Nobody books a call about your retainer

I ran a set of roundtables at the UK Ecommerce Agency Summit in Edinburgh last week. Four groups, same opening question. What are you struggling with.

Lead gen. Every single table. Obviously.

Then one agency owner said cold outreach was working for him and you could feel the room shift. Everyone's been told cold email is dead. He's got 25 to 30 active clients and around 20 of them came from cold email. He's got another 200 odd people who took a call, didn't buy, and are sat in a spreadsheet waiting to be re-engaged. Thirty domains warmed up, running through Instantly, which he pointed out you can learn off a YouTube video in an afternoon.

The table wanted to know about the setup. How many domains, which tool, how long to warm them, what the sequence looked like.

Nobody asked about the offer. The offer is the only part that matters.

Not "we're a full service ecommerce agency". Not "twelve years of Shopify experience, here are our five pillars". TikTok Shop.

Every brand has heard of it. A decent chunk of them have been asked about it by an investor or a board member in the last six months. Almost none of them know how to set it up properly. And he's got case studies.

That's why the calls get booked. It's small, it's new, it's specific, and saying yes to a call costs the brand nothing except thirty minutes of finding out whether they're behind.

Then the good bit. Plenty of the brands who book turn out to be a terrible fit for TikTok Shop. He tells them so, on the call, before they've spent anything. And then he says the email programme looks like it hasn't been touched since 2022, or the site's the actual bottleneck, and here's what that would look like if they wanted a hand.

Email retainers and website builds. The boring expensive work he wanted to sell in the first place.

He didn't describe this as a strategy. He described it as being straight with people. It's both, and it's the whole trick.

Nobody has ever opened a cold email about a platform migration and thought right, today's the day. Migrations are expensive, slow, political, and the brand already has an agency they'll ask first. You cannot lead with it.

So lead with the thing they can't do yet.

Your outbound offer wants to be the newest, smallest, most curious thing on your services page. Ideally it's something with a bit of urgency baked in, where the cost of ignoring it is showing up to a board meeting with nothing to say. And it needs one piece of proof attached, because "we do TikTok Shop" and "we took a brand from zero to £40k a month on TikTok Shop in eleven weeks" are different emails.

Once you're on the call, everything else is diagnosis. You're the person in the room who's already been honest with them once. That buys you an enormous amount.

Most agencies have this exactly backwards. They lead with the retainer and then wonder why the reply rate is 0.4%.

The other thing he does is send the full method to the people who aren't a fit. Here's literally how we'd run it. Go and have a crack.

I do the same. I'll hand over the entire content strategy, the frameworks, the calendar, the lot. Almost nobody runs it. Not because it's difficult. Because it's Tuesday and there are six other fires and the person who was going to own it has just handed their notice in.

His line was that people pay for speed, and he'd learned it the hard way building his own websites. Months of evenings, looked at it again a few weeks later, hated it, should have just paid someone on day one.

Giving the playbook away costs you nothing. It buys you the one thing you can't manufacture with a sequence, which is trust.

Everyone treats outbound as a machine for booking sales calls. That's the least interesting thing it does, and it's the version with the worst reply rates.

Send outbound asking for fifteen minutes or a five question survey. Reply rates jump when you're asking rather than pitching, because you've flipped who's doing the favour. What you get back is the actual language your buyers use, the trigger points that made them go looking for an agency, what they hated about the last one, and what nearly stopped them signing. That goes straight to your sales team and it's worth more than any pipeline report. You also end up with a list of people who've told you their problems, which is a much easier list to sell to in ninety days. And the research itself becomes the content.

Send one thing that's genuinely useful and genuinely about them. A blog post that answers the question their whole category is stuck on. A podcast episode with the timestamp of the bit they need. No calendar link on the end of it.

The personalisation is doing all the work here. A link to your blog index is spam. "Episode 14, from about eighteen minutes in, is a brand director working through the exact returns problem you've got on your product pages" is a gift, and people reply to gifts. It also proves you've looked at their site, which is more than the other nine emails in their inbox that morning managed.

Then flip it round and ask them to contribute.

Nobody has ever been annoyed at being asked for their opinion. One question for a roundup piece, a quote for a report, twenty minutes on the podcast. It's flattering, it takes them ten minutes, and you'll get a yes from people who would have deleted a sales email without opening it. You end up with their words, their name attached to your content, their audience when it publishes, and three honest reasons to email them again. Once while you're writing it. Once when it goes live. Once a fortnight later when you tell them how many people read their bit.

That last one is where the conversation starts, because by then you've done something for them and they know it.

Some of them reply. More of them join the newsletter, and then you've got a warm list you own rather than 200 people in a sequence you're renting.

Which is where the newsletter earns its keep. Pull the engagement data once a month and look at it by company rather than by person. Three people from the same brand opening every issue and clicking through is a buying committee doing its homework. Pass those five names to whoever does your outreach and let them write something properly personal. Out of thousands of subscribers you're picking five. You've got time to do it well.

The easiest yes in outbound. Nobody has ever been offended by an invitation. A dinner, a roundtable, a small workshop with eight people who all have the same problem. There's no pitch to reject, so there's nothing to defend against, and a room does something in ninety minutes that a sequence won't do in ninety days.

That's most of what we do at Waye, and it's why the events work. You're not asking a stranger to buy. You're asking them to turn up, meet eight peers, and say out loud what's not working. The buying conversation happens on its own, usually by the second drink.

Sell the small interesting thing. Get in the room. Be honest about fit. Then sell the boring expensive thing.

The agency at that table had worked it out by accident and hadn't clocked what he'd built. Everyone else was still trying to find a better sequence for an offer nobody wants a call about.

Fix the offer first. The domains can wait.