| ISSUE №198 · CONTENT MARKETING |
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The Walk & Talk
If you've ever seen the Aaron Sorkin series, The West Wing, you might have noticed this scene style that he uses frequently. It's affectionately known as the walk and talk. From a action perspective, in these walk and talks, two people literally walking through the corridors of The White House. It’s a transition piece that allows the characters to go from one big scene in the show to probably another big scene in the show. In these incidental conversations, the real action happens. Secrets are shared and plot twists emerge. They aren’t designed to be high drama, they are designed to be sort of workaday, happenstance conversations. In these scenes, the stories (and characters) move ahead.
Walking & talking - VERY EXCITING TELEVISION!
Your Agency Is Pretty Similar - The Big Scenes Might Happen In Zoom or Google Meets, But The Action Happens Elsewhere
The things that feel like “big events” in your agency are probably similar to this:
Land a new client
Onboard a new client
Doing a QBR (Quarterly Business Review)
Hiring and Onboarding a New Employee
Sure, there are others, but this is a pretty good list of the things that are very notable in your agency life. These are certainly memorable events, but they are the outcome of a bunch of different things. More likely than not, they are the outcome of information processes and ideas that happen in your agency's version of a walk and talk.
When you talk with someone on your team about solving a client problem or working with your ops manager to make things more efficient, you are actually creating enormous amounts of useful data as a byproduct of simple communication.
The real value of your agency, the skill of your team & the impact you have on your clients isn’t in those big moments - it’s the aggregate of all of your walk & talks with your team, your clients, your prospects, your peers & more. The data that you generate in these moments is almost certainly a catalyst for your agency growth.
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Last week in AIC#196 (Your Journey Is Short & Their Is Long) I told you about the start of my test of Fathom. This is part 2: After a few weeks of using Fathom, I noticed some things that I really, really like - especially compared to Fireflies.
The first one (and this is a biggie) Fathom records my meetings and then just pretty much gets out of the way. It sends stuff to HubSpot in the right fields rather than dropping links as notes (it works this way with Salesforce & GHL, too. Fathom’s native Claude & ChatGPT plugins/connectors seem faster than the MCP connection I used to use - and it took be about 3 minutes to set up a Fathom -> Claude -> CopperCRM (my daily driver) integration and to my “2nd Brain” doodad that I built. Truly easy-peasy lemon-squeezy.
The second one is subtle - but I think it’s pretty important… If you are a Zoom user, you know that Zoom is adding all kinds of stuff - docs & sheets & slides & automations - all cool stuff, I am sure. But, they are making it harder and harder to NOT live in their eco-system.
Fireflies is adding a bazillion AI features too, and they want you to use them inside of Fireflies (also, they all use “AI credits” and nothing seems included in your monthly subscription). I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to do work INSIDE of my call recorder. The whole purpose of a call recorder is to record the call so you can do work with the data that’s in the call wherever you want. But if you work with a tool (like Fireflies or Zoom) that expects everyone to be on the same platform, it makes it really hard to work in a hybrid environment.
What I really appreciate is that Fathom has become part of my workflow rather than demanding that it BECOMES my workflow. I dunno - maybe I am just old and crotchety, but I expect to use tools to help me get more done, not help me get more done only if I am willing to do it in their environment.
If you want a call recorder that works with the tools you already use instead of making you move into its ecosystem, my link gets you 2 months of Fathom Premium free (double the normal trial). Start here with my link →.
Connect your CRM on day one. That's where it all clicks.
Great, Whenever I Talk To Someone, It’s Like A West Wing Walk & Talk. Is That The Point Of Today’s Missive?
No. Absolutely not… Today’s point is to realize that your walk-and-talks are incredibly important, and there are three ways that they are crucial to creating more growth:
They Reduce Agency Reliance on “FOUNDER MAGIC”: Founder Magic is the experiential and market authority advantage that you, as a founder, bring to your agency. You can sell things that other people can't. You can see connections that other people don't. You can say things to clients and staff that other people won't. That’s all because of your position & perspective. Often, all of that stuff is trapped in your head. You don’t share all your stories, or the connection you made between a Google announcement, a thing you saw in TechCrunch, and a LinkedIn post that crossed your path. Entrepreneurs are, truly, a bit different than “normal” people, and most don't realize it. So all of that context that you carry around in your head starts to leak out during these Walk & Talks. You are so much more likely to transfer a real perspective, insight, or attitude in an informal conversation than other kinds of communications.
They Open Up Your Ears & Let You Hear “The Blab of the Pave”: Sorry, “blab of the pave” is one of my favorite phrases from Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” - and once a high-school English teacher, always a high-school English teacher, I suppose. But what I mean by "blab of the pave" is that, by having these informal conversations, you get to hear the questions and statements that the people you work with, your clients, your prospects and your peers say. It is a rare treat to get unfiltered and unfettered language because it's happening in an informal conversation. You need to keep your ears open so that you hear the terms and language that the market is using when they talk about the problems that you solve. A million years ago, after SpinShark was acquired PM Digital, we worked with lots and lots of formerly catalog fashion retailers. Because these businesses emerged and evolved from the catalog industry, they had a particular language that they used. Instead of sales or revenue, they talked about demand, and instead of campaign launches, they talked about drop days. This was their “blab of the pave”, hearing that and adopting that language gave us more credibility and more affinity. In fact, it allowed us to express our products and services better to them because it was in their language.
They Force You To Articulate Things Outside of Your Head: This is a lot like writing. In fact, it might sound silly, but when you listen to your own thoughts and you connect things to your own internal references, often the meaning and impact of what you say is lost on the other people you are saying it to. In in an email kind of communication, the feedback of "I don't understand your reference or your point" is so delayed that the communication gets lost. In an informal conversation, when you say something and you can tell, just by the look on someone else's face, that they have no freaking idea what you are talking about, that is a signal to you: you have to step up your clarity. That forcing process of increasing clarity creates more concise, more effective, and more valuable thought.
So How Do Use All Of This Walk & Talk Data To Grow My Agency?
in those three ways that we just discussed, those are pretty gentle ways of growing. It's about expressing things more clearly, sharing your knowledge freely, and finding a communication pattern that works for all parties involved. But remember what I said about this being data?
It is. All of this conversational data is the fuel of your positioning. It's the fuel of your content. It's the fuel of your sales process, and it's the fuel of your client retention engine. (By the way, this is where a botless recorder like Fathom can be amazingly helpful.)
Because you don't actually live in the West Wing or work on a television set. Most of your conversations are going to happen on the phone or via some sort of visual meeting (and yes, I know that people still go into offices, so even in person, too). You need to record all of these conversations because human beings tend to live pretty much in the “now”.
The data thrown off by these conversations over time, we'll show you how your thinking is evolving, the themes that repeat, and the problems that you consistently solve.
All of these conversations are a record of the thing that's right in front of your face. Recording them and using AI to maximize their value, because the themes, words, and insights that you create are retained. That gives you so much more context to share with your team and with your clients, because you can take conversations from different pieces of your agency experience. If they are all saved, you can look at how you are understanding, acting upon, and preparing for any topic that might come up.
I have all of my meetings dropped into my second brain that I put together using Claude and Obsidian. Claude understands who's in what call and what the topics are. It will drop it into a folder that has all of the other related people and concepts. It now has a way of bubbling up important stuff by listening. If I've spoken about something (about a problem or an idea or an opportunity) three times across a bunch of different conversations, and if it has hit that threshold, Claude puts it on the first page of that folder and says, "This is a theme that you need to be investigating."
Guess where my ideas, insights and content come from? I am capturing the data that I am creating through conversation and engagement for my entire week is being compressed into ideas, themes, problems, and potential actions that are being delivered to me on a regular basis. This allows me to take an idea that I may have had in a conversation with another agency consultant, get it translated into actual language that my clients and prospects have used, and then look for similar themes and calls to action that have been effective in the past.
I want you to do the same. It feels weird that you are going to record your life, but it allows you to capture the incidental brilliance, insight, and opportunity that falls into your lap through conversation. The words that spill out of our mouths are the fuel to grow your agency because it gives you more context. It allows you to understand more context, and it allows you to interpret changes in context over time so that you can deliver powerful insight & solutions.
Quick Notes:
Agency Field Guide: This officially launched about two weeks ago! If you’d like to add you agency to our nearly 13,000 other agencies, please submit your agency - it is 100% free. Also, don’t forget to check out our agency opportunities feed AND our agency insights.
I love this conversational intelligence stuff so much that I have a an upcoming service to create compelling newsletter content for agencies, consultants, SaaS & service businesses. It’s in a closed beta at the moment, but WTF Growth Agency will be launching before Dec 1.
Finally, I bet many of you forgot that there is an Agency Inner Circle Slack Channel. I’m considering bringing on a resource to help manage it. It will be free (like this newsletter and Agency Field Guide). What I want to know is the following:
