Marketing and sales
Clients here are buying a moved number. If your profile does not name one, you are asking them to take the whole thing on faith.
Performance and paid media specialists, SEO consultants, email and lifecycle marketers, social media managers, and sales development specialists.
What a client checks before reading a word you wrote
- A number you moved, for somebody, that they can picture
- Whether you have worked at their scale, because tactics do not transfer across an order of magnitude
- Whether you understand their channel or are generalising from a different one
- What you would measure, which tells them whether you think in outcomes
The starting position, what you changed, and what moved. Percentages without a baseline are worth nothing, and clients in this category know that better than anyone.
This is the category where a retainer is easiest to justify and hardest to win, because the client has usually been burned by one. A short paid diagnostic first converts far better than a long pitch.
The symptoms here
Your results are all percentages
"Increased traffic by 300%" with no starting number.
An experienced buyer reads a baseline-free percentage as a reason to doubt the rest.
You sell channels, not outcomes
The profile lists platforms you can run ads on.
It makes you a pair of hands, and hands are priced like hands.
Clients want guarantees
Every conversation turns into what you can promise.
You end up bidding against whoever is most willing to promise something they cannot deliver.
Before
Hi there! I'm a results-driven digital marketing expert specializing in Google Ads, Facebook Ads, SEO and email marketing. I've helped 50+ businesses grow their revenue. Let's discuss how I can help you scale!
After
Your cost per acquisition doubled in March but your ad spend did not change, which usually means the account is fine and something upstream moved. Before touching campaigns I would check whether your conversion tracking survived the site change you mentioned, because that is the cheapest explanation and the easiest to rule out.
Marketing is the category where clients expect a number, and where more profiles than anywhere else fail to produce one. That combination is an opportunity, because the bar is a real result stated honestly and most of the competition is still writing adjectives.
A percentage without a baseline is nothing
"Increased conversions by 340%" could mean three sales became thirteen. An experienced buyer knows that, and a number you cannot contextualise makes them doubt the ones you can.
| Reads as marketing | Reads as evidence |
|---|---|
| Increased traffic by 300% | Took organic traffic from 900 to 3,600 a month over five months |
| Improved ROAS significantly | Cut cost per acquisition from £68 to £41 on the same spend |
| Grew the email list | Took the list from 2,000 to 9,000 with a 31% open rate held steady |
Under NDA, or the numbers are not yours to share
Describe the shape without the figures. "A B2B SaaS client in a regulated market, where the constraint was that we could not name customers in any ad" tells a buyer more about your judgement than a percentage does, and it breaks nothing.
Sell the diagnosis before the treatment
Most clients in this category have hired a marketer before and it did not work. They are not sceptical of you, they are sceptical of the category, and a long pitch makes that worse because the last person also had a long pitch.
A short, paid, scoped diagnostic converts far better. It is small enough to say yes to, it gives you real data before you commit to a plan, and it lets them find out what you are like to work with at low risk. Retainers that start this way survive much longer than retainers that start with a proposal.
Never guarantee a result you do not control
You do not control their pricing, their product, their sales team or their competitors. Guaranteeing an outcome that depends on all four wins the job and loses the client. What you can commit to is what you will do, what you will measure and when they will see it, and that is a stronger position than a promise because you can actually keep it.
What marketers ask
Only where you control the lever being measured and the tracking is yours to verify. Revenue share on a funnel you cannot see, for a product you do not price, is a bet on someone else's business.
By being the person, not the account. Agencies win on capacity and lose on attention. Name the senior who does the work, because with you it is always the same one.
Say when they happened. Dated honesty reads as credible; an undated claim reads as evasive, and buyers in this category check.
Not quite your line of work?
Find out what your profile is costing you
Seven questions, no account. You get a score, the three gaps costing you the most, and what to do about each one.