You find a perfect prospect, and you send them a cold email that is so spot on that, somewhere mentally, you are already counting the days until you are going to close.

Or, you have an amazing intro call, and in the Zoom, you can see the prospect leaning into everything that you say. they are engaged. they are asking great questions, and you know this one's in the bag…

Or, you know it's a competitive situation, and you are a finalist. You go in and give the presentation of your life. Everyone on the prospect team is engaged. they are present. they are saying things like, "During phase one, what would happen?"

You can feel it…you saw their issue, showed them your value, and there's no reason in any rational world where this prospect would say no.

We've all been there…

In AIC#167, I talked about the delusion necessary in order to take on the challenge of entrepreneurship (and I think that's when I gave you my favorite definition of entrepreneur: “Someone who is too dumb to know when to quit.”), but there's a different kind of delusion at work when you see the fit faster than a prospect does.

In a lot of ways, this delusion grows with the level of experience you have. The more often you see the patterns that go together to create a client-agency relationship, you can run down your mental checklist and find all of the places where you connect. If you are someone who is a relentless optimist, like I am, it's pretty hard not to see the pattern, the points of connection, and decide that there's an undeniable fit.

But rose-colored glasses clearly distort your vision…at least they do my vision. But how do we prevent the frustration, disappointment, and punched-in-the-face feeling that comes from expecting something before it's fair to expect it?

More after this sponsored message…

I've been a Fireflies user for years - not for any reason. I tried it, it wasn't terrible, so I just kept using it - no real compelling reason.

Then I had a call with Hannah from the Fathom team, - funny story - Fireflies recorded it (ha!). She challenged me to try Fathom (and, tbh, Fathom paid to sponsor this issue of the newsletter and have me write about it - but I have, in fact, canceled my Fireflies subscription after, I think, 3 years.)

Here's what I like:

Then I was on a sales call...and I got another popup and it was telling me I was going on a monologue.
 

You mean there is someone who can say to me "STFU" without being irritated? That's cool.

And there is a live "talk time" % tracker...and as someone who has been known to blab from time to time, this reminds me to keep my gum-flappery in check. It's a little thing - Fathom is right there reminding you to listen. Most call tools tell you you sucked up all the oxygen in the room AFTER the call…when it’s too late to, um, “breathe a little life into the conversation”.

So, what I started to see is that not only was Fathom recording the call - it was helping me shape the call. Fathom added a new layer - the conversation itself, my observation of and reaction to my conversation partner - and my thoughts about the next part of the conversation. But Fathom gave me a new dimension to consider - behavioral feedback - in real time. Fathom allowed me to observe and adjust my participation with time-driven data rather than "...uh...have I been blabbing...?"

Chew on that - and I'll dig more into Fathom as a data partner next week.

I've got a secret Agency Inner Circle link that gets you 2 months of Fathom Premium free. Sign up on your own and you only get 30 days. Get 2 months of Fathom Premium for $0 →

Turn it on before your next sales call and let the talk-time tracker stop you from being a total blabbermouth…

At a concert, there is always the “Encore” and you know that the show isn’t over until they turn the house lights up. At this point, we understand that’s going to happen, so while we might cheer wildly at the end of the “last” set, we know we aren't cheering to thank them for the show, but rather cheering to get more. We’ve seen that pattern often enough that we've come to expect it.

Sales is a choreographed dance that most of the time happens according to a pretty clear and understood cadence: intro → discovery →clarity of problem → offer of solution → negotiation → contract (check out my Agency Sales Playbook for more).

But you can only see that shape in retrospect - it's really only obvious after it's over. In most sales processes, there is an entire world of activity that's happening for your prospect that you aren't privy to.

To keep on with our concert metaphor, it's so easy to be excited about a potential sale that you might start to clap during one of those tricky songs where there's a short break of silence and there's still another verse. That happens because you are paying attention to your experience. You are feeling the rhythm and the verse, the break and the chorus. Sure, the artist might have wanted to put in a little trick just to keep you on your toes, but more than likely, you weren't really paying attention to the song. You were experiencing it.

You get caught up in the emotional momentum of alignment, agreement, and validation. For most agencies, we aren't looking at any particular transaction or relationship as especially strategic or especially integrated. Agencies are almost designed to be plug-and-play.

If one client leaves, you can plug that same team into another client with barely a hiccup. For prospects, hiring an agency is a much bigger endeavor. Think of it this way - you ask your clients all sorts of intrusive questions: "What's your revenue? What's your margin? What's your conversion rate?" They don't ask you those same intrusive questions. They have to become much more vulnerable.

Their sales and revenue and profit and maybe even bonuses are heavily reliant on you. You are asking for more trust and more vulnerability than you might know. That’s because you are FEELING the sale, rather than creating the sale.

Many agency owners that I've worked with have never been on the other side of an agency relationship. They think that most businesses run in these small teams, have low decision complexity and can move fast.

Most agencies are looser and more nimble than even small owner-operated businesses, and so much of that comes from the relatively low level of risk an agency takes when they onboard a client. Sure, there are risks if you aren't tracking your capacity or if you've under-scoped, but in almost every instance, that risk is mitigated because you have landed a client and you are receiving revenue which can help you solve your problem.

The client, on the other hand, has no such luxury. They are putting their dollars and trust into you with the expected promise of a true return. Brands carry a much higher risk when an agency doesn't deliver than the agency itself.

So, you, as an agency owner or seller or executive, have to do the truly difficult work of trying to imagine the decision-making process inside of a company that you have absolutely zero visibility into. Even when you ask, "What's your decision-making process?" you are almost certainly getting a highly sanitized, very compacted ledger of events.

If you work with larger clients, you've got to understand their org chart as best you can to know who is contributing to the decision-making process. (See AI#133 - it’s all about the decision makers that aren’t in the conversation). If you are dealing with a smaller business where there's a tiny staff, you've got to know about the potential financial, bandwidth and opportunity constraints that impact the decision. None of these things are obvious…

Here is a silly exercise that you can use to perhaps understand the potential client decision process:

You now have 50 reasons that don't involve anything that you have said, any experience you have, or any insight that you've developed that are going to stop your prospect from making a decision in your favor.

I'm going to guess that at least some of the ideas that popped into your head when you read our silly little exercise above were things around price, timing, or results. Some of these things you can fix some, and some you can't. For instance, if a client says, "We can only pay you $50 a month," that's a level that's not sustainable, so you can't address that particular need in that particular way…so that’s an issue that has nothing to do with you that doesn’t break your way.

If you are AWARE that there are things that might work against you, and you can create acceptable fallbacks or adjustments, then you are avoiding getting punched in the face and building both trust and insight with your prospect.

I’m not suggesting that you roll over and throw away the essentials that make it possible for you to do great work in order to satisfy a client. If you go through that list of 50 reasons why they are going to say no that have nothing to do with you, and you can think of how to mitigate that, you have just developed somewhere between 1 and 50 ways to increase the connection between you and your prospect. The more points of connection, the better the chances that they are going to become a client.

Good luck & good selling…and if you want, send me the 1st 10 reasons why a prospect might say “No”, and maybe we can work through a little prep together.

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