But...We Are Better!?!?!?

Does better even freakin' matter?

Author

Tim Kilroy
20 Jun • Estimated Reading Time: 11 minutes

In partnership with

Midsomer's Memos

It’s The Summer Solstice - The Longest Day of the Year

Let me tell you about a long day I had several years ago…

My alarm went off at 3:30am so I could catch the “nerd bird” (which is what my pilot friend called the 5:45am Boston to San Francisco flight). I was presenting to a super-well funded education startup. Their paid media budget was projected to be 7 figures monthly.

I had prepped my butt off for this meeting. We had the research, we had the intel, we had the tech, we even had a surprise connection - the head of performance marketing at the company was college roommates with my high school prom date. This was going to catapult us deeper into the VC-funded “grow at all costs” eco-system. We were a 4 person agency at the time, but this was a pot of gold that I was going to grab.

I gave the best presentation of my life - seriously. It was killer.

The room was full of nodding heads, great questions, all kinds of positive feedback, pricing questions, meeting cadence discussions, reporting needs…it could not have gone any better.

I got on the red eye back home at 10:30pm, and was wired the whole flight home…this was a trajectory altering opportunity. I fought my way home through Boston-rush hour traffic and walked into my house a disheveled mess.

My Phone Rang

It was the CMO that I had pitched the day before. I was grinning ear to ear. She asked how my trip home was, and we talked about the indignities of business travel. Then her voice changed. She said that we were the most sophisticated agency the spoke with, and we undoubtedly had the most upside potential of any potential partner. My smile started fading a bit… but, she said that they had decided to go in another direction…

I was stunned. Seriously. I managed, somehow, to ask her to go into a little more depth. She basically said that the board of directors was afraid that their needs and the scale of the budget would overwhelm our resources. I tried to explain how we had accounted for that, and our tech & automation…

She said that she 100% believed that we could handle her business and that we had the best solution to drive the best results for her business, but the board decided that the risk of failure wasn’t worth the additional potential upside.

Better didn’t matter. (BTW, for all of you performance agencies who think that prospects and clients only care about results…I can tell you that it isn’t true…we were selling THE BEST possible results. They cared more about predictable…)

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Better Sometimes Doesn’t Matter

I had a conversation this morning with a friend who owns a SaaS biz in the electrical grid space. He was telling me about the advantages of their approach & the ways it dramatically helped electric utilities. He was telling me all the ways it was better than his bigger competitors.

Then he asked me why they were kicking his ass all the time.

We chatted for a bit and he said that buyers were buying the wrong thing…that those competitors were selling an aged approach that isn’t taking advantage of AI and is no longer solving the market problem.

I asked him if the buyers understood the industry the way that he was thinking about it. He said no - they don’t see the whole market like we do - just their own little slice. And that’s what his competition sells - a surefire way to improve their little slice of the market…whereas my friend was selling market-wide data as the differentiator, but buyers didn’t understand how that data made their world better.

He got a little frustrated and said, “But we get better results - we have proof…why don’t they see it?”

I told him better doesn’t matter…relevance, dependability & shared point of view matters. His approach, even if it IS better, is different than the prevailing wisdom. His clients are geared for safety and dependability - so he needs to sell that. That’s what they know how to buy.

He asked if he needed to give up on his novel approach…I told him of course not, he just needs to repackage it so that the emphasis changed from “new approach” to a “more thorough, more rigorously-tested approach, backed by 10-100x more data than they could ever get access to previously”.

Are You Selling Something That They Aren’t Buying?

It’s so tempting to fall involve with your own ideas. It’s kind of intoxicating - your creative spark brings a new way to think or improve or whatever - and you want to sell the spark that has lit your entire world on fire. I guess they call it “entrepreneurial zeal”. It the passion that drives you to build an agency when the odds are against you.

If your sales pitches aren’t landing, and prospects aren’t responding to the thing that YOU KNOW makes a difference…it isn’t really a judgement on your approach, your insight, your process or tech…it’s evidence of a disconnect between what you are selling and what the prospect knows how to buy.

Before you sell new (eg, AI-enhanced dynamic creative iteration at gigascale!, etc.) make sure that you can connect your new shiny thing to what the prospect or client knows how to buy, because things that are too “new” or “different” (or better) sometimes don’t fit into a space where someone knows how to move forward.

Better only matters when it is relevant to the other party’s reality.

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