competitors work with, what services they have, what credentials they have, and guides for choosing and working with agencies. And shortly, we will have a “let us find the right agency for you” function.
As of today, we have about 9000 agencies listed…go to Agency Field Guide to see if your agency is in the guide yet. If it isn’t, submit it today - it’s free, and who knows, your next best client might come from AFG.
The best influencer marketing advice never comes from a report
It comes from someone who’s been there, done that, and has the receipts. Get ready for Return on Influence Festival ‘26. An entire day dedicated to influencer marketing with speakers running some of the best programs in the world.
October 21, 2026, 10 am - 5 pm ET. Free and online.
