 I like decisive action. Okay, so, hey, hello, and what, is this being recorded so we actually need to be good about using the mic, is that correct? Okay, all right, so. Wow, welcome to DrupalCon in person. The first day I was here, I just sort of had goose bumps and I have been really worried that you can never come home, right? And this week has proven that the community's still here and you're all still here and I'm really, really, really thrilled to be here. And first of all, I would like to know how many of you work or own, work in or own an agency? Okay, and it's easier to say, who doesn't work in an agency here? What are you doing here? What? So, great. And how many of you sell or market or communicate the value of what your agency does? Okay, cool, these are our people, these are our people. Right, so we have a thing that we call your agency house and it's a content, it's a way to think about your content on your website and wherever else you do content to help your business. And I wanna talk you through that, I wanna show you how we think about that. First off, I would really, really like to tell you who we are so that you have some context for that. So the most important part about who we are is Tracy. This is Tracy Evans, yes? So, and as you can tell, well, you can tell half of the story. First of all, she's the brains behind the operation and as you can tell, I'm the pretty one, okay? Now, and I want to say about our presentation style, I have done this a lot and I do this a lot and I do a lot of podcasts and interviews and so on. And Tracy hasn't done it very much and I talk with people every day about this stuff while she's busy having the amazing ideas. So, she's gonna talk some today but if you have questions for us after whatever, please, she's really, really honestly, this is our thing, this is our ideas and Tracy's honestly one of the very smartest people I know. I just talk more, okay? And I might forget. We had this conversation already this morning. So, we founded Open Strategy Partners, that's our mascot, the OSP. We founded Open, nobody? The OSP? Nothing, okay. We founded Open Strategy Partners in 2017 as a combination of my thinking about communications, technology marketing and developer relations, essentially, coming out of my experience growing with Acquia, where I was the 18th employee and having thousands of conversations with people like you. Tracy has three business degrees, including an MBA and she's managed everything from digital startups to international enterprise teams and she has all of the knowledge and education. I had all of the beers with you. So, we came up with this idea that technology marketing sometimes falls down because marketers are afraid to look stupid and so they're afraid to ask questions because they think the developers are really smart and I learned in my time that if you ask a developer what she does, she will tell you all day what she does and she'll help you as long as it takes to put out information that's meaningful and correct. So, we've put together an agency that does communication strategy and content production for agencies, technical product companies and open source projects and we're having fun doing it. We've been at it five years. Our team is plus, minus 10 people right now and we also do this, so what we're talking about today is kind of if you offer services, this is how we think about packaging, talking about yourself. We also do this slightly differently for product companies, slightly differently for open source projects and so on. Fundamentally, right? We need to make money. We need to convince people to give us money to do a thing and the outcome is completely uncertain if we're offering services. I'm promising you to do something. So, every sale that we do is a trust sale. So, you need to make your website your best sales tool so you need to build trust with it and your website is your sales person who's 24 hours online. It's always available. It needs to be doing that job and with the money and time you invested in it. So, we're gonna talk about that. We're gonna talk about the Are You My Agency? A bedtime book? How you help yourself sell and help people decide to go with you? Exactly how to build your agency house a little bit how we think about content and the newest piece of our content model which is the front door of your agency house. So, business words, business words, numbers, numbers, business. You need people to identify with what they see on your website. Believe that you understand them and their business and that you can help them, right? And then you can close with them. Then you can make friends with them. Then you can do business with them. Also, business words, right? But when it comes to bedtime stories, who remembers this book? No? Yes? I love this book as a kid. Are You My Mother? Are You My Mother? This chick hatches while his mother's away getting food. He, she, I don't know, it's a chick. And hatches, falls out, goes around asking all these different animals and a steam shovel. Are You My Mother? Are You My Mother? And then eventually ends up back with its mother. It's super cute. It's super, super, super cute. So, our bedtime story is, are you my agency? Right? Are you my agency? What do you do? Do I even need what you do? How do you work? What's it like working with you? Who have you helped? And so on. All of these things here. So, these nine, 10 questions are really, really important. How do I know you're qualified to help me, right? And are you experienced and so on, right? How do you work in open source, right? This is super important for us. How do you work? We really care about that. And that implies for us, a lot of ethical, moral, interesting questions, right? So, Tracy, tell them the questions we answer with our content model. I thought it was coming on a little later. Yeah, so, we really wanna make sure that we're answering the key questions that basically cover the pitch of your agency. So, we wanna know what do you do and does it fit what I need done? Do you understand me? Do you understand my business, et cetera? Do you have experience doing the thing that I need you to do? Who are you? How do you work? What tools do you use? This is an interesting one that we think is actually really important. They wanna know, do you use Drupal? Do you use Blackfire, et cetera? And specifically, they wanna know your qualifications and expertise in the specific area that they need help and getting a sense of what it's like working with you and whom have you helped transform and succeed sort of as a proof point that will end up in a successful relationship and project outcomes. And this long sentence here with the bold text, that's as variables, that's what you have to say. This is who we are, this is what we do, this is how we do it. So, every bit of improvement that you do to your website is going to make things better. And the first thing, when I'm talking with people about maybe working with us and becoming a partner, becoming a client, whatever it is that people ask me every time, whatever email I have to write every single time after I've had a conversation, whatever material I always have to go find again and send that becomes a blog post or a landing page or a download or even a PDF, you can send them, but really you want people while you're asleep somewhere else on the globe, you want them to have that question answered for them and come one step closer to being self-qualified when they actually contact you. So that conversation that you always have, write a cool blog post about it or answer that question in a landing page, whatever it is, but put that, right? In our longest agency relationship, the first year of the relationship, we spent doing that. We built an identity, gave them a manifesto, the principles that they work by, started blogging about their expertise and so on, but we were basically just working for the lead sales guy, putting things that he had to answer in sales conversations, right? So, think about why people come to you and highlight that, write about that next, right? And think about the people you wish were coming to you, figure out how to communicate about that, go to their conferences or put experts from their industry on your podcast or something, so you're sort of projecting into the world that you want to be working with this sort of people and you show them that you can understand them and help them too, right? And then think about what's going on, think about if you have to talk about headless or about whatever the artificial, I don't know how it relates to your business, right? But if you're using things that people might be searching for, right? It can never hurt. And every time you put one more of these things on your website, one more question answered, it helps your next sales call because you can either click into it during the video call, send it as a follow-up or someone will have already read it and gotten in touch with you. So, you want to help yourself sell. And then, you want to help people self-qualify. What are people asking you? Why do you win? Why do you lose? Who are you competing against? When people are coming to you, are they asking for Drupal? Are they asking for something else? Need to think about this as a sort of second order. After you've helped yourself have a better sales conversation, start to think about the people you want to be working with and the things that you do really well and the things that maybe haven't gone as well. You either have to fix them and then come up with proof that you do that great or maybe whatever that we've had this, we've had projects where we jumped in with both feet and we thought it was gonna be great and it was terrible. So, over time we learned what we're better at and what we can say no to, right? But, you know, focus your information on the success, focus your information on what you know you do great and double down on that. So, help people understand the things that they always, they're always gonna wanna know. So, trust signals, right? We talk about trust signals. We actually do a thing called the trust signal audit where we look at how your company is sort of projecting itself out into the world and you can do this for yourselves. What am I saying to help people trust that we're gonna do a good job, right? So anyway, here's your brilliant agency and this is the roof of your brilliant agency and that's your growth and your success but it's floating there in the air, right? There's nothing holding it up. So, this is the agency health. We can't sell a conversation anymore. Who remembers the days in Drupal when you could say we do Drupal and people would come and then you could say we will build anything you want cause Drupal queers a module for that, right? I did business that way. You can admit it, yeah, right? We can't do that anymore. We can't do that at all. And people don't wanna buy a conversation. They want to buy a package. So, you have to think about who you're selling to. You have to think about that site, that type of project that goes great for you or that vertical that you work in or whatever it is and come up with. Two, three, five focused packages that look like I'm buying a package. It doesn't matter that you have to build it and configure it. They don't care. Nobody cares. But I have to know that I can come to you and I can get a great hospital website. I can get a great golf club website. I can get an internal employee directory. I can get a multilingual, whatever it is. Make it look like a package. Put up. We think three to five, but it doesn't matter. Packages that are convincingly described with who's it for, what they're gonna get out of it so that they can go and basically, yes, I wanna talk with you about getting that. So package. Can I add something? Can I add something? With these service pages, they should actually look quite similar to the product pages. They should go into, well, structured but still detailed information about what are the exact features of that service and what are the outcomes, one of the benefits for them and what does that solution specifically look like? They want to be able to see themselves and their project in your description so it should be quite detailed. And there's lots of things that you can do to structure it so that it's easily consumable, but all of the information should be there and it should demonstrate your expertise. Take the second part, please. Oh, tools and processes pages. In the same style as the service categories or the service pages, also the tools that you use and demonstrating your expertise in that particular tool in the same way that shows what are the features? How do you implement the tool in such a way that brings them the most value, et cetera? So you want to share the particular tools and processes, so Drupal, Blackfire, CDN, Agile, Methodologies, Project Methodologies. KPIs, whatever it is that you do. And this is a special open source hot tip. Then you start blogging and we have many thoughts about how to make effective blogs. It's not the talk today, but when we're talking about trust signals to hold up this house, you're showing people what you do and what they can get out of it. You're painting their vision of what they could have from you. And then you're showing them what kind of bricks you use and what kind of spades and shovels and wheelbarrows. You're showing them how you put that together. We do, we, you get this vision. We use these tools to build it. Then you write about it. You talk about it. You do conference presentations about it. Talking, showing your expertise. Hey, so upgrading to Drupal 9, such and such and so, and when we're using this, you know, we do this for security and whatever it is. So you're blogging about the things that you use. So your technical blog stuff shows that you know Drupal, shows that you know CDN, shows that you know whatever it is that you're doing. Whatever your business-focused blog is, interviews and so on, you're blogging about things that are appropriate for the verticals and the packages that you're offering. Because you have to prove that you understand your potential clients, businesses and problems and so on. So the fourth post of the house is where things got really interesting for us. And we, I'm not sure how we came up with the idea, but it turned into one of our special, special little tricks. Or my, I don't know, my favorite tool. Actually, I can tell you how we came up with it. Do you remember? Yeah, the agency that we worked with, they had the Rockstar founder who was extremely well known in their community. And he, you know, was really grateful to have that position, he wanted to elevate the rest of his team. And so we did a workshop with them called like the agency stars. No, it's called build the star. Build the star. And, you know, we worked really hard to figure out how to like the details of the profiles and how we could elevate them into stars as well. Yeah, so if you, so exactly. So this very generous founder works with brilliant people and wanted to show off and highlight those people as well. So we started thinking about this and we came up with the idea, okay, we're gonna do team profiles. And then the head designer, her blogs are going to be about Adobe XD and about UX and so on. And every blog with her name on it links to her profile and has a little micro profile next to it. And her profile has key words that are all the tools and expertise that she would need to be a great head designer. Same goes for the backend developers. Same goes for the front-end developers. Same goes for the sales guys. Same goes for the project managers. Every blog is linked to a specific author whose profile expertise matches that topic. And that builds authority and reputation with the search engines and they can see that certain people and then their profile pages also linked to the blogs and so on. So that was working pretty well. And we know that because one of our, we were in the fourth engagement phase with them. And the second or the third phase we were asked to, one of our KPIs was to increase their search result positions within their topic area. And that worked and it was great but when they were a type of three agency they're based in Stuttgart, Germany. When you searched a couple of years ago for a type of three and please don't do this because what if it's wrong? But even if you're in like a German Stuttgart search bubble a couple of years ago, if you search for type of three agency Stuttgart they weren't coming up. Even though they were maybe one of the great agencies of the scene and co-founded by the project lead and so on, they weren't showing up. And we wondered and wondered and wondered how we were gonna fix this and meet our KPIs. So we had done some other things with the profiles. We had, they're an agency, they have a lot of personality, they're a really closely knit team. We put inside jokes in the profiles. We asked them how it was to work with the agency, how it was to work with their favorite technologies, what can't they live without, do's and don'ts, right? All sorts of stuff that matched them. So you can see there's a real human being and that's a trust signal, right? I can see who I'm gonna be working with and get a feeling for oh, these are interesting humans. This could be nice. And we had all those things in there and then eventually what we tried that worked is in 25-ish profiles in three or four of them we put in, well, Johannes is the youth group leader at his church in Stuttgart. And somebody else loves to do board gaming nights with his friends in Stuttgart and we put the word Stuttgart four times. And then it all came up. So these team profiles end up being a tool for doing all sorts of really interesting SEO tweaking once they're in place. Now, without the foundation, the house is nothing. How do I know that these things bring transformation and success to clients? Well, and how do I know that these people are nice to work with? Case studies and testimonials are the foundation. They're your most valuable piece of content when you can get them. And they're worth pursuing and they're worth doing because it's your evergreen sales resource. Five years from now, people are still, it's still valid to know that you're doing great work. So that's your house there. These are the questions you're answering. If you haven't gotten a photo, talk with us. We'll share all of this super, super happily. How are we doing on time? Oh, okay, I think we're gonna be okay. All right. Any questions from the audience yet? No? Okay. So I work with a genius and we just relaunched our website and our product packages and so on. And three or four weeks ago, we were gonna be selling the new us. And Tracy said to me after we'd been working on this, Tracy said to me one morning, no more pitch deck. And I was like, what do you mean? That's my canvas. That's my entire genre. And so remember all those trust signals and all those questions we're answering. And Tracy is going to take you through what she came up with. I have no idea how you came up with it, but yes, please. No more pitch deck. Yeah, so I came up with this idea to never build a pitch deck again. And the reason that I, there's plenty of reasons why I chose this methodology, but basically the key behind your pitch and all of the key messages that should be embedded in there, people should be able to find whether they're in a meeting with you or not and they should be able to self qualify based on what they see. And they should also have the entire pitch of your story available to them without having to go digging for it or searching through any other materials. And so basically this is a copy paste from our actual brief. My to-do. Yeah. So this is the actual brief. We've read a brief for everything that we produce and this was the key messages in the brief. And if you've built a sales deck before you know, these are sort of the standard pieces, components of your pitch that you make to clients. And I wanted to make this front and center on our homepage and actually use, we've built the webpage in such a way that instead of clicking through slides with a client, we scroll through the different sections on the webpage so that, and it also encourages them, if they wanna know more, they can see where they can dig a little deeper following the path. So that's our front page. So that's a front page and it answers all of these questions. Who we are, what's our brand positioning, what we do, the services, the services that we offer, it answers who we work with, which is very specific, which is very important and often overlooked to be explicit about the types of organizations that you do really well with. Another one is also challenges that we solve. I think we even missed this in the first draft that we did and we're like, challenges are like the key component of good communication. So making sure that you show which challenges that you address for them. The why work with us, it's touched on in a couple of different sections, but it basically, we wanna know the direct benefits, the direct outcomes of working with you, as well as some of the showcasing of your expertise and those proof points that working with you is likely to lead to success. And then what I also really like for an agency is to see exactly what's the best way to get started with us. And we've built kickstart packages that works for us, for other people it might be a UX audit or a technical performance audit and stuff like that. Oh, microphone. So, this is three weeks old and as an example of putting the front door on your house, I'm going to do the microscopic version of our pitch. Yes, it's our pitch, but I'm showing you how to do this, right? So when I talk with people, I know how I'll do this. All right, I'm not even pitching us at this point. So I have these four challenge areas and I say, hey, if you're in such and such a business, do you recognize, for example, well, I know we should be doing content but I don't have time, right? Need capacity soon and so on. And I find that people often identify with these challenges and I can say, okay, so if you're comfortable with, you know, if you recognize yourself in this, there's a company for that, right? We founded a company, so we align communications, we connect engineering with marketing and sales. That's our positioning. We help explain technical stuff to less technical roles who often hold the budget, right? So that you can communicate about it and you can see that we have strategy, planning, content creation and training and enablement. So I might talk about Tracy and me for a moment and how we're qualified and then I jump back into the challenge section right below and I explained, hey, we can expand your bandwidth. Hey, we're good at onboarding ourselves. Hey, you get a whole team of us for the price of one and so on. So talk about the challenges. We founded a company for that. The answer to the challenge is, then I say, oh, look, I'm truly proud of this, but it works, right? We saved them time. We created the market entrance package and they've grown, they do more work than they ever have and so on. So then when we go past that, we say, this is why we're good at it. We have a bunch of stuff. Those are talking points from me. You can click into them later. Here are some blogs we did, like writing and editing guide, editing codes. Like we're showing how we work also because we're open source people. And then it's already like, hey, you can have a fixed price, fixed scope, start with us. We can talk about custom stuff. We also have an agency package. I can send you more, send you some links. Let's talk next week, but I don't have to be there to do that because anyone can see that at any point. Anyone from my team can pitch anyone else. Anyone can follow up. So our website is hopefully selling for us all the time. We have 30, we have 16 and a half minutes left. We're doing great on time. So one more thing about this content, the way we think about content, and I'll just skim the surface here. Everything that you could find on our homepage, everything that you could put on your homepage, you need to paint a vision. You need to show the benefit of what could be if we work together. You show the pain points, you show the challenges to show people that you understand them and that you can help them so that people can identify themselves in the stuff you're describing because if they understand the pain point, they're gonna really love to have the benefit, then you explain how you solved it and how you solved it, that might be people, that might be technology, that might be whatever. So, blah, blah, blah, boom. Type of threes, digital asset management, integrations make it easy to do stuff, right? So the first sentence is a benefit. The second sentence, is it there? Oh no. Oh yeah, okay, so this is the persona we wrote this for, okay? So leadership Leonie is a C-level executive. She's responsible for the sex of business. She's in charge of developers on IT and she runs marketing. Think about her when you're writing, okay? So the value case that we put to her is, digital asset management can help people work more efficiently with media, right? That's what it says, and then challenge. You know enterprise organizations invest a ton in assets, but it's really, really hard to use them effectively, is what the second part says, and use this system integrated with Adam to do great asset management. Boom, boom, boom. Three sentences is a surgically precise value case on how to interest leadership Leonie in what you're doing. And this is a core part of our structure on your services pages when we build solutions. So if you're specialized in multisites or multilingual, you'll have an opening value case that talks about the specific solution area, and then underneath it you'll have the more explicit feature points, feature statements. Yeah, so this is for product pages and for the tool pages, right? What's in it for me? We do this stuff for you. Things that keep me up at night, things that waste my time, things that cost me money, is the second part, and then how our technology, our people, our idea solves a problem, delivers a solution. You can see here on, this is an agency page that we wrote. We done, I don't know, at least 95% of the content on this website. Here's a, so we build customized, centralized information management solutions. That's kind of, that's a solution, what we do. They're flexible, they connect, they integrate with your legacy systems, with efficiency, okay, great benefit. Boy, that would be awesome if I could have that. Here's a challenge. People calling me from Adobe are offering me this crap, but I know that it's really hard and I know that it's hard to work with and it's really expensive and whatever challenge. And then, look, we make these things, information management hubs, tailored for your needs, ready to handle, and that's also a bit of a benefit, but it's also how we're solving the thing. So, boom, boom, boom, value case. Remember the value case, remember the value case. Here's another one. I don't think we need to go into the details. Here's another one. Still this tripartite three things benefit challenge solution. So, now, keeping things simple, as we were trying to figure out how to present this idea of the agency house, we, you know, all the questions from the Are You My Agency book, we were trying to map the question onto the piece of information on your website to get the benefit that that would deliver. And I made a really good diagram that is 100% accurate and totally useless. So, those are the questions, right? And these are the content things and this is how, you know, that helps you anyway. Yeah, I mean, I really did make the arrows that is real, but it's useless. So, the thing that we have to say is, as I said, we build and sell services as a team of experts sharing her knowledge, qualified experience in using a set of tools and processes with a proven track record of success that looks like this in this content model. We build and sell services. Describe in terms of, and now you know, value case, benefits, challenges, solutions on your product and service pages. We share our knowledge. So, blog posts, podcasts, conferences, aimed at the right people in their language also helps you with the search version. We're a team of qualified experts on your team profile pages, put your certifications, put your training, put your hobbies, put your passions, right? Put your location. This is, and then you show your experience using the tools and processes, you show your experience with the business cases that you're addressing so that people can see that you understand. And then you have a proven track record of success with case studies and testimonials that show you're successful at delivering client transformation and that you're a great team to work with. That human element is my favorite part. So that's the formula. Whew, that's what we talked about. We have a solid 11 minutes to go. That was a lot. How are you feeling about it? Great. Now we get to hear from them. How are you feeling about it? You're mew! Any questions? Yes, please. There you go. Hi, this is really good. It made a lot of sense, which is very helpful. It's always nice to know that some of the things I've done have been, other people think they're a good idea too. So I'm looking at this and probably like a lot of people. I'm like, okay, I've got some of that. I've got some of that. And I'm trying to work out how to do the gap analysis. Yep. How? Please. I'm gonna give you the quick dumb answer. And then Tracey's gonna give you a better answer. Okay. I, on our side, I have what I need to have this conversation with you. So I know that it's really hard to explain to people that we are an outsourced marketing department. We can be your CMO on demand. And it's really hard for me to build that case, but we do it really well. So every conversation, every closed lost with people I'm always like, hey, you know, would have been cool, but what was missing for you, I'm building my sales package here when I'm doing this. But when you're looking at the house, talk about the auditing for where you are. So, yeah, just to check. So you're saying basically you need to ask someone who could be a potential client because then, no? I'm saying I scratch my own itch, right? Oh, okay. I needed to be able to explain to people enough so that they would try us. And I built that into content, right? So that people could self-qualify. Anything that you have is way better than not having anything, right? So that's already really great that you recognize some of it. Yeah, I think that if you wanted to do the audit, yourself basically looking at the house model and we're happy to share the deck after, I think this is gonna be published, and go through and see, and just sort of measure if you've taken each of those pillars, does it demonstrate all of those expertise, and then specifically, the questions that are on there. Does your website clearly answer those questions and are they easy to find? And are the most important ones specifically like the pitch questions from our brief that I think that's applicable to most agencies, does it clearly answer those things upfront in the most accessible way? Okay, thank you, yeah. So are you saying that we have no pitch decks at all, or do we have it in proportion? Because I keep hearing from my marketing team that pitch decks are our main source of sales and not our website. So what do you think? So for us, we've taken the choice to turn our website into our pitch deck. And so it needs to still answer the same types of questions and it needs to do so in a beautifully visual way. So it's a choice that that's what we're heading in that direction, and I think that's something that you can also decide as a team and probably working closely with your marketing department trying to find out exactly what their needs are and making sure that that's already available on the website. And I think going through some training of like, okay, well let's practice this, let's see if we can scroll through our website the same way that we would do in a pitch deck. And it's the dream, right? And I can do a regular call with the front page of the website now, but to talk with agency people, we have a deck, right? And so if we decide to go crazy and pursue this as a principle, right? Our agency landing page would then be another pitch deck, right? Maybe somehow some version of this, right? But it's not that we don't have any decks anymore. I think that one of the benefits of going this way of having the website be the pitch deck is that you're gonna get continuous feedback from your marketing team and say, hey, this was missing or they asked this question and it's probably, they're not that client, it's probably not the only one asking those questions of why not make it public and why not make it more present and so on. And of course there's always more unique situations that don't necessarily need to take up prime real estate on the home page, but there's always either a specific landing page for that particular type of client that you can click over to where you get more into those details specific to that particular use case or whatnot. We don't have any... Thank you. Yeah. Yeah, I think one of the things that's really important when you think about your site as your pitch deck is that I've been to thousands of sales meetings where I go out and I feel that the client has really understood me. And then a week later, it turns out that they're actually gonna change their CMO or whatever. And in those cases, whenever you need to, your client needs to go back and say, why did we get these people in? What really happened? Why were they so good? They need somewhere to go where they can find all of the arguments that you gave them. And it's not in the email inbox of the person who left the company, which has also happened. Which puts the pressure on people to keep... It creates a positive pressure to keep your home page up to date and having the most relevant arguments that you need your clients to see. Thank you so much for coming and listening and being a great audience. I highly encourage anyone to hang out afterwards and listen to Finn Lewis's super interesting talk. Next door, are you next door? Yeah, about LocalGov, a distribution that they're working on in the UK and Ireland. Thanks everyone.