What's Your Why Is The Wrong Question. Instead Ask, What's My Agency Truth?

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.“What’s Your Why?” Used to Be a Question That Agencies Asked Prospects…

Back in the pre-pandemic days, when money was cheap, ad-costs were low & growth opportunities were seemingly endless everybody in the agency space was selling the “revenue rocket”. Every business problem could be solved with growth…

When the sales pitch was EXACTLY the same from agency to agency, there wasn’t much differentiation (unlike today, where agencies are very differentiated 🤪 - sorry, couldn’t even type that with a straight face). Inspired by books like Simon Sinek’s Start With Why, and Gary Keller’s The One Thing, all sorts of service sellers started to try to jump into the lead spot by focusing on the buyer’s emotional state and their vision & mission. So they’d ask prospects, “What’s your why…?” hoping to get an answer like “I’m building something that my kids will be proud of…” or some other heightened emotional statement so that the focus wasn't on the problem, or the process, or the results, but rather some deep emotional desire of the buyer for “success”.

Let’s Be Honest - That Approach Is Manipulative & Demands An Intimacy That Hasn’t Been Earned

Sadly, for owner operators and startup businesses where the founder was the decision-maker, that kind of sales jiu-jitsu worked as often as it did not. So it started showing up in cold outreach - strangers on FB & LinkedIn starting off a conversation with "“Hey Tim, What’s your big why? What are you working towards? I think we can help you get there…” Luckily, when the faux intimacy hit the DMs, that tactic seemed to jump the shark - and I haven’t heard it in quite a while. (BTW, if you are too young & don’t know the origin of “jumped the shark” it’s this 1977 clip from Happy Days that had me RIVETED to the TV screen when I was in 4th grade.)

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Emotions Still Matter In Sales

LinkedIn is now lousy with “hero journeys” as if starting up an N8N automation agency was a battle for the fate of the world, like the Epic of Gilgamesh Yeah, I know being 22 years old and broke sucks but recreating workflows other people imagined isn’t heroic…but I digress.

Even if you are working with the most data-driven people in the world (have a chat with an analyst at a VC or PE firm and you’ll know these folks are at the top of the “logic above all else” food chain), there is some kind of emotion tied to action. Via Psychology Today, once logic has set the circumstances for you to make a choice, it is a physiological and emotional response that creates the action.

I think that is really cool. Even when your super-logic driven decision-making brain can’t get your body moving w/o creating an emotional state to allow for a heightened physiological condition which creates your need to take action!

OK, Tim, We Get It - Why The F Are You Telling Us This?

I’ve been working with a bunch of agencies around market awareness, social authority & visibility via my GEN+ program & crafting go to market messaging for outreach in my GTM OS offerings.

Discovering what kind of content and messaging will activate trust in your target market and spur action from prospects is difficult. Some people are just naturally better at it than others, and I’ve been thinking hard to come up with an easy way to frame the work needed to expose the messaging that CREATES the logical, emotional and physiological states required to activate a prospect.

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How To Activate Trust & Action

Trust is a rare commodity in the agency/prospect/client world. It takes time to build it and only seconds to shatter it. Increasingly, however, the foundation of trust is being built BEFORE any true engagement happens. Via Gartner, 60-70% of B2B buyers have made a purchase decision before they engage with you. That requires a ton of trust.

You build that trust through insight, through sharing your way of thinking, through exposing your decisions, by sharing your clients successes and how you helped them address challenges. You create that trust by being transparent and generous.

But the question remains, what is it that you need to share to activate the trust that allows 7 out of 10 buyers to choose you before they speak with you?

For some folks, it is natural… “I saw this pattern in our client data that unlocks opportunity for lots of folks, so I will share that!” Others struggle because they aren’t sure which insights and stories will be relevant to potential buyers without all the context.

Share What Is The Most True About Your Agency

This sounds silly, doesn’t it? There are lots of things that are true about your agency. It’s name, it’s place of incorporation, it’s logo…all of those things are true. But they are solely logic. There is no emotional impact.

Your agency truths might feel more difficult to tease out than these simple facts. Your agency truth is a value that permeates everything your agency does. In Agency Inner Circle 66 “Are You Obsessed?” we dove pretty deep on how to reuse and revitalize content themes that are important - and those are closer to agency truths than simple agency facts, e.g., “we have 6 employees…” But an agency truth is deeper - it is closer to an operating principle or a cultural pillar.

An agency truth is something akin to Amazon’s Day 1 mindset, or Common Thread Collective’s focus on profit in ecommerce, or even Apple’s obsession with artists, musicians and rebels (weird for a tech brand, right?). All of these things - Day 1, profit & creativity - live somewhere beneath everything that these companies do.

Your agency has a truth. In the early days, the agency truth might be the passionate insight of the founder who is still doing all of the stuff themselves. Other agencies might have their truth built into the way their proprietary media model is built. For others, it is the attention that they pay to the account meetings, or the depth and preparation that goes into asking the best questions during a discovery meeting. For one of my clients, their TRUTH is that they won’t work with a client until they are 100% clear on the business problem they solve through marketing. Their truth is that they solve business problems and will not write a line of code, a syllable of copy or a pixel of creative until they know what the business problem is that they are solving. Once defined, that business problem is the true north for the entire engagement and decisions/tactics/actions are taken ONLY when it is clear that they are part of the business problem solution.

What’s The Guiding Light of Your Agency Truth?

Truth Attracts & Activates

When your agency truth is revealed, it is easy to decide on messaging. If a fact, idea, story or snippet supports your truth it deserves to be shared. That makes content creation and messaging pretty simple. That clarity removes a lot of hurdles in the creation process and that content has a weight that attracts attention.

But when you combine that truth with a deep understanding of your target audience’s needs, it serves as an accelerant. Truth combined with empathy & insight creates action.

To put a fine point on it - you can activate potential clients when you have clarity on how your agency truth impacts and satisfies the needs of your client.

For instance:

AGENCY TRUTH: Our client experience is high-touch, high-accountability and it always works towards a specific goal that is mutually agreed to during the sales and kickoff process. All the questions we ask, all the reports we generate, all of the tests we run are all in service of the goal. We act and react with intention.

CLIENT NEED: We need to have clear metrics that quantify our progress towards a strategically important goal. We need regular reporting and information about progress, and even if other priorities surface in the short term, the over-arching drive towards meeting the strategic goal in a timely manner is paramount.

THE ALIGNMENT THAT ATTRACTS & ACTIVATES: The agency needs to talk in depths about how their client experience, from the initial kickoff call to monthly reporting, to the quarterly business review, to renewal discussions are all centered around honoring the goal that is cooperatively developed. This agency truth aligns well with the client need of managing longer term strategic goals with various tactical priorities in the near term.

As the prospect begins their search for an agency and they become aware of the market offerings, the agency truth will resonate with the prospect needs and attitudes. And as we discussed in Agency Inner Circle #66, it is the restatement & refreshing of core themes that allow that message to resonate.

Your agency truth may be irrelevant to some that choose to work with you, and that’s fine. That client may want crazy emphasis on short term results and doesn’t feel the value of a coordinated and strategic approach. But that truth remains your truth because it attracts and activates those that best understand, engage and VALUE your truth.

I’m Sure We Are Going To Talk About This Again…

This is a complicated an nuanced approach to leveraging content to attract and activate prospects before you speak to them. You aren’t going to have knowledge beforehand if a particular prospect has needs that are served by your truth…

But when you articulate, restate, reframe and refresh your agency truth, it will resonate and the prospects who are in tight alignment will find you, hear you, believe you and, eventually, hire you.

If you have thoughts or questions about discovering your agency truth and finding ways to make it resonate in the market, reply to this email and I’ll answer them in the Friday edition.

Date Change - Agency AI Sales & Lead Gen Summit

Due to some schedule conflicts, the date of the Agency AI Sales & Lead Gen Summit is now September 12, 2025.

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