TL;DR You built a better deck. Your team out-prepared everyone. The strategy was sharper, and the thinking ran deeper, and you walked out of that conference room genuinely believing you’d nailed it. Then the email came, and you lost to an agency you know, in your bones, was not as good as you. If your …
TL;DR A few months ago, a friend who runs a small creative shop called me, half-embarrassed. “The phone just isn’t ringing the way it used to,” he said. No crisis. No lost talent or anything he could point to as the problem. The work was as good as it had ever been. The referrals had …
TL;DR Positioning problems are the great impostors of agency new business. They almost never announce themselves as positioning problems. They show up wearing other costumes, as a dry pipeline or a prospect who won’t stop pushing on price, and you spend months treating the costume while the thing underneath keeps doing damage. So if your …
TL;DR “Should we niche or stay generalist?” is the wrong question. It frames the decision around what you offer instead of how clearly prospects can choose you. The better question is whether you’re the obvious choice for anyone. You can be a generalist and distinct, or a niche player and forgettable. Generalist positioning tends to …
TL;DR Constant price pushback is rarely about your price. It’s about a missing reason to pay it. A price objection is usually a distinction objection in disguise. When buyers can’t see a difference, cost becomes the only thing left to negotiate. Pricing power doesn’t come from your rate card. It comes from being clearly worth …
If I had a nickel for every conversation I’ve had with an agency owner in the last 90 days where they asked me, “Do you think AI will kill marketing agencies?” I could retire and open a taco truck that serves my world-famous TT’s salsa, fish tacos, and margaritas. AI isn’t going to kill marketing …
TL;DR When your agency’s new business slows down, the question you ask first determines how much money you’re about to waste. Most owners ask “what should I buy to fix this?” The better question, the one that saves you a year and a small fortune, is “what’s actually broken?” If your new business has slowed …
TL;DR Deals that used to close in a month now take three. The prospect goes quiet, resurfaces, asks for another call, wants to see two more case studies, loops in another stakeholder, and the proposal that should have been approved weeks ago just keeps dgragging on. If that’s your pattern, you’re not imagining it, and …
A few weeks ago, Meta confirmed that, as part of their AI adoption strategy, the company is logging employee computer activity, keystrokes, and using screen captures to train AI to use a computer the way a human does. When workers asked if they could opt out, the answer was no. The reaction was exactly what …
TL;DR The call went great. They leaned in and asked smart questions. Somebody said “this is exactly what we’ve been looking for.” You sent the proposal the next day. It was tight, detailed, personalized, and priced right. And then nothing. No reply, no explanation. You followed up once, twice, three times a lady (sorry, had …
TL;DR Finishing second feels different from losing badly, and that difference is a trap. When you get outclassed, you know something was wrong. When you finish second, everyone tells you how close it was, how impressive you were, how it came down to the wire. It feels like validation. So you keep doing the same …