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This article originally appeared on my Medium Blog.

Startups have to write a lot, especially those in B2B categories. Cranking out blog posts, product launches, and various types of emails is tough. In the whirlwind of deadlines and KPIs, it’s easy to lose site of the people on the other side of those emails.

But when that happens, you find yourself on the slippery slope of brand narcissism, losing all touch with customer empathy.

But effective writing is customer-centric and helps to answer the So What? of your business. The problem is that much B2B writing is self-centered and doesn’t help customers view themselves in the company’s narrative.

This is evident in headlines like “The easiest way to send transactional emails” or “Increased productivity for teams.” They’re trying to speak to customer benefits, but fail to draw the customer in.

In her book Everybody Writes, Ann Handley , Chief Content Officer of MarketingProfs, among other things, shares a tip that I’ve found incredibly clear and immediately actionable for avoiding self-centered copy. She says:

Use a customer-centric POV. Replace I or we with you to shift the focus to the customer’s point of view. Then write (or rewrite) accordingly.

She follows with several examples, including:

Company-centric: We offer accelerated application development.

Customer-centric: Deploy an app to the cloud at lunch hour. And still have time to eat. (From the home page of Kinvey.com)

and:

Company-centric: A Better Way to Learn How to Cook.

Customer-centric: Become a Cook in 30 Days

You can see how the customer-centric examples are talking to real people about problems the company can solve. You can also see that these headlines are just more interesting, providing a rich point of departure for the remaining copy.

Take a look at your homepage. Does it read more like the company-centric examples, or the customer-centric ones? How can you take the benefits you’ve already highlighted and reframe the the insight with the customer front and center?

As you implement this thinking, you’ll find that an empathic approach will help you connect with customers and differentiate from others your B2B category.

The demand of content production probably won’t ease up anytime soon, but with the customer as your guiding light, you can at least ensure your team’s efforts are all pointed in the same direction and that you’re telling a cohesive and customer-centric story.

Good luck! Please comment any questions below, or tweet me @patrickjwoods.

There’s plenty of trite advice out there on how to name your startup. Just google “startup naming advice” and you’ll find all sorts of 10 Tricks to Name Your Startup! and other bullet-filled listicles. Much of the name-related content would lead you to believe that naming is easy. Just follow these steps and you’ll be fine.

Thing is, finding a good name is hard. There are no shortcuts. Sure, you can pick a name at random and just go with it. But your name is the first element of your brand a potential user experiences. It’s the tip of the spear, and it should be sharp.

The good news is that others have done this before. My team has named many startups, and even more non-startup brands. I’ve worked with them to distill the key steps they follow when working on a naming project (shoutout to Dan Price and Justin Dobbs, my two favorite brand pros). There are lots of processes out there, but this is the one that works for us.

There are four main parts to our approach—Foundation, Generation, Evaluation, and Validation. Each step is important, and the success of each phase depends on the quality of work you put forth in the prior stage.

It may not be quick, but it’s worth it. And when you’re finished, you’ll have a name that means something, that starts a conversation about something true in your brand. To me, that’s a lot better than picking a random word from the thesaurus and hoping for the best.

Ready to get started?

Who is your competition? For many tech startups, you may not have direct, heads-up competition. If you’re a diet soda, you have lots of direct competitors.

In established categories, like soft drinks, laundry detergents, deodorants, and pretty much any other CPG, each brand works hard to find some opportunity to exploit.

“We’re the diet soda with Splenda.”

“We’re the diet soda with no caffeine.”

“We’re caffeine-free diet cherry soda!”

This arms race of product augmentation warrants its own post, but for now, it’s important to note that startups often face a less crowded competitive landscape. In the soda examples above, each description assumes a baseline descriptor, e.g. Diet Soda, then differentiates with some sort of addition, e.g. Cherry Flavored.

But what if you’re creating a market where there wasn’t one? How do you describe your widget if there are no other widgets for people to buy?

Big agencies working on national clients with massive budgets. Doesn’t sound like an ideal partner for a scrappy early-stage startup, does it? Definitely not on the surface.

But as it turns out, startups and agencies do have a lot in common. They’re both about solving problems and bringing big ideas to life. Some of the smartest people I know work for a startup or an agency. They’re generally working on interesting things.

On one level, the two seem like natural collaborators, but it’s rare to find an agency that knows how to work with startups, or founders who understand how to even conceptualize agency world. What gives?

I’ve come to characterize the relationship between both groups as two individuals standing back-to-back, facing opposite directions. In that configuration, the two are near to one another, indeed, within arm’s length. But while they’re close in proximity, their outlooks are totally different. They share the affinity for big ideas and solving crazy problems, but they apply themselves to different ends.

In my experience, though, it’s possible for both groups to realign, to share a common purpose, and to apply their strengthens in ways that benefit the startup as well as their agency partner.

What follows are some lessons learned.

For transparency’s sake

I hope this article doesn’t come across as overly self-promotional. If I use lots of examples from our our work at archer>malmo, it’s simply because we’ve been intentional about working with startups for the past three years. We’ve worked with founders on the west coast and in the southeast. Some have raised their A round, others have been recent accelerator grads. We’ve done a good deal of brand work, campaign development, and all sorts of other executions.

So, if I talk about our experiences a lot, it’s because, well, I’ve experienced them. But I am confident that the lessons learned here are widely applicable to all sorts of startups and agencies.

Reasons agencies aren’t good at startups:

Agencies have been around for a long time, and their ways of thinking and working tend to become ingrained. Here are a few hurdles I’ve seen stand in the way of fruitful agency-startup relationships.

different paradigms of:

• timelines — traditional client timelines often extend months into the future. If you don’t believe me, attend any number of annual planning meetings that happen between agencies and clients late Q4 or early Q1. For large companies, where marketing plans execute against known strategies, long-term planning makes sense. But startups operate in weekly or monthly cycles. There’s always a vision of the future, but planning specific tasks 9 or 12 months out is ludicrous. The startup may not even be around in 12 months.
• budgets — it’s not uncommon for agencies to pitch multi-million dollar business and to develop strategies that include massive (by startup standards) media spends and production costs. For many startups, though, $10,000 to produce a killer direct mail piece can be out of the question.
• process — many agencies are organizational waterfalls. In other words, they adhere to strict processes of internal approvals that culminate in revealing work to the client from behind a magical curtain, then waiting for client feedback, fixing it, and moving on. Startup DNA is fundamentally more iterative, with their organizations built on cycles of testing and ongoing revisions. It’s not uncommon for a startup team to suggest getting the work 80% right, releasing, and iterating, rather than waiting til everything is perfect. Tt can take time for agencies to get used to that.
• success — for traditional agency clients, success may look like single-digit increases in national sales numbers, or some uptick in brand awareness. Success for startups is usually much more immediate. They need to develop a strong brand, or help coming out of beta and going to market. Now.

Tips for making it work

There are clearly challenges for building working relationships between agencies and startups. But it actually is possible to make it happen. And it can be really good.

relationship

Our most fruitful startup relationships have begun as friendships. This sounds incredibly sappy, I realize, but it’s true. Investing in the relationship gives both sides time to feel-out the chemistry and fit, understand how both groups think and work, and ultimately, establish trust.

trust

As with any relationship, the startup-agency engagement has to begin here. Startups needs to get the attention their accounts deserve, and their teams need to feel comfortable that will be the case.

communication

By their nature, startups make decisions quickly, and begin acting on those decisions immediately. When things are moving fast, it’s crucial that both sides commit to an ongoing dialogue. That includes progress updates from the agency side, as well as timely input and feedback from the startup. The startup should also be transparent about upcoming developments that might affect scope, budget, or timeline.

knowing what you’re good at

Every agency has a core set of skills that are particularly relevant to startups. We happen to be a full-service shop, meaning we have creative, planning, media, PR, digital, and broadcast all under one roof. But are all of those functional areas relevant to startups? Maybe, maybe not. But we’ve found we’re particularly good at brand development and campaign development. If the scope falls outside of those areas, we can provide value to be sure, but we’re transparent about what we’ve found to be our core capabilities for early-stage startups.

In addition to these general tips, there are several pieces of advice for both startups and agencies.

Startups should:

• start with a finite project — avoid situations where the timelines and deliverables are blurry, and begin with a finite, well defined project. Moving toward a long-term relationship is optimal for both parties, but we’ve found that beginning with a bite-sized project with a realistic budget is the best way to get-to-know the teams involved without risking too much time or money.
• define scope as tightly as possible — make sure you understand what the deliverables are, and do the work on the front-end to define the challenge you’re facing and what kind of help you need. Keeping to a tight scope will help control both your budget and everyone’s expectations.
• avoid RFPs — someone on your board may suggest doing an RFP as a matter of best practices. They may even send you an awful template for you to blast out to dozens of agencies. Do not do this. RFPs create unreasonable amounts of work for the startup and for the agency, and really, the process won’t give you insight into how the agency thinks and works. RFP-mode is very different than starting with high trust and a strong relationship. And no one wants to begin a relationship with a laundry list of arbitrary to-dos.
• trust the feels — get to know the people first. You’ll really only want to work with agencies who have invested in getting to know you, or those who are putting out solid thought pieces about startup branding and marketing. So call up folks at two or three different shops and have drinks or something to eat. You’ll be spending lots of time with these people, so get to know them. As with any relationship, trust your instincts. If it feels right, go for it.

Agencies should:

• consider non-traditional compensation models — for pre-series A companies, cash-on-hand is king. Lots of times startups need agency help, but may not have the cash available to pay the fees. In those situations, it’s helpful if the agency can be flexible with how it gets paid. This could mean taking equity (we do convertible notes), deferred fees, or some sort of performance-based compensation.
• get to know the lingo — growth hacking, angel investing, runway, MVP, and myriad other terms are part of the lingua franca of startup world. Some are buzzwords, to be sure, but others carry lots of meaning. If your agency team is working with startups, it’s important to learn these terms in order to remove any barriers created by communication challenges. As a side note, I may do a separate post on startup glossary for agencies; let me know if that’s interesting to you.
• be prepared for nontraditional relationships — on one of our startup accounts, we work directly with the VP of Engineering, a couple developers, as well as the marketing director. In this way, we’re all able to provide feedback and iterate quickly without worrying about traditional layers of client approval. It also means our team is incredibly well-aligned with product development.
• invest in relationship building — as mentioned earlier, real relationships, i.e. beyond a LinkedIn connect, form the basis for any healthy agency-startup partnership. But you can’t build those relationships from behind your desk. We’ve found success through doing lots of mentoring, sponsoring and attending events, and generally just being present where startups are. And really, if doing that doesn’t get you absolutely amped-up, you shouldn’t consider working with startups in the first place.
• give first — the startup community is incredibly friendly and altruistic. It’s also keenly sensitive to hucksters and snake oil salesmen. To avoid coming across as opportunistic profiteers chasing the “trend” of startups, find ways you can provide value before ever considering a new business conversation. Mentor at an accelerator, do office hours, find startup conferences to speak at. We’ve developed the Brand Strategy Canvas to make branding easier for startups. We give this away for free, and do workshops all over the country.

Everybody should: keep the big idea front and center

Despite the technological upheavals in tech in the last couple of decades, the strength of a good agency is this: they’re really good at tapping the power of lots of smart, creative, connected people. The culture of the agency is one of big, amazing ideas. Of uncompromising dedication to truth and to producing great work.

As it turns out, startups are also relentlessly pursuing a big idea. The company is just the tangible manifestation of the founders’ and the team’s vision for the world. They’ll stop at nothing to bring it to life.

And this is where the agency-startup possibilities really get interesting: unreasonable founders paired with an experienced creative team that’s hard-wired to think big.

Hopefully this brief exploration of the agency-startup relationship is helpful to founders and agency folks everywhere. If you have questions or comments, I’d love to hear your thoughts. Shoot me a tweet @patrickjwoods.