Every agency owner says "we get clients from referrals, mostly" — but referrals aren't a strategy. In this solocast, I walk through seven distinct GTM motions an agency can run, what each costs, where each breaks, and how to pick the two or three that fit your stage.
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Chris DuBois 0:01
Hey, everyone. Solocast for you. Every agency owner I talk to says the same thing. We get clients from referrals, mostly, but we know we need to do more. The problem is that do more isn't a strategy, and nobody ever laid out all of the actual options. So that's exactly what I'm going to do today. In this episode, I cover why referrals are great but terrible. As a primary pipeline builder, the seven go to market motions, how to choose your portfolio based on revenue stage and more. Lead Gen is the hardest part of running an agency. For most it's unpredictable, it's slow and it's usually expensive. GF flips that. It's the all in one growth platform that turns your existing relationships and client work into a steady pipeline. Gia automates lead gen follow up and content, and it's all from the work you're already doing. You can check it out and get some free bonuses at get gia.ai/dynamic agency, and now let's talk go to market motions. It's easier than ever to start an agency, but it's only getting harder to stand out and keep it alive. Join me as we explore the strategies agencies are using today to secure a better tomorrow. This is agency forward. You all right, as you've already heard in the intro, right? The question that I ask almost every agency owner, so how do you get clients? And they almost always say referrals, and then they know that they need to do more in order to get those referrals, but they don't actually know what do more means, because referrals are often they're happening because of happenstance, right? And so they're going to try, usually, like they just pick one thing, right? Maybe they're going to post on LinkedIn, they're going to go to a networking event, they're going to launch cold emails, and then when that doesn't produce my client within 30 days, they just stop, and then they go back to waiting for referrals. So the real issue here isn't isn't the effort, it's that nobody has ever laid out the actual options and given them like a menu to look at all the various things that they can do. So that's what I want to do with this episode, is give you this menu right there. I believe there are seven distinct go to market motions that an agency can run. And I want to just show you, let's just talk through what can each look like in practice? What? What do they cost, right? Versus time versus money? Like just complete resources? Which ones work at what stage like if you're a smaller agency, what is it? What should you be leaning on, versus if you're a bigger agency? And then we'll get into like, a framework for just choosing the right ones for you. I think the thing that I see a lot of agencies getting wrong about their go to market is that they think they need to find, like, the motion, right, just this one, like silver bullet, that that's going to help them, like, achieve all of their hopes and dreams, when, in reality, it's like, you probably need two or three different motions that kind of work together, right? And you're creating your own marketing system for yourself. Okay? So let's figure out what this looks like for you. But before I run through, like, all of those seven, let's, let's just talk about why most agencies get stuck on on one motion, and why. And I don't even know that I would call this emotion specifically, but this one's always referrals, right? All right. Cat's out of the bag. Bum, bum. It. Referrals are probably the most natural go to market motion for a service business, because if you do good work, right, your client will tell someone, so that someone will call you. It feels organic. It like it feels like you earn something, right, and it requires zero marketing infrastructure, like there's no landing page, no email sequence, no CRM, right? It's just a phone and a reputation. The problem is that referrals have like, three characteristics I think that make them terrible as your primary pipeline builder. First, they're unpredictable, right? You can't forecast referrals. It's like, you can't tell your accountant, like, well, we're expecting four referrals in q2 right? They show up when they show up, which means your revenue graph looks like this, heart rate monitor during a horror movie, right? It's just like bouncing all around. And yes, I understand all marketing can appear this way, right? But data from referrals has way too many different variables, so I can, like more likely, predict what will come from ads or outreach or even inbound engagements than I can from referrals. Right? Like, I know if I have this input, I will get this output, but I can so I can do more content, I can do more ads, and I should be able to assume certain metrics that are the same. But with referrals, it's like, what do I do more of? Just get more. Clients like, because even that doesn't necessarily work, because if that client doesn't have someone to refer me, then it doesn't matter, right? Now, too, they're unscalable. Referrals are like a function of of how many active clients you have and how often those clients talk to people, right? So exactly what I was just saying, right? Both of those numbers have a they have, like, a ceiling, and I think that ceiling is a lot lower than people believe. Where you're like, oh, I can get 10 referrals from this one person, like, yeah, maybe if they're doing a ton of networking, and they really like you, and they're thinking about it all of the time, but that's not usually the case. You might get one or two referrals from someone, and then over time, that can keep growing, but like, you're not going to get a lot. Now, I think you can be proactive in referral generation. I strongly recommend that you are proactive in referral generation. But the way that most people, most agencies, are handling referrals is they're just not scalable, right? And they can only scale if you're taking on more clients, all right. Number three, they train you to be passive. This is, I think, a sneaky one, because when you're when your best clients come to you like without you needing to lift a finger, right, your brain learns that marketing yourself is unnecessary, and so you never actually build, like the muscle to bring in clients, right? And then referrals slow down, because they always slow down. And then you don't have something as like a backup. And so even, like when we talk to your sales process, right, like you might think you crush it at sales, but if all of your business has been referrals, like the Trust has already been established, right? That third party gave it to you, and so you're giving grace within everything. And so as soon as you start trying to sell cold to a new audience, your your win rate just gonna plummet. Okay, so what's the alternative here? Right? I don't think it's to replace referrals, right? They're great. I think you should keep them. The alternative is to build one or two additional motions that actually work alongside referrals, so you have a pipeline you can actually control. All right, here are seven. So I'm going to walk you through each one, basically with like, the same structure. I'm going through my notes here, the same notes that I use when trying to figure out what motions a client should be using, but we're going to talk through like what it looks like, or for what it is, that would probably be a great place to start right. Then what it looks like, what it costs, who it works for, and then where it breaks. This way, you can at least have the information to go through this for yourself, figure out which one works, which one's best. But we're going to start with outbound prospecting, because this is honestly where most people should start for their business. So what is it? You go find the client, right? Whether it's cold email, cold calling, LinkedIn outreach, like even direct mail, right? You basically find a list, you write the message, send it, and then you got a lot of follow ups for an agency, right? This looks like you building a list of like 200 companies in your ICP, then write a sequence of three to five emails, and then just keep sending like 50 a week, right? Follow up book calls, and you just keep running this every month. Now, generally, this won't cost anything. It's mostly your time that you're going to spend. But if you need to buy a list or you got to pay for like your email tool, then obviously those are some costs. There are some free ways that you can you can do that. I won't necessarily get into them today, but, but there are options.
Chris DuBois 8:42
I think the real cost is, like the emotional weight of rejection. And actually it's probably not even rejection. It's more like you're going to be ignored, right? You probably won't even get a response from most of the people doing this. And so if you're okay with that, awesome. This is great if you're putting your team on it, make sure that they have that fortitude to be able to to grind through that piece. Because it will. It does get through a lot of people, right? They say, I sent this many messages. Nobody cared. Now, if you have tight positioning and a specific offer, right? So like you can say, we solve the problem of x for y, and here are results. Your outbound can work. It will be more effective if your positioning is something around, like being a full service marketing agency right. Cold emails are going to sound like everybody else in the inbox, and so you're going to get just treated like everybody else in the inbox. Now this breaks at the trust gap. You're starting every conversation here at zero, and so like, the prospect doesn't know you, they didn't, they didn't ask for you, right? Otherwise they would have gone to probably seek you out. And there is a chance every now and then that you hit land in the right person's inbox at the right time. That's how. Happened to me where someone would send a cold message. I usually don't even open them, and here I saw it. I'm like, Oh, that is actually something I was thinking about. So I jump on a call that could work. Those are awesome. But for most people have been trained right to just like to ignore their cold outreach messages, everything in there, because they're just going to keep getting harassed. But for you, the math can work, because, like, one client from 500 emails is still a client. And so it's just, it's a grind to get and it scales very linearly, right? There is no like compounding here. It's more pipeline requires you, like, doing proportionally more outreach. So that could be an option. So outbound prospecting, motion one, motion two is content and owned media. All right? What is it? Basically, you just consistently publish content, whether it's blog post, newsletter, podcast, YouTube channel, right? Just SEO. You're doing this to attract your ideal clients and build like an audience that you have some control over. Some of this is discovery driven, so it's like someone Google's a problem and they find your article. Some of it is also subscription driven, and so they opt into your newsletter so that they can hear from you, like continuously, right? Or they subscribe to your podcast. Both are the same motion they're creating value that, like over time, will continue to compound. So for what this could look like for you, right? You launch a weekly newsletter or publish blog posts targeting really like the questions that people are googling, that they're asking. Ai, you could start a podcast interviewing people that your clients respect, so they already have some of that attention. Let's see. You can build a YouTube channel that like, where you're talking specifically about solving that specific problem that you solve. But regard like, I think the format probably matters way less than the consistency. I mean, you do need to be creating content where your audience shows up and stuff, so figure that piece out, but, but you just got to stay consistent with this, because it's going to take a while, honestly. So what it costs, right? It's a massive time investment with a long, long payback window newsletter. It can take you, like, two to four hours a week, if you want to write, like a really good one podcast, can take more SEO. I mean, it could be six to 12 months before any traffic converts. Okay, but the audience is building slowly, but it's building and so you're starting from zero, right? Your dollar cost is very low. Like, actually get all this done. It does not cost a lot of money, but the required discipline is immense. Who this works for agencies that are patient, have a genuine point of view and will commit for like, a year, right? Full, transparent it took me about like nine months for my content engine to start bringing in leads, and that was I was publishing a lot like, for a frame of reference, I was doing one podcast, two, sub stack articles, three, SEO articles, a newsletter, and then, usually, like, five ish days of LinkedIn content, and that took about nine months to really get humming. But I'm also getting traffic from from Ai now, like people book on my calendar without me having any idea who they are, right? They're finding me and so, like, it does work, it just it takes a while the let's see All right, where it breaks. It's really the consistency. It's your the timeline is what kills most agencies, because you expect results in weeks, but it can take months, right? And then by Month three, you start saying, Ah, this isn't working. And then you just give up, right? And like the, there's probably some graveyard of abandoned podcasts somewhere, because people aren't seeing any engagement. But the agencies that that don't let it die and they just keep doing it will usually start seeing traffic. One of the variables here is, like, you have to be doing good content, so like, you should really know your audience and make sure you're doing that, but if you're showing up consistently, then you will beat out most of the most of the competition. Okay? Motion three is earned media, so what is it? You appear on other people's platforms, right? You're doing podcast guessing. You're speaking on stages, right? You could write guest articles, okay? But you're essentially borrowing someone else's audience and their credibility. Now, for an agency, this looks like you just pitching yourself on podcasts, right? Go find some industry events and do a pitch there, like see if you can speak on their stage honestly. Just having a picture of you with a microphone on a stage gives you a ton. Ton of credibility. Add that to your website. You can go look at my website, see pictures of me doing it cool the let's see, really the cost is probably just your prep time. Like there's a lot of pitching that goes on here. You got to get really good at pitching so that you don't just show up in the inbox like everybody else. But that's kind of the that's kind of it otherwise, build relationships. Spend all of your time just building strong relationships. I actually don't know if I've ever done a podcast pitch, but I've been on dozens of podcasts, and it's usually because I know the person we've talked we've built up a relationship, and then they invite me on. And so that isn't it's a much longer term approach, but it is another approach. Who this works for agency owners that can, like, if you have a strong point of view, and you can articulate it clearly, right and like, you basically need something useful to say. That's the simplest way to put this, right, if you can, if you can go on stage and either hold a 30 minute conversation with someone, or you can just give some frameworks and talk about stuff with like you're excited, you know it, and it's something that's super valuable for everybody. Right then this, this motion, is incredibly high leverage, okay, but this does require you, or someone else on your team to be the face, which means it doesn't really scale, like past your calendar. It requires, again, clear positioning, like, from, really, from your point of view. But like, if this, I would say, if you really want an exit, and you want that exit soon. This might not be the best approach for you, unless you're finding ways to, like, get the entire team doing this type of content and showing up, so that the your company as a whole gets a credibility, not just individuals like you're you're going to potentially hurt yourself on the sale when you say, hey, the way that we get all of our clients is because I, as the owner, go, go on podcast. Right? Nobody's gonna want to buy a business, especially if they know you're separating from the company with it. But Okay, motion four is paid acquisition, right? Simply, you're buying attention, whether like ads, you can sponsor newsletters, podcasts, just retargeting your website visitors. That one's under use with agencies for some reason, but essentially you're just, you're paying to put yourself in front of your ICP. The this one just costs money. It's going to be way faster to get results, but it will cost dollars. So if you don't have a budget, it's going to be tight. The right, the the other like, the challenge here, right? If you turn it off, the pipeline just stops. And so, for some reason, you, your ad account gets, gets banned for whatever, like that happens on meta. A lot people just wake up and find that their ads have been shut down and they don't have access to their account. You also need to be spending probably, like two to 5k a month to actually learn what works, right? You're not going to do this with, like, spending a couple 100 bucks. You're not going to see what's actually working, because you got to be able to test out different copy, different visuals. And so, yeah, I mean, there's, it's not lost on me that a lot of ad agencies that do run great ads for their clients don't run them for themselves, and understand how, and it does matter if they, if your audience does not shop via ad like if you don't think it's going to be a successful approach, and that's one thing, but usually we can put ads in front of them and get the the desired
Chris DuBois 18:39
result there. So, all right, what this looks like? You know, maybe you're running LinkedIn ads targeting marketing directors and companies in your niche, or you're just sponsoring, like, newsletters so that you're at, you know, your ICP reads, you could boost a podcast episode from someone else, right? There's, like, there's so many different things that you could do here, who it works for, if you have a clear offer and a conversion path that works right then, because then we know we're going to send them to this landing page, they're going to then take this action which is going to lead to this. And you can map all of that out, that that is who this is going to work best for. This again, this breaks, really, in two places. If you underspend, then this will, this will probably not work for you, and then, like, the moment that you stop spending, like, assuming you are spending enough, like everything, the pipeline just goes away, right? And that is a huge problem, because ad costs will only go up, right, especially like in platforms that are bidding, it's like, it will never be cheaper to run the same ad, and so you have to continuously increase. And now you can't get better at, like, your cost per lead over time, so you just get more refined. But like, even that will max out. It's. Some point, and so it's just something to consider. Okay, motion five, your partner ecosystem. I did a full episode on this couple back. You should look up the builder ecosystem if this is something you want to go deeper on. But essentially you're building relationships with like adjacent service providers that share your ideal client. So think referral partnerships, co marketing could be tech partner programs, right? Agency directories, anything like that. Now, for an agency, this looks like you essentially identify 10 companies that serve your ICP but don't compete with you. You should also look at again listen to that podcast episode we should also look at so you should look at the people, the companies, communities, and then any publications, because any of those that have already had the ear of your audience could be beneficial. So build relationships, essentially refer each other. You could do like CO hosting of different marketing, co marketing, co selling, even right, if there's a project they could bring you in on, then you can go in and help with that. Essentially, all this costs is relationship maintenance, which comes into like coffee meetings and check ins. And essentially, you have to be willing to refer business before you've received any. That's a huge one here. Most people want to do partnerships, because the they assume they're going to get business. But it's like, if you have it's a partnership, if you have nothing to contribute back, that person is not going to want to keep sending you business. All right? Who this works for? Someone with clear positioning, right? You're if your ICP is like specific enough, then partner matching is straightforward, because you know exactly which adjacent providers to approach. But you also need, like your partners and anyone in the ecosystem needs to fully understand who you are, so your top of mind when they get a potential lead that comes through right so now you're not only marketing for clarity to your audience, but also to all of these partners, because you need to be like they need to be thinking about you always. Where this breaks is often with the reciprocity. A lot of times people are just not great partners. The reason you're struggling to get leads right now is because you're not, nobody is talking to you. You don't even have bad leads coming in, and so you don't have anyone that you could send to others. And so that that starts to hurt it all right? It was, I think, Episode 94 for the builder ecosystem. So you go check that one out if you like that that motion. But let's move on to motion six, which is community led pets. What is this? You build or participate in the community of your ideal clients, like Slack group membership. You can have, like, regular meetups. I've seen a lot of, like, coffee dates, lunches with like, larger groups and stuff. But instead of broadcasting your content, you're essentially just like facilitating conversations for your agency. You could do Slack community, right for agency, or like for anyone who fits your ideal audience. Within that you could host, like a monthly round table. You're you're just kind of creating space for your ideal clients. Talk to each other, right? But you're the one in the middle facilitating all of this for agencies. I run the dynamic agency community, if you want to check that out, dynamic agency os.com/community, and what there I am trying to just facilitate conversations to help agencies so that they never feel stuck in their business. So like I have other coaches and advisors. So go back to motion five, talking partner and like ecosystem, like I have other coaches in there who can help you with your problems. So that's not just me giving answers. Like, no, I really want to build a community to do this. And so some of the costs, and I've felt some of these, there's, there is a heavy time commitment for like, moderation, facilitation, right? Communities die when nobody's participating. So you need to be present. You need, like, promote the people who are being present. Like, help them out, so you can keep the conversations going. But like, you have to be genuinely, genuinely invested in in helping like your members, right? They need to be successful. So you can't just, like, get them lurking and waiting and stuff for you to respond. You can't be the one lurking for clients, either. But, yeah, you can work that for how you want to run your community. This is great if, if you're like, genuinely interested in being a hub for your niche, right, like you. Want people coming to you for various things, and you love connecting with people, just facilitating those conversations, and then this is going to feel very natural for you. If I would say, if you're doing this purely as a lead gen tactic, you're going to be miserable. It's, it's not going to be great. People are going to smell it immediately and it just it's not going to work out. Now, where this breaks, it's probably the hardest to maintain, because communities require so much energy, right? And that's why people have community managers and stuff, because it's like it is a full time job, they can go very quiet very fast if you don't have someone facilitating things. And so, yeah, it's just you got to stay on top of that. It's also like, the leap from like community member trust you to community member becomes paying client is very indirect, and so you can't really force it without killing trust within the community. Now, Okay, last one, motion seven. Event led, thank you for staying with me. If you're still here, what is this right? Event led, you're hosting events. If anyone has seen me hosting the all in agency Summit, we got another one coming up shortly. But like that's essentially this play. You're gonna host events, whether virtual or in person. You're, you're just bringing your ideal clients together, right? You could be doing workshops, roundtables, summits, right? For an agency, it's like if you, you could host a quarterly workshop for marketing directors at midsize companies, and you just bring them in once a quarter, you just they everyone knows that's coming up, and people will start to show up. And it's going to keep becoming a bigger event as that snowball rolls. Now, mostly for what it costs, like the logistics, for whatever your venue, any promotional spend. Obviously, virtual events are cheaper, but they are harder to make memorable, right? If a person is there in person, is much easier to like, create, I guess those deeper connections. So you're trading the cost for for connection value. I guess the WHO it works for. Like, if you, if you can deliver, like, genuine educational value in a live or virtual setting like this. This is for you, like it's so it's so valuable. Like, for me, it just feels good to know that I've given people information whether they hire me or not. It's just like to know that you are potentially in a better place after coming to one of our events is feels very good for me. And so I will keep running these events as long as I'm still feeling that. But so if you are someone who is also like that, these events are great to be able to run. Now, where it breaks is, like attendance is, is the bottleneck, like, especially if you're in like, a live room, and you can't fill that room, it will feel terrible, right? You're gonna look across and see, like, a couple, a couple filled seats and everything else is vacant. That's not going to feel great for you, but that's okay. It'll, it'll keep growing if you stick with it. And again, theme for like, this entire episode is consistency. But, yeah, I think that's like it does. It also requires just a ton of like effort, promotional effort. Yeah, that's, that's probably the hardest part. So, okay, that was, that was seven. This is a lot of talking for a monolog. So like, if you, if you are still with me, like, again, thank you. If you want more episodes like this, I can keep doing them. It is just a lot of me talking, though.
Chris DuBois 28:38
But the question that I'm sure you're asking, if you are still here, is, like, which one do I pick? The honest answer is, it depends. Which is like the answer everybody hates, right? But I would start with with probably two questions. First, where is your agency in terms of revenue, right? If you're below 500k you need motions that produce pipeline like now yesterday, right above 500k you can start to layer on some of those motions that compound over time. The second question is like, what are you personally willing to do consistently for 12 months? Look, if you can't do the motion like, if you're going to be inconsistent with it, then it's probably worse than a motion that you just never start, because it's going to train the market to ignore you. I I know one person right now that keeps doing different different ideas, and it's like, they just refuse to stick with one. And if they had stuck with their first idea, they would probably have reached that mine or that diamond. You know, the picture I'm referencing this meme, but I'm doing it poorly, where it's like, the guy's mining, and it's like, do you quit now? But he can't see that the diamonds right there. Like couple more pick swings, one of those. But so let's just break these down real quick. If your pipeline is below 500k right when you pipeline now, I would recommend doing something with probably, like an outbound and partner, because the. These motions produce conversations fastest, really like the outbound gives you some control partner. Partnerships give you this borrowed trust, and they neither of them actually require an audience. And since you probably don't have, like, a big audience at this point, that's super helpful, you'll Yeah, for your your outbound it's just gonna be spending a ton of time trying to get in front of the right list for the next year. If you're like 500k to a million, this is where you're starting to build, like a moat. So I would do some like earned media, and then content like owned media, because at this point you're past survival, right? Like you have leads coming in, but you got to build the authority so that this starts to compound. So get on stages, podcasts right certain newsletter layer these on top of whatever's already working like paid. Paid is a great accelerator for this as well, where if you boost the podcast episode, or sponsor a podcast or sponsor like a newsletter, it's going to help you grow your own Hey, I'm in last above 1 million. This is where we are trying to compound, right? We're trying to get some of that exponential growth that we all crave. I would do probably content and own media with some form of community, and then maybe, then lead, and ideally, right? If some of these previous stages are really working for you and, like, use those. Don't, don't stop using something that's working unless there's a valid reason to stop. But for anyways, for this stage, right, you should be you're trying to, like, build an ecosystem around your agency. This way. You got some redundancies packed in here. You got a newsletter community, right? Maybe an annual event. And these motions start creating, like, this gravity, where they're pulling people into your sphere. One, yeah, actually, let's talk one. One, like critical rule, like, there's none of these motions are going to work if you don't have strong positioning, right? You can't just, like, describe who you serve and what you if, if you can't describe who you serve and what you do in one sentence, right? Then all of this is going to fail. I got so frustrated for a second that I just stumbled over my words. The like, your outbound messages are going to be generic, right? They're gonna sound like everybody else. Your content is going to be all over the place. And when you're on a podcast, like, if you don't have a strong point of view, like, no one is going to remember you right? And so you have to have a strong position, then start picking your emotions, something semi separate, but like, I also like breaking out brand and demand here where like brand is the longer term play. Demand is for much shorter term stuff. But when starting like, you might be at 90% demand to get quick pipeline and 10% brand to just like, start growing your audience, right? So maybe it's like you're just spending it on ads. 90% of your marketing is on ads. 10% is like LinkedIn content and maybe a newsletter. Ideally, you're going to get to the point where, like, you're spending 90% on brand, and that's driving enough business, because this way your cost per lead is going to go way down, right? And you just, you don't have to compete with this, like the force growth of ad budgets, right? Ads will never get cheaper for you. And but if so, if so, if you could flip that where it's like, well, I don't need to run ads. I could just do I could reach out to my newsletter, fire this one, one email out, and that gets me more business. That's the ideal. But so now we want to, we're going to talk about how motions stack. Hey, because you, if you're not doing these things, then you're, you're shooting yourself in the foot. Right, earn media. Should feed your content. Right? You go on a podcast, that episode becomes content for your newsletter. Speaking event recording becomes a LinkedIn post series. Right? Like one appearance is should generate, you know, five pieces of content that you didn't have to create from scratch if we want to get consistent like this is where it comes comes from. Your content can feed to the community, right? So, like, your newsletter readers become your community readers or community members. Sorry, your your podcast listeners become your workshop attendees, right? This is what we're aiming for, and then throw paid on on top of all of this to accelerate it, right? Boost the podcast episode. I have boosted podcast episodes that I was a guest on so that more people could potentially hear me. You could sponsor a newsletter, right? And to grow your own like some people are fine with that, and if you, especially if you're talking to adjacent providers, retarget event attendees who didn't actually convert on on whatever your asset was. The agencies that are building like predictable pipeline aren't just running one motion harder than everyone else. They're. The ones who are like they're planning out a couple motions, seeing how they feed each other, and then using those to stay consistent like that. That's the game, right? And that's what predictability looks like. So okay, let's, let's start bringing this one into close. Here challenge for you look at, look at these seven motions like go back through. Listen to it. The be honest about which ones you're running right now, because for most of you, like, you're just doing referrals. And so, like you don't, I didn't even put that on the list, because it's something, it's not something that you run. It just runs itself. And you can, you can use outreach, and some of those other methods do help with this, but, but it's just running itself, and it's only doing it, probably sometimes. And so pick one additional motion, just one that fits your positioning, your personality, your target audience, and your really, your willingness to commit to it for 12 months. Don't pick the one sounds coolest, right? Pick the one that you're actually going to do if you're not sure where to start, right? If you if you have clear positioning, start without them. If you have strong opinions, start with like, content earned media. If you have strong relationships, start with partner. And then, I guess, if you have a budget, and then like, do run ads for everything, but like match, match the motion to what you already have going for you. The goal of all of this is not to replace referrals, right? The goal, excuse me, the goal is to build like a second source of pipeline that you actually control because you want, like one motion that you choose, one motion you commit to, one that that doesn't depend on someone else deciding to mention your name at the right time, right? Okay, that's it. I will see you next week. Hopefully you got something from this. If you did shoot me a note on LinkedIn, let me know what you got, what the value was. If you got any questions, happen to do more content based off what you guys want? You that's the show everyone. You can leave a rating and review, or you can do something that benefits. 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