The Lead Product Method: The Origin Story
Today I want to share the origin story of the Lead Product because it is such a fundamental part of the No BS Agency model.
And it's something that I have been teaching for the last eight years, maybe more, and not just in the branding space, but in all industries.
I've had people implement this in finance, in law, in all kinds of coaching.
The Lead Product continues to be one of the biggest game changers in business.
And I want to share with you how it all came about because it actually evolved over a few years.
Before the Lead Product process
In the last blog post, I explained what a Lead Product is. If you’re reading this and you don't know what it is, go read that right now.
The Lead Product is the first step in the process.
It is a paid engagement that delivers value and it sets you up to sell higher priced services to clients who are eager to work with you, and sets the whole project up so that it goes much more smoothly.
And if I think back to where it originated, it actually started years before I ever sold a written brief.
Instead, in the beginning, I was just trying to get the design work to get approved.
In the very beginning of Worstofall Design, we would send creative work via email in PDFs. And we just wanted the creative work to stand on its own.
I remember one client, they were some sort of science client. And I remember sending them a PDF with 10 or 11 different logo concepts.
And you know what? They were all great concepts, and the clients liked it. In fact, their feedback was very positive. And yet that project went back and forth, maybe 6 or 7 times.
Because, as I learned later, without context, without an explanation, without agreeing first on the direction of the project and what we were all going for, when we sent them that creative work in a PDF, we were basically just asking them what their personal opinion was.
And we were asking them to make a decision based on information they didn't really have or that wasn't very clear. And so there was so much unspoken stuff.
So that was in the very beginning. That's how we used to present creative work.
How the Lead Product was born
In the following couple of years, I tried so many different things to try to shorten that process.
And one of the things that I started doing little by little was before we would show the creative work or show the logos, for example, we would start to explain a little bit beforehand, maybe we would just present the work live.
And before we showed the logos, we would kind of just tell them, ‘Hey, let's remember what we're going for here…’
I remember distinctly another client where I had the idea that before we showed the logos, we should actually show what is inspiring each of the logos and why we picked those elements and just break the logo apart and explain.
I remember saying to the client, ‘You said that you guys were a team, and you were very militant about your work. And you wanted people to know that you were very exacting, and you showed up on time and all of this. So we took inspiration from and then we showed them all this, you know, shields and military icons.’
And so we showed all of those images so that when we showed the logo, it reflected that idea and they were bought into it.
And that worked phenomenally well.
I remember that as being a turning point, and we never showed work differently after that.
This whole experience also heavily influences the Magic Hour, which is a process I also teach inside No BS Agency Mastery. It’s how to get clients to basically say yes to an entire brand, logo and most of your website in one single setting. But that's a story for another day.
It was influential for the Lead Product because the same thing was happening there that we eventually pulled out and put into this process.
We were sharing with the client what they told us they wanted and told them what we thought the plan should be to get them there.
So in the example of the client where we're using those primer slides to get them to the logo, we were telling that story right before we showed the creative work.
And a little while after that, I started pulling that story part out and doing it before we even did the creative work.
I remember a few clients where even though we started the whole branding and website project, the first thing I would do is interview them, and then just summarise what we spoke about so that I could get their buy-in and agreement on what the plan was and what the goals were.
And it was as much to make sure that I understood what they were saying, as it was to make sure that they put pen to paper and signed their name on the dotted line and said, ‘Yes, that is what I said’ and ‘No, I'm not going to change that, once you show us the work’
It was me kind of covering my own ass, because I felt like when I didn't do this work in previous projects, it was very easy for the client to say one thing in the first couple of meetings and then have an idea or have a different thought that maybe they always had, but they just forgot to say it. And it would really throw a wrench in the creative projects.
If you've ever done a project that has gone out of scope or taken a right turn at some point, you know that sometimes clients can come with new ideas or something they forgot to tell you that can completely change the direction of the project.
Well, what I started to realise was that part of my job was to make sure that we got all of those ideas out on the table before we did the creative work. And that would both protect us, and also make sure that we really did have the whole story.
Both of those were my goal - I wanted to protect us and our time to make the project go more smoothly, and I wanted to make sure that I got all the information that was important, and not just whatever the client thought to tell me whenever we happen to meet.
So fast forward another year or two, and we are now starting to interview the client and then write this brief.
And then one day, there was a turning point.
Discovering that The Lead Product actually works
I believe the first Brand Shrink I sold (the Brand Shrink is my Lead Product) was to a woman whose company was named BEX NYC. And it was a kind of dominatrix-style lingerie brand.
And she was super cool. She used to work at Playboy, in the garments department, or merchandising or something and she wanted to start this brand. She wasn't really ready to do the design, but she really wanted my advice on what she should think about for the brand.
And so she asked me if I could do a project with her where I just gave her that advice. And so I thought, ‘Well, I'm already really doing this as the first step of our project, so why don't I just charge her to do that?’ And so I did.
And that, I believe, was the first Brand Shrink that I did.
The intention for that Brand Shrink wasn't even to upsell her. I think I did pitch her to do a project after and that was okay, because eventually she was going to need some branding.
Now that I'm thinking about it, I think she actually was a bit of a designer and she wanted to design it herself. So she was just looking for my advice on the direction.
I remember afterwards she was so thankful for the session, and so thankful for the brief. And she said, ‘Great, I'm gonna use this, and I'm gonna design the brand. And I love the ideas that you brought me.’
And that was it.
It was the first time that I realised that this engagement could be valuable all on its own.
And so after that, that was it. I said, ‘You know what, I'm just going to do this with everybody.’
Because if this engagement is valuable on its own, well, it's a lot easier for me to do. And it's smaller, and I can charge people a small amount of money for this.
And then after that, I'll know if we're on the same page or not. And it will also be so much easier for them to buy from us and for them to hire us for a much bigger project.
And I was right.
That was exactly what started happening.
I started selling these Brand Shrinks, and they were actually much easier to sell than a full project.
I didn't have to do the proposals anymore.
People would buy the Brand Shrink and at the, it was $650, so that was my first price.
And I was just selling it to everyone.
And I would tell them ‘Listen, if you want to work with us, this is the first step in the process. And after we do the Brand Shrink, you'll definitely have some great insights, you'll have some valuable information and you can take that or you can hire us.’
People loved that they were able to engage with me and get some really valuable information without having to sign up for a multi-thousand dollar project.
And at the time, we were pushing our prices up quite a bit.
Our prices were anywhere from $15k to $30k at the time that I started selling these Brand Shrinks.
There were plenty of people around me that I had been nurturing and I had been networking with for a long time - they already knew, liked and trusted me, so they were happy to spend a little bit of money to work with me.
And some of those people, after they would get the brief, would say, ‘Okay, great, well, now I see it,’ and then they would hire us for the full thing.
So it worked really, really well in that respect, and I've never looked back.
I used to spend so much time on these beautiful proposals.
Steve made some incredible decks, and the first half of the proposal would be all about the client and I would write out the vision of what this project was going to be and where they were going to go.
I always felt like the details were so important, so these proposals would both be designed as a deck to pitch the client on the vision of the project, but it would also be in great detail with every single aspect of the project, because I wanted to make sure that I was very clear, so that neither of us went out of scope.
Of course, that rarely worked at the time, but I was trying.
And then it would also have all these beautiful pages after, about us, our brand, our team and projects we've done.
And sometimes these decks would be 30-40 pages. And, of course, some of that was the same for every deck, but still, that's a lot of work.
And a lot of stuff to send somebody, even just to look at.
And what I found was that these Brand Shrink briefs that were sometimes just one or two pages, single spaced, really worked well.
I remember the Brand Shrink brief that I wrote for the owner of Stash Wealth was one page. And she called me up a couple of months ago and asked me if I had a copy of it, because she said to this day, that is still the single most concise and clear description of what their brand is and needs to be, and I need to give it to the people on my team for marketing.
So this one page brief ended up being so much more valuable than the beautifully designed 40-page decks.
And when I teach how to do this inside No BS Agency Mastery.
I give lots of examples of real briefs that I wrote, and I purposefully show that they're not really designed at all.
Of course, the fonts and the spacing of the words is designed to make it easy to read, but we purposefully don't use a lot of design in the brief at all, because I'm trying to communicate that the design is going to come, but this is not the design, this is the plan.
This is the valuable information that you need in order to do design, that's going to get you where you need to go.
And so I purposefully don't design the decks and never have.
I've sold $10,000 Brand Shrinks, and it's just a document. It has a nice branded cover, but that's it.
And again, I purposefully do that, because I want to communicate that when it comes time to do the design, then you'll see some incredible work, but we're not doing that right now. So I want you to focus on the ideas, the vision and the plan. Let's nail that first, and then we can work on the next part, and we can do it with all of our effort.
And so that's what I like to do in the brief.
So that's where the brief came from.
It evolved over many, many clients, and it really evolved out of a need to solve a problem.
And in the last eight or so years, I have been teaching other people to solve that same problem with their clients using the Lead Product.
It's the first thing that we teach inside No BS Agency Mastery, and it is a game changer.
It’s not only going to just change the way you sell or rather don't sell, because it's so much easier for people to buy this thing, but it’s also going to change the dynamics between you and your clients.
It’s going to build so much more trust, and it’s going to make them see you as an authority.
And it means that when you move into the next phase of actually doing the project, they're with you. They're following you. They're excited by what you have to show them and they want you to do your best work the way you think it should be done.
That's what the brief does.
If that sounds like a process that you would love to implement inside your 1-2 person branding agency, go to nobsagencies.com/program. There's a video on there that tells you a little bit about the model, and you can book a call to strategize how to scale up your small agency without employees.
Let's see if now is the time to take your business to the next level.
Here’s what you need to get…
You may still be doing those elaborate pitch decks and proposals because that’s how every other branding agency pitches for work, and that’s just the way it’s done.
But if you’re anything like me, and you’re getting frustrated with putting in all this work into the proposal, but not getting the clients, maybe it’s time to try another way that could actually work.
P.S. You can always jump on a call with my team if you want to learn exactly how to implement the Lead Product and all my other tools and strategies to scale up your agency - just go here to get started!