Client perspectives on agencies in 2025 (featuring Lee McKnight, Jr.)

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Chip Griffin: Hello, and welcome to another episode of Chats with Chip. I’m your host, Chip Griffin, the founder of SAGA, the Small Agency Growth Alliance, and I am delighted to have with me one of my favorite guests, Lima Nightmare, AKA Lee McKnight from RSW/US.

Lee McKnight, Jr.: I’m back and it’s good to be back. Chip. Thanks for having me again.

I love it. I, so I have to, I did bring a little toy, eraser sushi that I will be nibbling on throughout the show. It is important that, yeah, don’t. They literally are erasers.

Yeah, that’s probably not a good idea to be erasers.

But I did bring something.

Chip Griffin: Excellent. I mean, I can always count on you to have a prop of some kind whenever you’re on any of my shows.

So hopefully people are watching this on video. And if you’re listening to it, go back and watch the video because I mean, it’s, it’s part of the entertainment that we have. But in addition to entertainment, we’re going to get into some substantive things here. And because Lee, you and RSW are really expert in business development topics and, and you don’t just opine, you actually go out and do research. You’ve done some research recently. And so we’re going to talk about some of the findings from your latest surveys.

Lee McKnight, Jr.: Absolutely. No, and thank you. And we released this little bit of background, oh, about a month, but I think what’s interesting is interesting is how evergreen a lot of these topics are staying.

And we, we’ll, we’ll get into it, but we added a couple of new questions we found to be, you know, really interesting and, thing, you know, one of the things we talked about before we started was, well, I should finish, shouldn’t I? What we do is we survey agencies and marketers. This is one of the three survey reports we release over the year.

Where marketers are included, and it’s probably the most popular, probably not a surprise to hear, in terms of hearing both sides and where they play out, you know, in the answers to some of these questions. So, there’s, there’s the, setting the table there. I think that survey went out end of November release.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, and I think that’s, that’s really what does stand out about this, is that you are looking at both sides. The client side and the agency side, which is, which is relatively unique. I mean, folks like myself, we, you know, I do a lot of research, but I tend to focus just on the agency side. And so being able to bring both pieces of it into the equation, really, I think.

Has surfaced some, some interesting nuggets, that are worth looking at.

Lee McKnight, Jr.: Yeah, for sure. And I think we, we decided to start with some of the disconnects, which are always, it’s a fun place to start. I think, and I know one of the ones that you’d mentioned specifically wanted to talk about out of the gate is productization piece, which I’ll try to say that over and over again, it won’t happen, but.

Just to set the table there are so, 52.4 percent of agencies say they sometimes, productize their services yet, 65 percent of marketers still prefer customized services over productized solutions. So there, there’s a, there’s a gap in expectations. And I thought that that 50 percent number maybe seemed a little high.

I wanted to see what you thought, but definitely a gap.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. I mean, it, it, the number does seem perhaps a little bit high. I think, you know, part of the challenge that you run into here is definitions, right? Because you know, there are, I would argue that the vast majority of agencies have productized their services over the years.

When, when I go in and I look at the engagements that agencies have, it looks pretty similar from one client to the next, and the pricing is pretty similar from one client to the next. So effectively that is productizing. It’s not doing it in a branded way, you know, where it’s in your face. And so I think that, that some of this may come down to, is it overt productization or is it subtle productization?

Lee McKnight, Jr.: Oh, that’s great. I just wrote a post on this. I’m going to go update it. Because I hadn’t really thought about that because you’re exactly right. I mean, if you look at marketers, SEO firms, I mean, these types of firms that have bundled for lack of a better order productized services for quite a while, you know, I think it’s interesting because I had an agency principal email me, not one of our clients, but just that happens to know a great firm, but, and it’s small to midsize firm, but it said, can you get like 10 minutes?

Cause what do you, what exactly do you mean by like productized services and how would we, a creative agency, we’re not even thinking about that. So that’s very interesting. So we did have a little bit of a conversation about it and he said, I don’t, I don’t think we want to do that, you know, as a creative agency, I can see how, but it’s interesting because you’ve got a lot of consultants and, you know, folks out there saying that this is the way it’s going. This is the way professional services firms are also going, and I can see that as well, whether it’s a law firm or what have you, but, but it’s interesting how I see a little pushback too in terms of creativity and that customization and, you know, what, how are you going to do that year over year, or I should say month over month.

When clients start to wanting you to get away from your nice little bundle or, or what you, you know, how you productized it, then, then what happens? And I think we know where that tends to go.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. And look, I mean, I, I think that, you know, if you ask a client if they want something that is productized or customized, I mean, everybody’s going to say customized, right?

Sure. And, and it’s, it, it just, it feels better. It feels like you’re giving me better service. I, so I think we always need to be careful when we’re doing these things in thinking about how it’s being heard on the other end. So same thing with, I’m a big advocate of paid discovery as a first step in agency client relationships.

Yes. However. I don’t believe you should ever call it paid discovery with the client, right? Because that, that it’s just, it’s off putting. And so you need to have a different way to describe it. Same thing with productization. You know, you don’t necessarily need to say that here’s our packaged product that we’re selling you, but you do say, Hey, we have a, a standard process that we use.

It’s absolutely customized to you. But it’s like going into a restaurant and asking them to hold the pickles on the burger or something like that, right? You’ll, you’ll make adjustments. But you’re, I mean, even a creative firm, if you’re doing logo design or web design, you’ve got a process that you follow.

Every creative firm that I’ve ever worked with has a process that they follow. That is productization.

Lee McKnight, Jr.: No, I do agree with you, but I, I, what I tend to see, and especially just even lately in like writing this post, I just wrote, I’ll keep going back to that, but, but digging into it a little bit more. Is that there does seem to be this push for like, we put it again for like the over productization.

Yes. Where they are saying like, no, we have this package and we need to be doing this. And here, many agencies over the past three months or so asking me and saying, here, this is our plan. Productizing X and X. And it’s not that those, I mean, who am I to say it’s a bad idea without, I mean, I’m, we don’t, we’re just scratching the surface with them out there, but, and I’m not sure where exactly it’s coming from, but there seems to be that push for overproductizations.

Yeah, I knew it. And, yeah, I’ll be curious to see where, where that goes.

Chip Griffin: And I suspect some of it depends on what clients you’re trying to sell to, right? I mean, if you’re selling to, you know, Fortune 500, my guess is that they are going to be less receptive to the idea of an overtly productized offering.

Whereas if you’re in the SME space, that’s a lot less off putting to someone like that because, you know, that’s probably how they’re selling a lot of their stuff too these days. Well, let’s move on to, another topic. You know, one of, one of the ones that, that really jumped out at me, was the, the question of, clients paying for specific deliverables.

And, and those numbers have changed a little bit.

Lee McKnight, Jr.: So we had, 53 percent of marketers or clients now preferring paying for specific deliverables up from just 5 percent in 2016, which I thought was very interesting. It was, so it was 59 percent of agencies charged clients from deliverables instead of hours.

88 percent of clients prefer to pay for deliverables over hours. This is much more in your domain, Chip, I have to say, because we don’t, we work somewhat with clients on pricing, but, I mean, what’s your take?

Chip Griffin: Yeah. I mean, I, I think this is, this is the, the direction that a lot of, professional services folks are, are generally moving, right?

You know, where it’s, I mean, you know, whether you call it paying for deliverables, you just call it, you know, fixed fee or things, people are generally moving away from, hourly billing, time and materials, those kinds of approaches in part, because there are a lot of folks out there advocating value pricing, and I’m not going to go on my anti value pricing rant because I, I think that it’s just, most people don’t understand it and, and most people are implementing it incorrectly. But I think that in general, clients like to know, what am I going to get for what I’m paying for? Honestly, it’s generally good for the agency as well, because then there’s a lot more certainty on their side, and so I, I think the hourly model is, is, you know, not necessarily gone, but headed out the door and really only useful when you have truly unpredictable projects where you really something like say crisis communications, where you have absolutely no idea what the bounds of the deliverables are going to be.

Because it’s going to evolve. But if you’re, if you’re, you know, designing a logo, building a website, launching an ad campaign, all of these things are, are, are things that you can, generally speaking, put a fixed fee and tell the client what they’re getting for it.

Lee McKnight, Jr.: And it’s directly related to those tangible outputs, which makes sense.

Chip Griffin: Yeah. Now the trick is, if you’re going to do that, please don’t tell them the number of hours that it actually took to do it, because I’m seeing this one not infrequently, where someone has a fixed fee for the deliverables, but then they still report to the client on how much time it took.

Lee McKnight, Jr.: They’re being transparent, Chip.

Chip Griffin: No good comes from that. You don’t do it. That’s very true. And if you get asked for it, you just say no.

Lee McKnight, Jr.: Right. It’s in the calculations. No, but in all sincerity right now, that’s not, interesting. Okay.

Chip Griffin: So, I mean, I, I think overall on, on pricing though, I, you know, did you have other questions on pricing in there? I can’t remember it.

Lee McKnight, Jr.: Well, I mean, I have to kind of want you to get into the value base a little bit, but if that’s going to, if we’re going to go off…

Chip Griffin: I’ll go on, I’ll go on my rant. So look, here’s the thing with value pricing. Most of the time when someone says they do value pricing, they’re just doing fixed fee for deliverables.

True value pricing really requires you to be almost a business analyst and to understand the exact value that a client will receive from the work that you’re doing. But the problem is that most of the things that agencies do It’s not that easy, and the client can’t give you a square answer. I mean, how many clients can you think of who could, who could really help you pinpoint the value of a logo?

Right? Right? I mean, it just, and, and, and logos are one of the, the ones that always seem to come up in value pricing. Well, you know, it’s You know, yes, it only took me, you know, three seconds to do the swoosh for the Nike, but you know, it’s worth billions of dollars in revenue to them. The vast majority of clients can’t answer that question.

So you can sit there and poke and prod at them and say, well, what would it be worth to you if we did this or that? And, and to me, it’s not, it’s not a particularly useful way of spending your time. And, and I do agree that fixed fee is, you know, generally speaking, a better way to go, but let’s call it what it is.

It’s fixed fee. It’s not value pricing.

Lee McKnight, Jr.: Okay. No, I like the rant. Interesting. Okay, there, there’s another, disconnect that we talked about a little bit before we jumped on I wanted to get into while we’re still there, and that’s one that we talked that, you know, that, maybe not a shock, but what’s interesting to see is that we had

77 percent of agencies who are confident and staying ahead of trends. Marketer confidence dropped to 62. Now you may look at that initially and say, well, okay, and, Lee? Well, it’s dropped four years in a row and it’s risen four years in a row for, for agencies and for marketers. And I think it’s, I just, I like to bring that up while maybe it’s not as mind blowing.

It’s important for agencies to realize. And it goes back to the order taker, and we’ve talked about this before, Chip, you know, where it’s hard to do, you have to do the work. But I think if we continue to see these trends move, that’s probably going to be an issue, right?

Chip Griffin: Oh, absolutely. I mean, it’s probably Yeah, I mean, one of the, one of the most common reasons that clients give for ending an agency relationship is that they, they feel like the, the agency is no longer coming to them with fresh ideas, that they’re just going through the motions.

And, you know, I think that, you know, that really is, what’s represented in part in, in this question and, and the results. I mean, it is particularly concerning to me. It’s not surprising to me that there’s disconnect. It is particularly concerning though that that agencies seem to be deluding themselves into thinking that more and more they are in touch and clients are feeling that they are less and less in touch.

So you don’t what mean the disconnect is one thing. But the fact that it’s getting worse It is certainly a concern. And I think there are a lot of reasons why agencies may look this way to clients. One is they may actually be behind the times, right? I mean, it’s just, it’s, it’s possible because some agencies just get so busy and, you know, nose to the grindstone, just churning out stuff that they don’t invest in, professional development and R& D and, and give their time, their staff time to work on those things.

But it’s also, I think, in part, symptomatic of the fact that when agencies do bring new ideas to clients, the client often says, sure, let’s do that. But they also don’t say, and we’ll pay more for it. And so it just gets added on. So I know from a lot of the agency owners that I work with, they’re kind of, they’re, they’re a little bit timid in bringing these new ideas forward because they’re afraid that they’re going to be stuck with doing the work without getting any extra compensation.

Lee McKnight, Jr.: Oh, totally. Yeah.

Chip Griffin: And you go, it’s the same thing in an office environment, right? I mean, how many times have you, you know, heard an employee say, well, I’m not gonna suggest that to the boss ’cause he’s probably gonna tell me I have to do it.

Lee McKnight, Jr.: And it, it plays into another question that we asked and we asked, we’ve asked this for years, and that is asking agencies and marketers what they thought in terms of those trends.

What, what, you know, what’s at the top and not shockingly of course it’s AI and right behind that is short form video. Which I think, you know, as an agency, you’re going to have to get vested in both of those in some shape or form. Obviously now that could mean services, but it could also mean business development, which I strongly suggest to agencies.

I mean, I don’t think… so, a lot of them don’t have the wherewithal to be as active as you are on social and on LinkedIn. I think that that can be very hard for small, mid sized firms. But just like those, the YouTube shorts, I mean, we went from doing my 3 Takeaways videos that were three to six minutes and our views were kind of going down and, and I’m waiting for you to say, well, whose fault is that?

But, not because of the talent. I mean, the talent’s there obviously, but we really can’t see for whatever reason, and we had actually, we’re rethinking that now, like, did we just get a hundred and something episodes and maybe it’s just time for a different format, something like that. But then those YouTube shorts for an agency on their phone, which is what they want you, you know, it’s more the TikTok that’s becoming everything, kind of those more raw, personal, shorter videos.

There’s never been a better time for an agency to get in there and create some of these. And it’s, it’s, it feels kind of weird sometimes and it’s different and plus I’m old, but. I, our views skyrocketed comparatively on those shorts that we’ve done and we’re still kind of experimenting with it.

And then with AI, good lord, yeah, I mean it, I find it helpful, I, I can’t speak, I can speak a little bit to services on the agency side. But I did have one principal raving about this GPT he created has cut his proposal creation time in half. I would love to see what those look like, you know, given kind of what we know about AI so far, even though it’s evolving exponentially, I’m just throwing out a couple of those things there that I think were interesting.

Chip Griffin: Absolutely. And look, I think that that agencies ought to be using a lot of these new or at least newer tools, and platforms too, to help grow their own business. But frankly, it’s a great way to learn. And so, you know, rather than experimenting on a client with AI or short form video or those kinds of things, experiment yourself with the agency. And so if it works, it’s a twofer, right? You’ve generated business and you’ve learned how to do it so that you can now frame it more accurately to a client and go sell it to them so that hopefully they will pay you more for it. So absolutely, I mean agencies need to be getting into all of these different things and figuring out how to use them. And to your specific point I think AI is a perfect thing to help in doing a proposal production.

If you’re going to do proposals, I, and I would rather you didn’t, I’m, I’m anti proposal.

Lee McKnight, Jr.: I don’t think I knew that. Okay. Interesting. Sure. I, I can guess why, but.

Chip Griffin:  Yeah, I mean, it’s to me, it just doesn’t make any sense to, because proposals are a way for the client or the prospect just to kind of put you off and say, just send me a proposal, you know. You know, and, and there needs to be much more of a dialogue back and forth and have a meeting of the minds on what you’re going to do and roughly what it’s going to cost.

And then go ahead and once you’ve, you know, got a sort of a handshake agreement that says if this works, you know, if, if you can really do this for this price, we’ll, we’ll sign. Now, okay, go ahead and put together a statement of work, but don’t do a proposal. I, I think.

Lee McKnight, Jr.: And that’s a fair point because I, you can, yeah, I’ve seen agencies default because they kind of, either they’re not comfortable enough or savvy enough, whatever the right phraseology is, where they just default to, we’ll just send over a proposal.

Yeah. Then half the time they take two or three weeks to even send that over. Which drives me nuts. That’s a whole other episode, right? I mean, it’s like, what are you doing?

Yeah, if you’re going to do them, you got to turn them around quick.

Got to turn them around quick. And that’s also part of the problem is some of those, they can get so bespoke that you’ll be up all night turning that around quickly.

Chip Griffin: Well, and the biggest problem is that too often they’re done with very little actual information. I mean, how many proposals have you seen that an agency turns out after one or maybe two calls with a prospect? How can you put together any kind of decent proposal for a client based on that little information? You simply can’t. You’re just, you’re guessing.

And so I would rather you be having, you know, more in depth conversations with the prospect so that you can figure out, yeah, this is what we want to do, this is the direction we want to go, and here’s roughly what it’s going to cost. And then go from there and you will waste a lot less time on your side and you will waste the time of the prospects a lot less as well.

Lee McKnight, Jr.: Yeah, that’s fair. I think it’s tough to pin down those prospects sometimes to get that info that you need, but that’s nothing new.

Chip Griffin: But if you can’t pin them down when they’re looking for a solution, imagine how hard it’s going to be once they become a client. So that’s something you need to factor into your pricing too, right?

If you’re chasing them when they’ve come to you or they’ve agreed to talk to you to solve one of their problems, It ain’t going to get any better.

Lee McKnight, Jr.: That’s very true. And that’s where the frustration begins to set in. Yeah. Right. Yeah.

Chip Griffin: I mean, I, I will say at least you, your, your study did show that, that RFPs seem to be less popular with agencies than in the past. So that, I mean, while I disliked the proposals, I really hate RFPs, so.

Lee McKnight, Jr.: I was gonna say, I mean, I, yeah. Different than RFPs and I figured that that’s what we were gonna say, but, you know, no, that, that was heartening. That was good. It was, fewer high volume responses and, and 24, agents, agencies just focusing on quality over quantity overall.

As RFPs become less universal with some opting out altogether and those percentages kind of keep going up. So that is really good to see. I bet that hamster wheel, I, I mean, I, again, we’ve talked about this before your higher ed or some of the other CVDs, you have to do it, you know, every three years or whatever that is.

But otherwise, I mean, that’s anytime we, our own clients, agency clients or prospects, like we are not here to chase RFPs for you because why would you ever want that? We don’t ignore them because. Some may actually be the right fit, but a shiver goes down your spine.

Chip Griffin: I mean, I think, I think that, I mean, it’s, it’s really encouraging for me to see it because a lot of these things that we’ve talked about, RFPs, you know, excessive proposal writing, that, you know, these are, are symptoms of agency leaders who want to feel like they are doing something on the business development front.

Even if they aren’t necessarily. Same thing with, you know, redesigning your website or things like that. You know, you convince yourself that these are meaningful steps that will help grow the business when really what you need to be doing is having meaningful conversations with actual people. And, and that is more likely to win you business than anything else.

Lee McKnight, Jr.: Yeah, no, a hundred percent. Yeah. Interesting that you, that you say that because another piece of it, the top four ways that marketers find agencies, you know, we ask that every year as far as business development goes and, and by the way, if we want to get back to RFPs, but, I always find it interesting.

Well, you know what? It’s not interesting because we know what the number one is. It’s referrals. No shot there and it will probably never change. And, and hey, referrals are great, but what has been steadily rising, at least over the past four years, is direct outreach. Which is kind of interesting because agencies hate to do that or they’re not good at it or all of the above, or they just legitimately don’t have time or at least make the time. But I think it’s 52 percent of agencies, I think it came in third, direct outreach.

So, you know, as a biz dev firm, it, you know, it, it is good to see. And I think that while it, I think it’s gotten progressively better. We talked about this over the last several months and a couple of quarters, breaking through now is so different than even it was five years ago in terms of like email deliverability or the thing, and I’ve certainly met ops people that do that and know much more than I do, but it’s, it’s tough.

And so I think I especially can see for small, mid sized firms, you’re not going to have the budget for a lot of these platforms and, and there’s so many shiny things as well that, that it just, I, we get the frustration. Thankfully, we have people that, you know, are then part of that, that, that test a lot of those.

I had, it’s coming out that would work, but it’s good to see agencies still committing, you know, at least more than half to it.

Chip Griffin: So, you know, either from the, the study or obviously direct outreach is, is very much in, in your wheelhouse, for RSW. Is that, are there any types of direct outreach that, that seem to be more effective?

Is it You know, is it, is it more thought leadership driven? Is it just a straight up, Hey, let’s have a conversation about how we can help you. What, what are you seeing or what is the study show as far as the kind of direct outreach that’s most effective right now?

Lee McKnight, Jr.: Good question. I think, and some of this has got to be more what we’ve, what we’ve seen.

I think that. We’ll certainly just a mass email. We personally aren’t really about that. Just give this image back too late. Comes vomiting that out, you know, and you spray and pray. I’m always been not a fan of that at all. And who is? Having said that many still try to go there, and I don’t know how they don’t get dinged and completely blocked, which they probably are. But you know, I think what still holds true and it’s not just because we do it, I mean, we see it out there is because you don’t know where these folks live, your prospects, you have to be careful about only devoting yourself to one platform and/or channel, meaning if you’re just emailing and emailing away, I’m not saying that doesn’t work, but the phone still works.

I think the key there is making sure that if you can have some thought leadership in there, you almost have to these days, and it doesn’t mean that you have this it’s not going to be your full time job. And that is actually where AI does help. I think going back for a second, there’s nothing worse than, especially on LinkedIn, taking these shortcuts where they just have the AI spit out whatever gratuitous business cliche.

And I’ve seen agency owners, owners do this and it’s like, you can tell so quickly that’s the AI and I don’t know what, what, what are you getting out of that? But I think there are ways it can inform research. It can inform messaging in a way that maybe you hadn’t thought about. Today anyway, you should not take that directly and just pop it wherever or, or get it out to a prospect.

But I’ve had, I’ve been trying to learn more just along the lines of prompts. I think it’s so much deeper that I didn’t realize even two weeks ago, I got on the sub stack and I was like, Oh my God, that’s, that’s a huge prompt that I had no idea it got that complicated for lack of a better word and I learned a lot from it actually.

And so I think we’ll see where that goes, but I think making sure with that outreach that you get more of that. It’s going to take a little bit more time, but I think for small and mid sized firms, if you’re able to really target those prospects, and this might sound like, well, coarsely, but targeting those prospects so that you could have some of that personalized outreach, ultimately get to those conversations that you’re talking about, Chip, where you are able to show them specifically, this is how we can help you and solve this business challenge because our clients are doing it. Versus the fluffy stuff and I think agencies have gotten better. But man, there’s still a lot where to your point. I mean, they all look alike in many ways. It’s gotten better. But, you know, I think alternating those platforms and alternating those touches is one of the best ways to get in the door.

Chip Griffin: Yeah, I think you, you touched on something really important there, which is to make it personalized.

And, and real personalized, not using AI to fake personalize

it, which, I mean, I’ve seen that go horribly wrong in my own inbox on a regular basis. Right? It’s not, yeah. It’s just awful. And it’s, I mean, LinkedIn is, is terrible these days. You know, it seems like every time I accept a connection request, it immediately is followed by a sales pitch.

And, and so it, it really, it frankly has made me reluctant to accept LinkedIn connections in the way that I used to in the past. I really kind of have to know who you are now before I’m accepting it. Even if you look like, you know, someone that I ought to be connected with, because I’m just tired of that, you know, poke me in the eye with a sales pitch right away. And, and you’ve got to work on building relationships and, and it’s, it’s about quality, not quantity.

I mean, as you said, spray and pray, vomiting it out. That’s not the approach.

Lee McKnight, Jr.: No, that’s interesting. Specifically to LinkedIn. I mean, I typically. It will be several weeks, minimally, and two or three touches of a part of my job is bringing agency clients on board, for every day to connect with them. Because I want them to at least have the diversity sublevel of permission, where to your point, you know, we may not have built a relationship yet, literally, but they’ve opened an email or they’ve responded to something.

It’s like, well, now that door’s open and they don’t have to, to, you know, accept it. But I most certainly then do not follow with any kind of pitch. It’s, hey, thanks. You know, it’s usually something where I’ve done a little bit of homework, and I’m bringing up something, either a newsletter I read, that they put out, or a post that they had.

To at least show them, look, I’m doing a little bit of homework here. This is not just, there’s, here’s why I’m reaching out. There’s a reason.

Chip Griffin: Well, and, and you do a lot of things like this research, which acts as a great door opener to conversations. And, and, and that is the right way to do it. And more agencies ought to be looking at those kinds of things, frankly, even doing their own research.

It, I mean, does it require work? Absolutely. But you can learn a lot from it and you can leverage it to build a new relationship.

Are you seeing more of that with agencies you’re interacting with?

I’m certainly seeing agencies doing more innovative things to try to build new connections. So that might be putting on their own events, for example, you know, that showcase both their abilities, but also makes connections with people who might be likely prospects for them.

I haven’t seen as much on the original research side, which I think is, is really an untapped opportunity. I agree. It doesn’t. You know, it doesn’t have to be a monumental piece of original research, you know, but a little bit goes a long way.

Lee McKnight, Jr.: It really does. And I feel like I’ve seen a little bit more, kinda hard to like quantify, but I feel like just because that’s what I’m doing day in and day out and interacting with either agency websites or literally with them.

But, and I will make sure and compliment them and not, not try to blow smoke, but just say that, I mean, you don’t know how, I mean, you probably do because you’re doing it, but how invaluable that can be and to your point does not have to be war and peace or the treatise that tells us all something that we never found out, but a little bit does go a long way and I think putting that into place in the key, of course, is getting it in front of your prospects and making sure that, you know, again, that the Kevin Costner build it and they will come is not a thing.

It simply hasn’t been for years. You’ve got to get it out there and that’s, that’s hard.

Chip Griffin: And you gotta do something to stand out because there is so much of this AI generated garbage that’s out there. And so, you know, doing things like original research or events or webinars or those kinds of things are things that, that can’t be replicated by AI.

And so it’s, it’s a way for you to stand out and, and really connect with the people that you’re trying to talk with. Absolutely. Well, I think that’s probably a, a good spot to, to wrap up, this, episode on. Because I, we always try to stick to roughly 30 minutes. You and I have a really hard time with that though, because we could really go on for…

Lee McKnight, Jr.: Well I make it hard for you.

But yeah.

Chip Griffin: Um, if someone is interested in having a meaningful conversation with you, accessing this research, learning more about RSW/US and all the other great things that you do, where should they go? Lee?

Lee McKnight, Jr.: So our site is the best place to start. So rswus.com and got a bunch of, all of our research is actually there.

Absolutely. All at no cost.

Chip Griffin: Fantastic. Well, as always, you have been a great guest, and I look forward to having you back again very soon.

Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

And I appreciate everybody who has listened all the way through here, and I look forward to having you back, listening to another episode very soon.

Thanks, everybody.