Here is the AI trap I see agencies fall into - they use AI to automate existing processes rather than build processes around what AI can do better.
Cold outreach is a great example - "personalizing" an email is a way to say "I did some research on you."
It doesn't really add any value to have AI say "Hey - I noticed that thing you did!" The prospect already KNOWS that stuff.
It doesn't really add value to take meaningless personalization and scale it to tens or hundreds of thousands of unwilling recipients.
What could you do with AI that's better than using some bullshit personalization?
Maybe:
1. You could use AI to take your list of potentials and cull any that don't have a certain number of real similarities to your best clients...so instead of sending more spam, you send better fit outreach.
2. You could use AI to pull out all market needs from your sales calls and find evidence of those market needs in a prospects...again, using AI to send fewer, not more, emails.
3. You could use AI to create a prospect specific landing page that shows the connection between that specific prospect and your service...
There are so many more interesting and high-impact things you can do with AI, rather than just use all of this power to scale shitty, undifferentiated crap
The biggest unlock in business isn’t another system, strategy, or framework.
It’s understanding yourself.
What am I genuinely good at?
What am I confident doing?
What am I willing to tolerate?
And just as importantly what simply isn’t right for me?
You start recognizing "this is something my business would do" and maybe more importantly "this is something it wouldn’t."
The yield you get from alignment is what I call ROU - Return on Understanding.
Because the better you understand yourself, the easier it becomes to build a business that
actually fits who you are instead of constantly forcing yourself into someone else’s model.
I went deeper into this idea in my conversation with Jaime Ellithorpe of @https://www.linkedin.com/company/540-strategies/
Full podcast below hear the whole conversation.
An agency I coach built a multi-7-figure ecommerce business for their client from scratch.
Last month the client CEO emailed - she was shutting it down.
Why? Her dashboard said traffic down & sales not growing. A failed experiment in her mind.
What her dashboard didn't say - margins up, conversion up, AOV up, $1.3M in annual profit and accelerating.
The agency knew all of it. It just wasn't in the weekly report.
Selling opportunity is easy. You show the future, the client imagines it, they run toward it.
Proving value is the work that shows your impact. Your client has forgotten every decision you've made and every adjustment you created. If you don't tell that story, your work is nothing by a number on a report.
Do the work
I hired a salesperson, talked at him for two hours, handed him a PowerPoint and unlimited minutes on his cell phone.
In 4 months, he didn't close a deal. I decided he sucked.
He didn't suck.
He said he did not have my stories or context in his head, and he was right.
I sucked at building a sales process he could succeed with...
A sales process is not an SOP with a CRM taped to it, it is your agency lore.
Learn to make sales an agency function that you can manage.
Stop delivering and your client screams today.
Stop paying taxes and the IRS screams eventually.
Stop marketing and absolutely nothing happens, which is the terrifying part.
My agency went quiet for ten weeks once, and my CAC went from $3,800 to $10K!
Only 21 percent of agencies have anyone marketing the agency, and only 14 percent report a healthy pipeline. That is not a coincidence.
You've got to create a visibility function in your agency.
Dig in via the bio.
When shit hits the fan, sometimes you, the intrepid agency leader, jumps into a client call saves the day! You feel like a hero.
You also just taught your client to escalate past your account manager forever.
You aren't a hero who saves your agency, you are more like the composer of the symphony that is your agency. And composers don't hum a melody and hope that the orchestra remembers it. The create a score & an arrangement, and then let the players play.
In this case, the players are your team...learn to be the composer, not the 1st violinist.
Read the whole thing.
They say revenue is vanity and profit is sanity.
The way to get sane is one flipped equation.
Instead of running your biz from this formula:
(Revenue-expenses) = Profit
Run your agency from this better formula:
(Sales - Profit) = Expenses you can afford.
Your job as the agency CEO isn't making money, it's allocating it.
Admin Hell
Sucking really hard at admin & delegation killed my first agency, not the market.
The Eisenhower Matrix is a great management tool to help you prioritize what matters.
The Kilroy Matrix tells you if you (as the CEO) should even touch it.
RACI turns the whole mess into a function somebody else can run.
You are the architect, not the builder.
Link in bio.
"Never mind, I'll do it."
Those five words have killed more agency growth than any recession. I learned the fix from my brother-in-law, who runs a box factory. He taught me that your output is somebody else's input, and that you fix the line at the loading dock, not at the end. Your team does not need more instructions, they need context. Great chefs do not hover over the mirepoix. They teach what good looks like, then they let the kitchen cook. Read the whole thing in the bio.
CEO does not stand for Chores, Everyday tasks and Overwhelming to-do lists.
If you are doing grunt work where you add no CEO-level value, you aren't running your agency, you are working at it.
Just think - the CEO of your bank doesn't make change for a $20 at the teller window. They could...but that isn't their job!
Agency activities that get done by the team are deliverables and invoices and client calls.
Agency business functions that CEOs MANAGE are delivery, account management, sales, marketing and admin.
Read the full issue. Link in bio or below.
"I hate selling" is the biggest pile of BS in your agency. Every single person in your agency is already selling something every day.
Leadership sells vision and standards to the team. Biz dev sells insight and trust to prospects. Account management sells growth and market patterns to clients. Creative sells understanding and magic to everyone in the room. Delivery sells surety and accuracy to account management and clients. Tech sells efficiency and robustness to... basically everybody.
What they won't sell is something they don't believe in.
So if your team isn't selling their own work, their own value & the value of your team and agency to anyone who will listen, you've got some shit to fix:
Does your analytics team trust the data they're presenting? If not, WTF are you doing to fix that?
Does your account manager believe they have the authority to challenge a client and lead them somewhere better? Or have you made client retention so sacred that the right move is always to shut up and nod?
Does your creative team believe that what they make actually matters to the client's business? Or do they suspect it gets approved and forgotten?
Build your team and your resources so everybody is TOTALLY FUCKING CONFIDENT of the thing they have to sell. That's your big job as an agency leader.
DEMANDOS AGENCY WEBSITE REWRITE OF THE DAY
AGENCY: Award-winning 6 year old ecom agency. They seem to be VERY good at what they do - "Partner of the Year" and that sort of stuff from a VERY big platform.
CURRENT HEADLINE:
YOUR E-COMMERCE MARKETING PARTNER
Ugh - this is as exciting as oatmeal. It's good that they let you know they do e-commerce, but I would guess that out of the 71,000 marketing agencies in the US, at least 48K of them could say the same thing.
CURRENT SUBHEAD:
As an extension of your team, we develop and execute custom marketing
strategies that scale digital brands.
We are reaching maximum density for words that sound like YAFA (Yet Another Fucking Agency)
PLUS MORE PASTY COPY:
→ "data-backed strategy and full-service, expert execution" (strategy sounds Harvard Business School smart, right?)
→ "Strategy-Driven Decision Making" (yay, more strategy! are there vibes-driven strategies? asking for a friend...)
→ "we deliver results driven by strategy" (ah, strategic results - must be a relative of strategy-driven decisions, obvi)
→ "game-changing e-commerce marketing services" (thank gawd we are changing the game & not saying strategy again)
You know what's cuckoo? They've driven $100mm in client revenue. They deliver big but sound EXACTLY like everyone else.
Here is the DemandOS rewrite:
HEADLINE:
100 MILLION REASONS TO PICK [AGENCY NAME]
SUBHEADER:
We've driven $100m in revenue growth for our clients. That's not an accident. Rapid, profitable growth isn't just doubling down on one channel; it's about knowing how your brand makes money. We work across channels - web development, SEO, paid media, marketplaces & more - to deploy the smarts learned & earned from working with 250+ ecommerce brands.
Want to be part of the next $100m? Get in touch.
What do you think about the DemandOS Rewrite of the Day?
