Our Biggest Lesson From August

August was the month 6AI started taking meetings in volume: property management companies, a commercial real estate owner, a podcast team, a developer. Some went well. A couple of the early ones didn't, and the difference was how much we knew before we sat down.

Walk in already knowing everything

The meetings that closed were the ones where we could have run the company's marketing for a week before the meeting. What they do, every property or product, the software they run, whether they already automate anything, and the two or three things on their site that are costing them.

For Build or Break we walked in knowing that the words “Build or Break” appeared zero times as text on the show's own page, that the page was titled “Podcast Episodes”, and that 42 old article URLs were dead. That audit was the plan, and the plan was the deal. There was nothing to persuade anyone of. We showed them what Google saw.

By our review meeting with Danly we could show them one of their old pages ranking at position 3 on Google as a 404. Nobody can unsee that.

The one that taught us the most was a company we nearly pitched from a template. A real audit found they were already building their own automation platform. The draft pitch said “you have no automation”. We threw it out and wrote one about the systems they already run that don't talk to each other.

Another company already had an experienced developer helping them automate, which we learned on the call. That should have been in our notes before we walked in. It changed what we were selling: being the team they call first.

So: study the client. Their team page, their software, their old URLs, their competitors, what they've already tried. If you can describe their operation back to them better than their own website does, the meeting is half won before it starts.

Plan the pitch, then rehearse it

Knowing the material and presenting it are different skills. Before our best meetings we wrote a run of show: who speaks first, what the five slides are, which numbers we need cold, which questions we're going to ask and in what order, and what we want to leave with. Then we practiced it out loud, including the awkward parts.

The questions matter as much as the pitch. The best questions in our last brief only exist because of the research: each one starts from something the company itself published that week.

After one call we wrote down exactly what to fix for the next one: have pricing ready up front, lead with the two things they asked about, cut the filler words, rehearse the automation pitch. Small notes. They compound.

Research also tells you whether to take the meeting

The smaller lesson. The same research that wins a meeting sometimes changes it, or tells you not to have it, and that's worth as much.

Some companies are already doing everything right, and there's nothing honest for us to sell them. Some operate under rules where the thing we'd normally promise can't be promised: once, the structure of a company's business meant the obvious search pitch would have been improper, so we changed what we proposed before we ever brought it up. And if the research turns up a company whose values you don't share, you can decide that before anyone's time is spent.

Some clients are difficult to work with, and it shows early: in how they treat the people around them, in how the first two emails go. When you notice it, move on. Your time belongs with the clients who are worth it, and there are more of them than the difficult ones.

We need the right clients, and an hour of research before the meeting is the cheapest way to find them.

What we do now

Every meeting gets a written brief first. The last one ran twelve pages. It gets a run of show, a list of numbers to know cold, the questions we'll ask, and a rehearsal. It takes an afternoon.

Here's who we are, and here's what the first call looks like.