Build Your Agency’s Marketing Around Your Most In-Demand Person

The person you can least afford to pull off client work is exactly the one your marketing needs.

Earlier this week I sat in an exec meeting where we spent way too much time building the agency’s own campaign around whoever had open capacity instead of around what would actually work. Two names came up fast. Both good people, both with room on the calendar in September. Inside twenty minutes we had a content plan and a start date.

Getting people in motion is work, and it feels good, it feels productive. But productive ≠ effective, and that plan wasn’t going to get us where we needed to go.

The expensive version

They asked me what I’d do. So I pitched the expensive version instead. Take 20% of our most in-demand person’s time and put them in direct conversations with the exact leaders we want as clients. Not a webinar and not a panel. One conversation at a time, recorded, with someone whose logo we would like on the website in a year. Then the team distills those recordings into POV-led content across the website, email, and social.

The production engine sits behind that person, not instead of them.

That 20% pays twice. The conversations fuel the marketing engine, and they build the network we’ll eventually pitch the offer to. Six months of that and you have a body of work that doesn’t sound like anyone else’s, plus a list of the exact buyers you want, each of whom has already spent an hour with the person they’d be buying from.

Why it has to be that person

It works because that person can say things nobody else here can say. That’s what makes them in demand in the first place.

This isn’t a talent gap on the team. The person with open capacity can write clean, well-organized content about what we do. What they can’t do is carry the point of view, because the point of view came out of a few hundred client conversations they weren’t in.

The sharpest version of what we do gets said out loud in a conversation with a prospect, and it rarely makes it into anything we publish. That gap is the whole opportunity, and it doesn’t close by assigning content to someone with time.

The objection is real

Twenty percent of the person everyone wants is the most expensive time in the building. If they’re billable, that’s revenue you’re choosing not to book. If they’re not, they’re the one holding three accounts together, and pulling a day a week out of that shows up somewhere, usually on a Thursday when something goes sideways.

I don’t have a clean answer to that. The cost is visible on day one and the return isn’t visible for two quarters, which is why this decision almost always goes the other way. I’ve watched it go the other way in rooms where everyone agreed with me.

What I’d push on is where the 20% comes from. Your most in-demand person is usually carrying a pile of work that doesn’t require them. Reviews they could hand off. A recurring call they attend out of habit. The 20% rarely has to come out of the part only they can do, and if you look at their week honestly you can usually find most of it.

What it looks like on a Tuesday

Ninety minutes a week. Two conversations, no deck, no prep beyond the name and the company. They hit record and they talk to someone the way they’d talk to a client.

Then somebody else owns everything downstream. The transcript, the pull quotes, the post, the newsletter section, the page on the site that finally says the thing out loud. If the program depends on your in-demand person also writing it up, it dies in week three, and you’ll conclude the idea didn’t work when what didn’t work was the handoff.

That’s also the test of whether you actually have a production engine. Take away the writing and the editing and the scheduling from the person with the opinion, and see whether anything still comes out the other end.

I get the draw of running marketing on whoever has open capacity. It’s cheaper and it starts Monday. But nothing outperforms your most in-demand people talking to the market themselves. That’s the part you have to pay for.