SPONSORED BY

When my kids were growing up and they started to have friends that were valuable to them, some of those friends would become extensions of our family. (Heck - I have 5 kids, do you think I would care if there were an extra 2 or 3 underfoot?") selectively, we would elevate these friends to what we called "walkin’ in friends." A walkin’ in friend is a friend that doesn't have to ask to come over, knock on the door, or anything formal like that. They became welcome in our home at any time - even if the kid that they were friends with was busy or not home.

There’s a couple of kinds of walking-in friends that your agency ought to try to have - these are the people that you always are happy to see at your door:

ECOSYTEM FRIENDS: These are platforms partners & other folks that can refer you business, like consultants, previous clients, other agencies - we will dive into this circle of friends next issue.

DATA-ENRICHED FRIENDS: Friends might be a little strong of a word here, but these are the people that you know enough about to truly believe that they are good fit prospects for you.

For most of the last 60 years, we’ve used the most basic data-enrichment available - firmographics & titles. Before cold email, kids, we used to send out cold mail - that stuff with stamps, licked envelopes, and we “personalized” via manual mail merge…typing someone’s name on a form letter! This was SO advanced, & so futuristic. Someday, I will tell you all about dynamic print on demand - IN COLOR! But that 1990s miracle of technology would be too much excitement for today…

Now we have “signals” - you know the things that I'm talking about: job postings, company news, product launches. That plus RFPs are the stuff we use to build Agency Opportunities at Agency Field Guide. These are events that might mean that someone is in the market for something. the easiest to get signals are probably the least informative, like job postings and press releases. They are definitely good, but they don't always represent a real opportunity. They maybe show you more that something is in motion.

If you pair market signals with patterns that you match from your sales calls, your client calls, and your experience. They can actually be a really terrific source of opportunity because, if you have enough information from your clients' experiences and your experience, you can come in with a "perhaps you never thought of this" kind of idea.

SPONSORED

Way back in May 2025, in AIC#60, I said agency lead generation is like running a hedge fund. You try to be responsive enough, diversified enough and hedged enough that you can succeed in any market conditions. For instance, if cold email starts underperforming, you have other options to invest your attention in. This way you are never stuck, as an investor might say, “catching a falling knife”.

In that issue, I actually mentioned Perspective as a great tool to help you spin up some lead gen resiliency. I believe it even more today. Perspective used to be very focused on building funnels that were stoopid simple to build and performed well regardless of the display environment (desktop, big screen mobile, small screen mobile, tablets, lasers on the moon, whatever…)

In the last 18 months, these guys have been super deep under the hood, ripping everything apart because “AI”. I got a sneak peek at what they are going to unveil at their free event on Tuesday, November 24, at 1 pm Eastern, and I was pretty blown away. Here are just a few things that are gonna make you want to spin up funnels everywhere:

OK - so that’s about all I can say, after all, I don’t want to ruin the surprise. BUT things to remember:

You know that I am totally not comfortable with things that are scammy, scummy, or underhanded in any way. It just doesn't sit right with me. An example is when you put up a post somewhere and someone likes it, maybe they even send you a quick complimentary note: When you respond and say thank you, they launch into a pitch of something that most likely is not related to anything that you wrote. That means the social post like and the complimentary note were a bullshit pretext to an unsolicited pitch.

That’s not how a quality relationship between two parties is going to begin. Let’s do something crazy, and imagine how acquiring information might happen in real life:

So, what’s the secret goldmine, you might ask?

Asking fucking questions with the intention of learning more & nothing else.

No! I think you might have missed the point. Getting new information, specific to this person, in this moment in time, is the point. When we do outreach, cold calling, or ads. Most of the time, all we're really doing is creating an engagement so that we can say whatever it is the fuck we're being paid to say, right?

Any data that you gather throughout that engagement process is a force. It is just pleasantries that you've got to get out of the way so you can go into your spiel.

You aren’t enriching what you know about your prospects or audience…you are just hoping that they will stop blabbing long enough for you to pitch.

Believe it or not, that brings me back to our friends at Perspective. One of the things that I really liked about using Perspective was how easy it was for an ADHD-addled, impatient, kinetic thinker to be able to make a relatively complex information-gathering solution. When I got folks into my funnels, I didn't know who they were going to be. They were people who were responding to a lead magnet offer or to an ad, but before they entered any information, I had just a notional idea that they fit inside of my ICP.

I don’t work with just anyone because, like Liam Nelson, I have a particular set of skills, and if you don't need those skills, there's no reason for us to work together. I needed to find a way that was simple for me to get more information without making it seem like a horrendous interview before you could get the thing that you came there for… I used a bunch of logic branches to keep the questions short & moving fast, and with each logic branch I asked just enough to know if they were relevant to me.

For instance, if I asked for revenue or team size, agencies under a certain threshold would be headed towards my Agency Studio experience, whereas larger folks would be headed DemandOS or SalesOS.

That might seem simple, but the fact that I could do this simply, easily & graciously inside of Perspective was awesome. Even better, all of that data stared flowing into my CRM so I got to categorize and understand more about these people and their agencies so my future outreach would be better and more relevant.

I know that this is sort of segmentation 101 - but in this case: it is prospect data enrichment so that you can better choose which leads to prioritize. It's almost hilarious that we don't think just to ask prospects these questions. We rely on signals to generate outreach and discovery calls to weed out the good from the bad, and RFPs to formalize our solutions to problems we solve every day.

There is so much power in asking a question that isn't agenda-loaded. During the pandemic, when everybody was stuck in their house, it was very popular on Facebook to find somebody in a group that might have said something that you considered a potential opening, and then direct message them: "Hey, how's business?"

That isn’t an information-seeking question, but rather more like one of those gates at the beginning of a ski-race. If the recipient said anything other than, "Oh my god, I have so many clients. I can't possibly do one more thing." You would assume that that gate was open and you were rushing in with your pitch dialed up to 11.

When you were growing up, ou probably had kids that were your “friends”, and then you had kids that were your FRIENDS. There’s a lot that goes into making a friend. There's opportunity, frequency of engagement, a shared sense of values, a shared sense of the ridiculous, and a lot of trust.

FRIENDS can last a lifetime, & “friends” sometimes don’t last as long as Thanksgiving Break. And I think what goes into the definition of each of those is what you know about them and how well you can keep the context of their experience in your mind. The more you know & the more you can put their experience first, the better the friendship becomes.

In the world of lead gen/demand gen, this kind of familiarity and commitment is really based on relevancy and need. Whenever you generate a lead, you have a high-level idea of whether what your solution is is right for their problem. So many in the agency space believe that the secret to winning the pitch is the offer. But truly, the secret to winning any pitch is having the right offer…

And the goldmine of information that can help you understand if you have, or give you the pieces you need to create starts with knowing enough about the prospect so you can determine the strength of the “signal” they are broadcasting.

Discovery calls are truly the best way to gather & share information, but raw signals like “we just raised money” or “product launch” sometimes push people who are “friends” into discovery calls. A few questions using a solution like Perspective can help you get to know those “friends” well enough that as soon as you hop on that Zoom call, you are gonna be walkin’ in friends.

Our sponsorships are ads (obviously - duh). But some of the companies or services linked in our content may pay us a minimal commission if you buy something from them. Potential payment is never a factor in what we link to, and we have direct experience with every company or service where you can buy something that we mention in our content.