Laser Beams & Sunshine - Agency Inner Circle #6

Targeting & looking ahead

Author

Tim Kilroy
26 Jun • Estimated Reading Time: 6 minutes

Table of Contents

Laser Beams

Here is a fun fact - bar codes, those things you scan at the self-checkout turn 50 this month. (Sadly that means I am older than bar codes…). But I was thinking about the other side of that transaction - the laser beam.

Laser beams aren’t anything crazy. It’s just light that is REALLY tightly focused. (Maybe you’ve seen these Fresnel Lens dealios…) Tightly focused light is insanely powerful.

Most agencies aren’t using anything that is insanely powerful when it comes to targeting and prospecting. They are using the equivalent of glowsticks to light their way. The come up with an ICP that is overly broad - like “ecommerce brands between $5mm and $25mm in revenue”. That’s cool, but that represents a HUGE and completely heterogeneous set of problems.

I’m not suggesting that you “niche” down - but I think that you should have a really great idea of what kind of clients you WANT to work with. Prospecting isn’t just finding people in your market. It’s about finding your people in the market. Most of us aren’t allowing us to define who our people really are.

So, take a laser beam approach to that market definition. Instead of that flabby $5-$25mm parameter, try thinking about who in that market you want to work with…is it a fun, snappy new DTC, a traditional retailer who is struggling to make online work well, is it a startup who is Amazon 1st and wants to sell direct? Is it a company where you work with CEO? Is it a company where you are the only agency? Do you want to support an in-house team or be an outsourced team? Do you want to pursue fast growth or profit-first? Do you want to be part of the creatine decisions, or do you just want to crank on scaling media spend?

Forget about your ICP and the about your MDC (Most Desirable Client).

If you want some ideas on how to find your MDC using Charm.io, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Clay.com & your own charming personality, LMK. And keep your eyes open for a new DWY GTM/Prospecting offering really soon.

Sunshine

You’ve probably heard that “sunshine is the best disinfectant”. In the world of agencies, think of your focused attention as sunshine. Not that your agency is infected, but things that you don’t expose to sunshine every now and again get musty. Since we are moving into the second half of the year, stuff that Yu worked on last year is probably starting to get a little funky. Take 6 minutes before the end of the month and pick 6 pieces of your business to review and decide if they are as sturdy and as fresh as when you put them away as “done”.

Welcome To Jhana Li

We’ve got some terrific mentors in this group (Marcel, Tim & Taylor - take a quick bow). But we have another terrific heavyweight joining the fun…Jhana Li from Spyglass Ops. She is going to provide ops and management insight and guidance to Agency Inner Circle! Welcome!

Best of the Agency Inner Circle Slack

Ashish Rawat has some questions about landing clients. I asked him to give us his 4Ws…he shared them and got some insight on how to answer them better. This is the very essence positioning and when you get that right, everything from lead gen to account management falls into place

Industry News

  • Shopify & Target Get Cozy: In a complete non-surprise, Target is allowing Shopify merchants an easy way to enter the heretofore closed Target marketplace. The exciting wrinkle here is that there may be a way for select merchants to get shelf-space in actual Target stores. That’s pretty awesome.

  • Cannes is Finally Over: Thankfully, the annual circle jerk that is Cannes, has ended. Cannes, if you don’t know, is the annual mutual admiration society where really large agencies hang out together and remark on how they are so glad that their truly remarkable “creative innovation” help brands authentically connect with the global consumer base. They neglect to mention that all of these things that they shower with praise are just ads.

  • AI & Search: Google rolled back some of their AI-powered summaries. I haven’t heard Bing crow about AI in a few weeks, and Wired just called Perplexity a “bullshit machine”. I think the hype is running juuuuuust a bit ahead of the technology.

Thanks To Our Sponsor - Customers.ai

Customers.ai is best described as “knowledge is power”. It helps your clients identify some of their unknown site visitors (so you can message them), enrich their customer lists with data like income, net worth, marital status, parental status and more (so you can create amazing Klaviyo segmentations and deeply relevant flows) and it can feed social platforms with amazing SuperCAPI data that helps Meta & its friends find better customers for you. Customers.ai clients have seen as much as 2x performance in social advertising.

They have a terrific partner program that get agency partners sales support, lead gen opportunities and a generous rev share.