# Interview A05: content agency, 11 staff
Participant: founder and managing director. Interviewer: our co-founder. 34 minutes, lightly edited.

**Interviewer:** Where did your last five clients come from?

**Participant:** Let me think. Two were old clients coming back: one had changed jobs and brought us into her new company. Two were introductions, one from a web agency we partner with and one from a client's CFO who'd seen our work. The fifth found us through a talk I gave at a SaaS marketing meetup. So none of them from anything you'd call outbound.

**Interviewer:** You mentioned you'd tried outbound before.

**Participant:** Yes, about eighteen months ago. We paid a lead-gen agency to run cold email for us. Twelve hundred pounds a month, I think. They booked meetings, I'll give them that, maybe six or seven a month. But the people on those calls had no idea who we were and, honestly, most of them didn't have a budget for content. The ones who did wanted to see that we'd written for companies exactly like theirs, in their niche, before they'd even talk price. We stopped after two months. We didn't close anything from it.

**Interviewer:** What was different about the clients who came through introductions?

**Participant:** They'd already been told we were good. That's the whole thing, really. Content is a trust purchase: you're letting someone write in your company's voice. When the CFO introduced us, the first call was about scope, not about whether we were any good. The sales cycle's still six or eight weeks, but it's a different conversation.

**Interviewer:** How steady is new business across the year?

**Participant:** Not steady at all. Feast or famine. Last spring we had three clients end in the same month, two budget cuts and one acquisition, and I spent April panicking.

**Interviewer:** What did you do?

**Participant:** I went through our old client list and emailed everyone who'd worked with us in the last three years. Just a personal note: what are you working on, anything we can help with. Two of them came back within a month. I should do that every quarter and I never do, because when we're busy I don't think about it and when we're quiet it's already too late.

**Interviewer:** If a tool could do outbound for you, finding prospects and writing personalised emails, would you use it?

**Participant:** Cold? Probably not. I'd worry about our name going out on emails I haven't read, and the maths didn't work last time. Now, something that reminded me to keep in touch with past clients and the people who've referred us, and drafted those notes so they sound like me? I'd pay for that tomorrow. That's where our work actually comes from.

**Interviewer:** What would you pay?

**Participant:** For that? A couple of hundred a month without thinking. Six hundred for cold outbound, no.