Preview & Foreshadowing Are Your Friends

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I talked to two great agencies this week.

One a super fun agency that does amazing work. But what happens during onboarding isn't really addressed during the sales process. Their client onboarding is kind of intense and they need a lot of things from their clients. But they don't prep the clients for that intensity during the sales process.

Another agency doesn't leverage their greatest strength during the sales process. They don't say anything about how awesome their client experience is…and every single customer is blown away by their attention to detail and their commitment.

In the case of the first agency, they thought that every agency onboarding was this intense, collaborative back-and-forth with lots of deliverables going both ways because that was their experience. The second agency was afraid of bragging. They didn't want to spout off something that they didn't know everybody would think to be true.

In neither case are these agencies previewing what's to come.

Previewing is such a powerful human tool. If you are a parent, you know that your day goes better when you tell your toddler:

1. We're going to do this

2. Then we're going to do that

3. Finally, we're going to do the third thing

Because that helps their little brains project safety into the future because they know the process. They know the expectations. Strangely enough, onboarding clients is kind of the same. It really helps if you are able to start the process of previewing during the sales experience. So during a closing call, for instance, you might say, "Typically, the next steps are 1, 2, 3."

That allows the people on the other side to know what is going to happen, and they can be prepared for it so they are not caught off guard. Because again, if you were a parent, you've probably experienced this where your toddler or teenager reacts badly to something they don't anticipate. I'm not saying that clients are toddlers or teenagers, but there are plenty of similarities.

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Use previewing as a powerful foretelling

When I spoke with the agency owner who has the particularly intense onboarding process, he said that they stopped talking about it as intense or as involved because people didn't want to do something that was involved. It made them afraid that it would be too hard.

We've built this intense onboarding as a selling feature. We've turned the fact that you need to devote 2-5 days over the course of two weeks as evidence of how thoughtful this agency is, how every detail is pixel-perfect, and how every possible outcome is anticipated. It's intense because it has to be. It's intense because it works. It's intense because it makes the outcomes better.

The second agency, with their amazing attention to detail and client experience. They were afraid of being braggadocious or they were afraid of being lumped into the "we're an extension of your team" kind of marketing. But what we have done with that agency is really deeply focus on the benefits that their clients get from the engagement with this agency that are not specifically related to the deliverables that the agency creates. We've turned it from "We have great customer service" to "We create deep and meaningful relationships with our clients because our clients matter to us." Putting photographs of one of the agency principals attending the wedding of a client's daughter as evidence of how intense these relationships are. And we were able to pull out quotes from clients saying:

• "We finally felt understood"

• "They know our business as well as we do"

• "They anticipate our needs because they are one of us."

We are turning these parts of the post-sale experience into things that are able to be leveraged in the sales experience. It's really different when you think about what your clients actually get vs what you are trying to sell.

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This is all part of vibe, vision, and values.

Over the past few weeks, I've talked a lot about vibes, vision, and values and how exposing those and celebrating those are the differentiations that matter to people in the market. Think of foreshadowing and previewing as elements of that.That can take the good stuff and sometimes the hard stuff and turn it into something that is known, addressed, and maybe even maximized in terms of its impact before somebody even gets close to signing a contract, so that there are no surprises.

What are the things that you need to preview?

Before you jump in and say "our results" or something else obvious, I want you to think carefully about the non-tangible things. What are the emotional responses you get? What are the process blocks you run into with your clients? What are the pieces that maybe aren't core to your value proposition? Or perhaps more accurately, you don't realize are core to your value proposition?

A long time ago, another agency that I worked with had an annual event for their clients. It was very inclusive, invite-only, very intimate, they brought in fantastic speakers. And this was not something that they sold as a benefit of being a client, it was only something that clients got to be a part of after they were clients.This agency was able to pull in serious folks from Meta, Google, and Adobe. So a real benefit of working with this agent was the opportunity to get some face time with the people who operate the platforms that your business depends on.But they didn't preview that. They certainly talked about it while it happened, but it was never part of their "this is a reason why you ought to work with us" approach. And it's not because they didn't understand the value of it. They did. They didn't understand that they could preview something that would create desire.

The agency with the intense onboarding process that attracts people who are ready to rock. That attracts people who are ready to jump in with both feet, get moving, and do the work.

The agency with the amazing customer experience that attracts people who are grateful to be heard. It attracts people who are desperate to be understood. It attracts people who understand that the agency-client relationship is just that: a relationship of equals deserving of respect and investment.

What are the things that you need to preview?

How would you like to be a beta tester of my new AI sales call coach?

This is still in beta (or maybe even alpha). I don't know. I've been banging away at it for quite a while. And I really think that my Sales OS Call Lab is something of real value. I would love for you to give it a shot - just to try it out. It's free. I'm not going to spam you. I'm not going to try to put the hard sell on you.

But I do want to give you great feedback on sales calls that you have recorded because you're going to have to paste a transcript in. It's going to give you feedback from multiple different sales frameworks: SPIN, Challenger, Gap. And it's going to tell you the moments that you need to hold on to and the things you need to avoid. I would love your feedback on it.

I’d love to know if you find it useful.

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