Are You Cocksure Or Intelligent?

A quote attributed to Bertrand Russell says "The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt." In our line of work as an inbound marketing agency, we meet people from both camps. Let's just say we are selective about who we choose to work with.

Take our advice; if people don't value the work you do, if they hire you to help them and then question your expertise, you don't need to work with them. There's absolutely nothing wrong with saying, "no, this isn't a good match, you'd be better off working with someone else." Life's too short. Save your energy for the right type of clients.

So You're Passionate? That's Nice

I really don't like the much-overused word "passionate". Everyone's passionate these days, but the thing is they're not. Being passionate isn't about saying you're passionate, it's about what you do. Just like the people who tell you they are perfectionists when they are actually just control freaks, perfectionists seldom declare their perfectionism.

When it comes to inbound marketing we live and breathe it. We do that so we can help our clients with their web based lead generation. We're not "passionate" about it, we're immersed in it, we're surrounded by it, we write about it, we speak about it, we do it day in and day out. We sit blogging about it on Saturday evenings, we're obsessed.

So ask yourself this, why would you hire an inbound agency, who live and breathe the attract, engage and convert philosophy, then tell them how to do their job? Intelligent people, you know, the ones racked with self-doubt, don't.

We Get Your Scepticism

One of the hardest things in our line of work is the perceived ethereal nature of what we do. We get your scepticism, we feel your pain. We know it looks like alchemy, we know some practitioners claim to have a special relationship with Google™ (they haven't, none of them) and we know you think we've got some secret sauce to propel your website up the search rankings resulting in tons of web traffic and a steady stream of great leads.

While it's true that we can create a predictable, scalable and reliable web-based lead generation tool for your business, we do that using a blend of your skills and knowledge and ours. While we'd never pretend to be better at your job than you, for this to work you'll need to trust that we're good at what we do. It can be a powerful combination, a beautiful thing.

Are We Sounding A Bit, You Know, Cocksure?

I know to some of you this blog post might seem a bit strange, a bit cocksure. Talking about selecting clients and suggesting that some of the people we speak to are stupid may come across as arrogant. I can assure you we're not. We're actually the archetypal racked with self-doubt types and we worry and fret about the work we do for our clients because we know some of it won't be effective and we actually care. We always do our best but the nature of the beast means sometimes our ideas don't create the results we'd hoped for.

The data doesn't lie, that's the beauty of inbound, all your efforts can be measured. It might be hard to take, but if we don't get you the results we can take another look straight away and use our new knowledge to refine and improve until we get there. You just need to trust us.