Day 0 of Building A B2B Growth Agency in Public
What Kind of Marketing Agency / Business Do We Want To Be
Non-Coercive, 100% Intent + Interest Based
That picture represents how we envision our clients and team conversations
Long Post Alert; Here’s the TL;DR version
- Marketing is broken, coercive, and leaves customers, agencies, and clients unsatisfied, and wanting more in the end
- You can (and I will) build a business by creating a community of friends while sharing knowledge, ideas, and sometimes, money.
- We will do it because we want to build a thriving and fulfilling life, and not just a profitable company/business.
- We are going to create a no-push-sales-team-consultative-only agency for the next 100 days, and report on our progress daily.
- We will let our customers decide and let us know when they are ready to buy from us.
- Until then, we will share knowledge, ideas, and stories with them.
- Join our journey, for daily progress updates, and follow us along on our path to freedom from the shackles of shady marketing.
Let me start this post with a little bit of a rant. But first a disclaimer.
This post isn’t meant to shame any one company or an individual in particular. If your audience buys from you with shady underhanded pushy artificial scarcity tactics, then all the power to you in the world.
As for me, this is meant to lay the foundation for what’s about to come in the next 100 days.
Curious already? Well, read on then!
I’m sick of the marketers on Twitter, TikTok, and LinkedIn.
Almost everything I see now is a thinly (most often not so thin, really) veiled “like me & buy from me” post, written to convince the reader to buy, to move them further along the funnel, pushing them towards your end goal, which is to make a sale.
Following the narrative of “listen to me because I’ve discovered this cool little hack that prints money while you sleep”, just to draw your attention.
I get it. Attention is scarce. We all want it.
I recently read an article, that suggested for the first time in history, the human attention span is less than that of a goldfish.
Maybe it’s true, maybe not. But that’s not the point here.
Attention can be had without the hacks and the tricks.
If only the marketers would begin to offer some real value. And real connection. And real relationships.
That aren’t based on transactions.
That are based on a vision for the collective future growth of the two businesses, together.
What do you mean, by real value?
A vast majority of content, that you see today about marketing, is regurgitated hacks, with almost non-existent thought ownership.
Think about it, the entire system now almost exists in an echo chamber, of its own making.
And then, of course, there are gazillions of articles teaching “objection handling” for salespeople — How to sell when the prospect is not interested.
There are coaches, that teach you how to handle an objection when someone says I’ll need to speak with my wife, my partners, my colleagues, anything.
There’s an answer to that objection.
It sucks, but it’s there, and they push it.
Until the prospect (at least some) can’t object anymore.
For the most part, you’ve either shamed them into a “yes” or you have just pushed a product down their throat that they didn’t need.
I want to repeat the rant here.
I’m sick of the marketers on Twitter, TikTok, and LinkedIn.
Business is not meant to be run like this.
Yeah I get it, we’re all gunning for changing lives, and make a dent in the universe, but really, are we?
Business is meant to be driven by a purpose.
As Peter Drucker has suggested —
The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer.
In my opinion, Peter Drucker is the smartest management thinker of our time.
He not only looked at the business as an entity to create profits, but he placed an equal (if not more) importance on the responsibility of a business towards the community as a whole.
I posit that the only purpose of a business (and that of marketing) should be to genuinely help a customer achieve their goals.
At their own timeline.
To help them achieve their purpose.
And build a community in the process.
Of individuals that help each other.
Grow together.
As humans, we’re a communal species.
Our evolution into bipedalism meant we had to give birth way too early, and therefore, it took (quite literally) a village to bring up our young.
So, the fabric of the community is inherently planted in our DNA.
But we, as marketers, have taken the easy road to riches, and have made a whole ecosystem around hacks, tricks, tips, and tactics — that has led us to the worst imaginable situation.
Use the customer as a means to an end
Not the end, but as a means to an end.
Read that again. We have started to treat customers as a means to an end.
And this leads to perpetual dissatisfaction, the quest for wanting more because neither the customer nor the marketers are satisfied with “the transactional nature” of the relationship.
Remember, what Peter Drucker said.
The purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer.
I’m taking my first step toward change
In my experience of running an agency/services business for over twenty years, if there is one thing I’ve learned it is that the customer value equation looks something like this.
Customer + Their Priorities + Their Results = Your Lifetime Business
You remove anything from this equation and your business is doomed to fail.
I’ve seen this firsthand, many times over.
And with our new agency manifesto for 2023, I am going to change that.
And I will hold myself, and my team accountable to extremely high standards.
By building a business in public.
A business that treats customers as friends, who get the best advice from us, no matter if it means that they should buy from a competitor of ours.
We will not indulge in coercive marketing tactics, period.
Not for our business, not for our client’s businesses.
We will lay it all out in the open.
What we know, what we do, what we can learn, and what we cannot do.
We will inform the customers, we will educate the customers, and we will leave it at that.
We will place our trust in our customers’ ability to choose.
At their own timeline. When they’re ready. When they’re happy.
We will treat every customer as the end, and not the means to an end.
The end goal of our agency will be to create, keep, and grow as an extension of our customers.
We will place a premium on:
- Developing Intelligent Thought
- Sharing Interesting Ideas
- Playing The Long Game
Over the next few days and weeks, I will write detailed explanations for what each of these means, and how we are going to execute them.
In a nutshell, know this.
We are going to make it “personal” as it is to us.
How we see the business, the customers, and the journey they take, and how it’s different from how anyone else sees it.
It’s a radical shift from the traditional outside-in model that we have been trained for all our lives.
Find an idea that has demand in the market, find that market, find a team to take your idea to the market, execute it, and create a big juicy profitable company.
All that is dandy, but it leaves one important component out of the equation.
You
At the end of the day, where does that leave you?
Are you fulfilled with your achievements, your potential, and your place in society?
If you are, I tip my hat to you, but you’re not my kind of people.
No offense, but it’s not who or what I am after, with my agency.
I’m after a personally fulfilling life.
What I want to do with my own business, and what I will feel content doing in my days as I turn 50 next year.
The Shift to A Way Of Inside-Out Thinking
For the past 3 years, I have struggled with the demons of walking away from a 7-figure agency.
An agency that was selling shitty financial advice for 300+ clients to over a million email subscribers.
And I just walked away in a day. Not quite literally, but one day we were there, and then the next day, we weren’t.
When I started the company, my compass for running my business was simple.
If I can come home and tell my daughter, what I did for a living that day, I’ve done an honest day’s work.
Somewhere along the road, lines started to blur, and I rationalized what we were selling with insane justification (more on that another day).
While researching content for my weekly newsletter at Inbound Marketing Labs (the agency we’re talking about, duh!) I found the writings of Rob at Ungated Media and it blew my mind.
Rob makes some very interesting observations, and in all honesty, has been a catalyst for my decision, and this blog post.
I have been meaning to tread that exact same path for as long as I can remember, but never had the motivation to out myself like this.
In a way, Rob has been there, done that, and this gives me hope.
And courage, most importantly.
What’s my motivation for doing it this way?
My motivation is multi-dimensional at this point.
- To build a business that creates a legacy.
- To enjoy what I do on a daily basis
- To make lifetime friends
How are we going to achieve this?
By creating a team that places a premium on learning, planning, executing, measuring, and optimizing the hell out of a customer’s business.
Like there’s no tomorrow.
A system of execution and delivery that is based on solid knowledge.
Deep topical knowledge of the areas of marketing we care about.
Marketing that matters to our customers’ business.
Marketing that matters to you.
Marketing that delivers long-term intrinsic value to your business.
Marketing that looks, feels and works like an investment, and not a recurring expense.
Something that makes everyone that comes into contact with, joyful.
There is enough scarcity mindset in the world, and I don’t want to accentuate it further by building yet another set of hacks, tips, and tricks.
We will create content that acts as a signal in the clutter of noise.
We will help our customers create content that acts as a beacon of light in their industry.
Shining light on topics that their customers care about.
And create lifelong relationships in the process.
So, follow along this crazy wild ride, and see how business can be done without being “sales-y” because deep down, you hate these push tactics too.