TL;DR

• Revgen is tough, and after working with a bunch of agencies and researching thousands more, I think I have some insight into why.
• The most impactful revgen blocker might be as simple as how agencies describe their prospects.
• The idea that “CMO Melissa’s biggest pain point is SEO” is wrong and hurting your revgen. Melissa doesn't care about SEO.
• This misalignment in messaging between what you THINK your prospects care about and what they REALLY care about kneecaps your revgen efforts before the race even starts.
• To build an effective growth strategy, you first need a crystal clear vision, solid positioning, and detailed growth vectors.
• Zooming in on positioning, you can’t develop messaging pillars until you understand your buying committee’s pain points.
• Your ICP consists of the firmographics describing the type of company you’re targeting.
• It’s important to understand who’s in your group of buyers within each of your target ICPs. This is your “buying committee.”
• The messages your buyers need change based on their relationship with you, so we layer on messaging to each buyer committee member at each ICP based on where they are in their buyer journey.
• Use this refactored messaging to build out the rest of your positioning, it'll be much easier.
• I help digital agency leaders design custom growth strategies that deliver repeatable revgen with reliable margins. If that sounds interesting, let’s chat.

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I'd love to hear what you think about this write-up. Was this valuable? Think I'm way off base? Just wanna say hi? ​Click here and LMK.​ I try to respond to everyone, and I use this feedback to help shape what I focus on. -Nick

Agency Revgen Has Always Been Top-of-mind

Revgen is tough, and after working with a bunch of agencies and researching thousands more, I think I have some insight into why.

I’m working through this year’s State of Digital Services report, and once again, revgen issues top the list of challenges for agency leaders.

1. Lead generation
2. Sales
3. Account retention / growth

Last year, leaders were most concerned about:

1. Sales
2. Leadgen
3. Maintaining or increasing margins

Even in 2022, when everyone was talking about hiring and retention, revgen worries came in a close second place.

I’ve been doing Revgen Reviews with everyone from large (320 FTE) multi-national generalist agencies to tiny 12 FTE hyper-niched specialist shops and a bunch of sizes and shapes in between.

While the most common issue is the lack of a single source of strategic truth, the most impactful one might be as simple as how agencies describe their prospects.

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Melissa Doesn’t Care About SEO

Every agency I’ve worked with has had some kind of Buyer Persona Document that describes various theoretical buyers with things like “CMO Melissa’s biggest pain point is SEO.” (I’m not picking on anyone here. I’ve seen this at least a dozen times)

This is where the cracks start, ultimately undermining your entire growth strategy.

ICPs and buyer personas have become an exercise in futility, akin to a hastily thrown-together SWOT analysis. What began as a good idea has become a waste of time because doing it right is tough.

No CMO’s biggest pain point is SEO.

If it is, then they have serious prioritization issues.

Furthermore, CIO Tony’s biggest fear isn’t a slowly loading web page, and CEO Mike isn't up at night thinking about UX, conversion rates, or progressive web apps.

Understanding what drives someone, what they fear, and what truly keeps them up at night requires actual relationships, conversations, and legitimate insight.

But because it’s tough to view the world from someone else’s perspective, we color these personas with what’s top of mind for us.

If we sell SEO. We think Melissa buys SEO. So, it’s easy for us to toss SEO into the pain points box on our Google doc and move on.

But Melissa isn’t buying SEO.

Melissa is buying trust, or stability, or career mobility. Or any number of things that your services unlock for her.

If you base your messaging on the idea that her biggest pain point is SEO, you’re creating a huge misalignment in what your sales and marketing are communicating and her actual needs.

This misalignment in messaging kneecaps your revgen efforts before the race even starts.

That’s a major point, so I’ll hammer it more in a min, but first, I need to run through what makes up a growth strategy.

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Growth Strategy Components

Vision: At the foundational level, you absolutely need to know what you’re building. What is it you’re creating? Why are you going through this? Create a detailed description of your desired state. That’s your vision. It sounds hokey, but it’s impossible for me to draw a path from where you are today to where you’d like to go if your end state isn’t crystal clear.

Positioning: This section is where you’ll do a bunch of research and make decisions about who you’ll serve, what you’ll do for them, how and where you communicate your value, and what and how you’ll charge them.

Growth Vectors: Moving on to growth vectors: Where will you focus your resources? What kind of activities are necessary to generate the desired amount of net new business? What needs to happen to grow current accounts? And what kind of roles and structure are needed for those activities to be successful?

​🐉 Hic Sunt Dracones: Here, strategy work begins to blend into implementation. We work through the proper structure, review roles and responsibilities, build out a financial model, design a transition/implementation plan, set goals, and determine the appropriate metrics and pivot points.

At a high level, those are the four components of a growth strategy. Let’s take a closer look at the positioning section.

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Zooming In On Positioning

Here, agencies need to cover the following:

• Industries they’ll serve / Ideal Client Profile (ICP)
• Buying committee personas
• Service mix
• Unique value proposition
• Messaging pillars
• Content format
• Channels
• Pricing methods and levels

The order of this list is important.

You can’t price your services if you don’t know what they are. You can’t create effective content until you understand your core messaging pillars. And you can’t develop messaging pillars until you understand your buying committee’s pain points.

This is exactly where the issue of phoning in the pain point descriptions breaks everything and plunges the world into darkness.

If you build your messaging pillars on the idea that CMO Melissa is woken up at night from nightmares about the finer points of SEO when, in reality, she’s been at her current company for 14 months and is actively interviewing with 2 other firms and just needs stability in leadgen through the end of the year, your messaging will be useless.

It won’t matter if you deliver your message via PPC, a newsletter, cold outreach, or a well-orchestrated ABM campaign. The tactics will all be equally useless because the messaging doesn’t resonate.

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Doing ICPs Right

It isn’t exactly easy, but I’ve seen numerous leadership teams accomplish it within a week or two.

Your ICP consists of the firmographics describing the type of company you’re targeting. These can include:

• Size (employees and/or revenue)
• Location
• Industry
• Tech stack
• Budget
• Buying process
• Financial components
• Firm goals

There’s some nuance to this, but you can zero in on this by listing out your past clients, sorting them into similar firmographic buckets, and grading them based on things like the value you delivered, how easy the project was, how profitable the project was, how well you know the space, how easy it is to connect with people in that space, how fast that industry is growing, if that industry’s trends are good or bad for you, etc.

For new industries where you don’t have past clients, it’ll be tougher, but you can use things like interviews, industry reports, industry experts, trade publications, industry events, slack groups, to get an idea about the type of firm you can provide value for.

Doing a good amount of primary and secondary research here will make your ICP descriptions both accurate and useful. This’ll be critical in the next step.

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Doing Personas Right

My audience tends to skew towards larger agencies. Most of you are above 25FTEs and most will sell primarily into upper mid-market clients with some enterprise-level clients mixed in.

With these target audiences, it’s likely that your sales process will need to convince multiple people within an org. before a contract is signed. If you’re selling into small businesses, you’ll typically only need to convince one person.

Therefore, it’s important to understand who’s in your group of buyers within each of your target ICPs. This is your “buying committee.” At a basic level, it’ll include an internal advocate, influencers, and a decision-maker. An example could be a Director of Marketing as the internal advocate, a Director of Sales, CFO, and CEO as influencers, and CMO Melissa as a decision-maker.

You aren’t going to love this next sentence. You need to build out personas for each of them.

Now, they don’t need to be major endeavors, but you need enough insight into each to understand things like their goals, the metrics they’re graded on, where they seek information, who they trust, where they congregate their professional pain points, and personal pain points. This takes work to get right and unfortunately, it’s pretty critical to get it right.

This is where having a solid network becomes a superpower. Staying in touch with members of your target buying committee keeps you continually updated on changes or details that can impact how you communicate and deliver value. This is why I’m always talking about the need for a continuous feedback loop among agency sales, marketing, account management, and leadership teams.

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Adding Another Dimension

Who doesn’t love complexity?

So you have 2-3 ICPs and a buying committee for each. At this point, you should have a solid handle on the messaging that’ll resonate for each. You can plot this across 2 axes in a table.

Each box can then contain the appropriate messaging that corresponds to the specific persona at a certain ICP.

This is farther than most shops get, so everything beyond this is icing on the messaging cake!

There’s an issue, though. The message each individual needs to hear changes based on their relationship with you. A “Contact Us” button won’t work if they've never heard of you, and flashy intro ads won't help a stalled deal cross the finish line. Right time, right message, right place.

To solve for this, let’s add a third axis. Something that corresponds to where everyone is in the buying process. We’ll keep it simple and use AIDA here, but feel free to use your favorite model.

Now, each "point" will contain the appropriate messaging that corresponds to the specific buyer committee persona at a certain ICP who is ALSO at a specific stage in the buyer journey.

Not everyone’s going to need content at each stage. You don’t need to worry about Attention with the Influencers or the Decision Maker since the Internal Advocate will handle that for you, though the more help you can provide your advocate, the better.

You will need to develop content for the Influencers that stokes Interest and Desire (or whatever your chosen model says). These can be things like:

• Integration guides for COOs
• Access to tech experts for CIOs
• ROI calculators for CFOs.

You’ll also need Action-geared content for Decision makers, things like executive summaries of case studies and ROI calculator outputs.

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Congratulations!

You’ve solved the hard part.

That huge misalignment is gone. The Melissas of the world can rejoice now that they're no longer bombarded with ineffective messaging. The rest of your buying committee will be equally thrilled. Ok, maybe not thrilled, but maybe they'll be just a bit more likely to reply to your newsletter.

Identifying the patterns in your ICPs and personas makes positioning pretty easy. Your teams know who they’re selling to, the value they're delivering, how to communicate, where prospects get information, and how they buy. This simplifies figuring out your service mix, unique value proposition, content format selection, channel focus, and pricing methods and levels.

Obviously, there’s more to a full-fledged growth strategy, but dialing in your ICPs and personas is a huge step forward.

I help digital agency leaders design custom growth strategies that deliver repeatable revgen with reliable margins. If that sounds interesting, let’s chat.

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