I’ve been pummeling your inbox for 200 issues so far…and I don’t think I am going to stop any time soon. I hope you’ll stick around for the next 200, and thank you for reading and sharing your thoughts with me. I appreciate you.

I get this question, or some variation, a lot: "What is the thing that is going to help me build my business right this very minute?" I wish I had the right answer…there are actually a bazillion things that are working - I just don't have the right answer FOR YOU.

Let’s take a look at some of the things that you can do, and I've put them onto a fast/slow, easy/hard matrix because they all work. It's just a matter of what's closest to your capability, your budget, your aptitude, and your attitude.

SPONSORED BY FATHOM

Over the last couple of issues, I’ve talked about my transition from using Fireflies to Fathom as my call intelligence tool of choice. What has become really apparent to me is that Fathom unlocks the data that is trapped in your calls - without getting in the way.

For a small team like mine, that data is pretty easy to manage - we dump the calls into our “2nd Brain” and then it gets sorted & catalogued by client or concept or opportunity - whatever. But in my work with sales teams (SalesOS), I find that different reps handle call data in different ways. Different sales pods handle call data in different ways. This makes it REALLY hard for founders and sales leaders to see the same data (objections, strong sales points, new questions, what prospects responded to, what fell flat on its face, etc.) across reps and teams. It’s just not apples to apples data…and whenever you’ve got to make judgement calls around which data is the same as which, you run into the possibility of poor judgement OR just plain missing something.

Because Fathom makes it so simple to aggregate calls across individuals and teams, the data can be extracted in all sorts of different ways throughout the lead -> prospect -> close -> client onboarding -> account management arc. And because of Fathom’s excellent CRM integrations, data can be accessed, referenced and integrated in client interactions for years.

BTW, can you imagine how much your client will love your agency if in month 3 of your engagement, you reference a concern, word for word, from the sales process and show how your account plan is staying true to what the sales team promised? I’ve been in this game a long time, and I can promise you that your client is going to love that attention to detail and fidelity to their needs… So if you have a team, Fathom’s flexibility is unmatched.

If you are still on Fireflies with your team, Fathom has a crazy offer to migrate you over with white-glove service and give you Fathom Business free until your contract ends. FYI, I dropped Fireflies PDQ once I saw how well Fathom works WITH me, rather than asking me to work with it…

Flying solo? My link gets you 2 months of Fathom Premium free → grab my link here.

Running a team on Fireflies? Skip the trial and take their migration offer. They'll move your whole team over, white-glove, and you’ll get Fathom Business for free until your Fireflies contract ends. → Get their migration offer here.

If you aren’t doing these two things, WTF are you even doing? Systematically reaching out to your existing and previous clients and asking for referrals or offering an upsell or an account expansion is the number one way to increase your revenue. Why aren't you doing this every single day? Now you are probably wondering what CRM mining is. Well, it's just scrolling through your past relationships and figuring out who you haven't talked to in a really long time…and then reaching out to them with an idea. In your CRM, there are sales calls that you should have closed, prospects that made another choice that you should have followed up with, people who really, really liked you, but the timing wasn't right, people that you knew you could help, but there was something in the way. This week, I want you to make a plan to turn this into a habit, because it is the top tier of business growth.

There are an extraordinary number of Tier 2 opportunities to grow your business, and they are not Tier 2 because they don't work. It's just that they require either more effort, capital, or time.

So many people think of this as just a sales activity. But it really is a demand gen activity, in as much as the first time you connect with somebody, they are suddenly now aware of your business and they are aware of, potentially, the problems you solve. The the reason why this is tier 2 is that the world of cold messaging is incredibly congested. AI and automation have made cold messaging at scale too easy, so the market is very crowded. Additionally, in cold email specifically, there has been such an elevation of technical infrastructure needed to do cold email well. I always have been a really big fan of cold email and think that you should be adding this to your demand gen stack, but be aware that it is hard. It is completely a numbers game, and it may not be worth your time.

I know so many agency owners that live and die by ads, and they can be incredibly successful. The reason why this is tier 2 for me is that, first, you need significant budget in order to generate enough traffic to create yield from your ads. For many agencies, that's a blocker. However, there is another issue that makes ads a Tier 2 player - it can take a really long time to get ads dialed in well enough so that you are generating quality leads. If the leads that you are generating aren't high quality, you are wasting money in generating them, and you are wasting time when you are engaging with them and disqualifying them. This is a friction that most small agencies can't stomach. For larger agencies who are seeking larger clients, in my experience, ads have been significantly less effective than other methods of demand generation simply because their target audience seems to LESS LIKELY to click on an ad vs. getting a trusted referral.

If it weren't for the need to write a newsletter, I would put this as a tier 1 demand gen opportunity, but a newsletter needs to be created. Lots of agencies don't give themselves permission to do this, so they just don't. Sometimes people get confused between a newsletter and a nurture or drip sequence, and they mix them. It's weird, and it does not build your authority like a newsletter does, nor does it solicit responses in the way that a good drip campaign does. But if you do, allow yourself to create a newsletter, the act of creating content drives visibility, authority, and opportunity in a pretty dramatic way.

I really like both of these activities for demand generation and authority building - that’s why we focus on social content in DemandOS. The only reason these are Tier 2 activities: they require consistency. A single social post or a single webinar is not going to fill your pipeline. You need a process around both of them in order to turn the authority and power of both of these channels into pipeline, and it starts with the ability to consistently do them. I think they are both marvelously effective and truly can differentiate you in a meaningful way, but they require commitment and process. In my experience, people tend to shy away from high-commitment, high-process opportunities if they don't work immediately.

Everything in Tier 3 works really well. It just so happens that it comes with a higher level of friction or capital than things in Tiers 1 and 2. However, they are really effective.

Sponsorships are really powerful when they target an audience that is valuable to you. For instance, if you wanted to get in front of agency owners, you might want to be like Fathom and sponsor a newsletter (like this one), or a research report (like the amazing research from Promethean Research) or a community of agency owners (like The Bureau & their nifty new website). If you think about YOUR target audience, you can, without a doubt, find places to sponsor.

Partnerships ought to be a core part of your daily existence. A quality network of even three or four agencies connected together who refer business to one another when they can't fulfill can add an enormous amount of vitality to your pipeline. Most agencies don't create partnerships like this because they are afraid to potentially refer a prospect or a client to another agency. They think the other agency might steal the business, or potentially they think the other agency might expose some things that they don't do well. Those are just fears talking. Get over it, and find an agency that is bigger than you or smaller than you, and refer business that doesn't fit, or find non-competitive agencies and think about how to serve your clients strategically from this group of agencies that are friendly. Of course, you should do rev share, but that's not the reason to do it. That brings up the second issue around partnerships - They've got to be equal. I've been in partnerships where I did all the referring and didn't get anything back. Was the referral partner good for my clients that I referred? Absolutely, the provider was amazing. However, it wasn't reciprocal, and over time that started to bother me. When you structure a partnership, make it clear to everybody involved that reciprocity is expected. If it doesn't emerge, the partner who isn't reciprocating should know that they are likely to be called out or replaced.

Everything in Tier 4 works. I'm just making it 4th Tier because they tend to take a long time or have a high bar of entry.

SEO is still a great channel for certain kinds of queries, but it’s future in the B2B services space isn’t totally clear. I still get plenty of traffic via SEO to both my primary site and to the newsletter archives, but it's not clear in the way that it used to be that there's any purchase intent involved. I think some of the more high-intent queries might be sucked up by AI-overviews. There is a strong connection between SEO and our next entry, but in my experience, SEO moves slowly.

Answer Engine Optimization is without a doubt the darling of the marketing world. The reason why I have put this at a tier 4 is that it's unclear what works over time, and with the capabilities of frontier models changing so rapidly, it's very difficult to predict what AEO is going to look like in the coming months or years.

Even though every AEO provider that I have talked to is doing extraordinary stuff with real and provable results, I think that there is an element of "This works for now, and I'll tell you next week if it's working next week." It's not that I'm not a believer. It's just that it is so variable and rapidly changing that I think everybody should be doing it, but I do not believe that AEO is going to be a controllable, dependable driver of opportunity anytime soon.

These are all amazing ways to build your pipeline. Every person that I know who has written a book (and that's about three dozen) has been able to leverage that book into a consistent pipeline flow. Everybody that I know that has put real effort into getting onto stages has had extraordinary pipeline results. Everyone that I know who has put on an event like Tinuiti Live or HawkeMedia’s HawkeFest has continually pointed to it as an incredible place to turn prospects into clients and clients into clients who spend more. And the people who are extraordinary at in-person networking and connecting swear that it is the only way to effectively build a high-quality pipeline.

every single one of these things works incredibly well, but writing a book is a high barrier to entry. Booking consistent speaking events is a different kind of pipeline development. Holding an event in person or virtually is an extraordinary undertaking in terms of complexity and cost. In-person networking often involves hopping on a plane and going somewhere.

All of these incredibly effective things come with a relatively high barrier to entry, which is why they are Tier 4. It certainly isn't that you shouldn't do them. It's just that you've got to jump over something higher in order to take advantage of the opportunity.