Premature Amplification

Premature amplification.

Ok so I know this sounds ridiculous but bear with me because I genuinely think this is a Thing.

And if I had to name the single biggest commercial mistake I've seen agencies make over the last twenty years, that's probably what I'd call it.

It's the temptation to amplify before you've built something worth amplifying.

To race to activation.

And by activation, I mean taking something to market. Outreach. Prospecting. Sending emails. Picking up the phone. Launching campaigns. All the visible deployment activities that make it feel like growth has begun.

Wait... what? Surely that's the point?

We all want momentum. We all want progress. We all want to see that the investment is working. That's why this mistake is so understandable.

It's not made by careless agencies, or agencies that are bad at growth. Quite the opposite. They've made a conscious decision to invest in winning more work and they want reassurance that they're moving in the right direction. They want meetings in the diary. Opportunities in the pipeline. Something tangible that you can take to the board that proves the engine has started.

I completely understand that instinct because, for most of my career, I was helping agencies do exactly that.

Which is probably why I've become so stubborn about what happens next. When growth starts to slow, the conversation is almost always the same.

"We need more clients."

Which means we need more opportunities.

Which means we need more meetings.

Which means we need more outreach.

Which probably means hiring an SDR, appointing a lead generation agency or buying another platform that promises to make prospecting easier.

Every step follows logically from the one before it. It's a perfectly sensible chain of thinking. The only trouble is that the chain starts too late.

By the time you've reached for the amplifier, you've already assumed the thing you're amplifying is ready to be amplified.

Sometimes it is. Sometimes it isn't.

I should probably admit something before going any further.

I love outreach.

I love the craft of it. Even after all these years, I still enjoy researching a prospect until I find an angle nobody else has spotted. I still enjoy writing a bespoke email that feels more like the beginning of a conversation, rather than the start of a sequence.I still think thoughtful outbound remains one of the most effective ways an agency can create commercial momentum.

So please don't think this is an article against lead generation. If anything, it's an article in defence of it. Because outreach is far too valuable in terms of time and investment - to waste on weak foundations.

One sentence has been rattling around my head for years now.

Outreach can amplify commercial problems just as effectively as it can solve them.

When I first wrote that down, I thought it was just a pithy observation. Now I think it's one of the most important lessons I've learnt.

Think about it.

If your proposition isn't distinctive, outreach simply introduces more people to an ordinary proposition.

If your case studies talk about deliverables instead of commercial outcomes, all outreach does is share weaker evidence with a much larger audience.

If your website still speaks to the clients you had five years ago, rather than the ones you're trying to attract today, more traffic doesn't suddenly make it more relevant. One mouldy blog post from 3 years ago does not scream 'bleeding-edge innovative thinkers.'

Outreach doesn't create clarity. It amplifies it. And that's precisely why it deserves something remarkable to amplify.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to realise this.

For years I was convinced the answer to commercial problems was better outreach.

Not more outreach. Better outreach.

Better subject lines.

Better opening sentences.

Better value propositions.

Better calls to action.

I became slightly obsessed with the search for the perfect cold email. The one message that would somehow cut through every sector, every job title and every buying committee. The silver bullet. The holy grail. The email that would make a prospect stop what they were doing and think, "My goodness... we need to speak to these people."

Yeah. It doesn't really work like that.

Whisper this quietly - and please don't tell the brand side of the marketing world - but I've been behind millions and millions of outbound emails.

I've written them. Reviewed them. Pulled them apart. Rebuilt them.

Trained teams to write them. Created templates, guides and masterclasses.

Watched approaches succeed spectacularly. Watched others fail spectacularly.

If there was an idea worth testing, I probably tested it. I think I probably tested a fair few ideas that were probably not worth testing.

My point is, even after the decades of doing this and the sheer volume of evidence I've accumulated, I'm still fascinated by outreach.

I just understand its role very differently now. Because eventually I realised something: the email was almost never the thing that determined whether a campaign succeeded.

It was simply the first place a target audience got to inspect everything behind it.

Every now and then a new agency would land on my desk.

I'd open the website.

Maybe it was an agile indie agency, full of creative risk takers, brief challengers and digital ninjas in a market already full of creative risk takers, brief challengers and digital ninjas.

The website looked tired. The case studies weren't particularly compelling. There wasn't a distinctive point of view. No obvious evidence that this agency saw the world differently from anyone else.

And I'd think,

"Right... somehow I've got to persuade great clients to buy this."

Sometimes we managed it. Sometimes personality carried us, sometimes persistence did. Sometimes we simply outworked everyone else: the hustle culture can work.

And yes, if I'm being completely honest, sometimes I convinced myself that one more round of testing would uncover the breakthrough.

A more cunning subject line. A stronger opening. A better value proposition.

Because the answer had to be better outreach. Right?

Looking back, I don't think I was asking too much of myself.

I think I was asking far too much of the email.

We weren't introducing something remarkable. We were asking the email to become the remarkable thing… and that's an almost impossible brief.

Any email, no matter how well written, is just the tip of the spear. The thing that starts the conversation, not the entire conversation. It's everything behind it that matters.

Is the agency genuinely different?

Do they have a point of view worth hearing?

Do the case studies prove meaningful commercial impact?

Would somebody remember them after the conversation had ended?

If the answer to those questions is no, no amount of clever copywriting can carry the weight forever.

The agencies that consistently outperformed weren't winning because we'd written an email that was three per cent more persuasive than everyone else's, or because someone happened to be particularly good at handling objections on a cold call.

Those things mattered, of course they did. But they were never the whole story.

The outreach worked because it was introducing something that already deserved to be introduced.

A clearer proposition.

Stronger evidence.

A more interesting point of view.

A founder with genuine credibility.

A business that understood exactly who it wanted to work with and why.

Outreach - no matter how lovingly and amazingly crafted - cannot create those things. It can only reveal them.

One of the occupational hazards of specialising is that you begin to see the world through your speciality.

There's an old saying that if the only tool you own is a hammer, every problem starts looking suspiciously like a nail. Commercial growth has its own version.

Positioning specialists naturally notice positioning.

PR consultants see visibility.

CX consultants see customer journeys.

Outbound specialists, unsurprisingly, tend to see outreach.

None of those perspectives are wrong, really. It's just an incomplete view.

I've been that outbound specialist, so I understand why the first instinct is to reach for more activity. It's visible. It's measurable. It feels like progress. But movement and progress aren't always the same thing.

I can't tell you how many conversations have begun with a founder telling me they needed more pipeline. Perfectly reasonable.

Three hours later we weren't talking about pipeline at all. We were talking about a proposition nobody could remember. Case studies that explained what had been delivered but never why it mattered. A website speaking confidently to exactly the wrong audience. A founder sitting on years of genuinely 'insightful insights', that had never been turned into a commercial point of view.

The outreach wasn't the problem, just the first place that the symptoms appeared.

That's an important distinction because commercial growth has an awkward habit of breaking somewhere completely different from where we first notice it.

I often tell people I'm a tad suspicious of fast starts. "We'll be live and in market within the first two weeks of working together" is a claim that makes me inherently nervous.

I'm going to quantify this. This is not because I dislike fast paced environments or am advocating for sluggish, ponderous working practices.

No, I love momentum and seeing campaigns go live. I love the energy that comes from finally taking something to prospects and seeing how it performs.

I just think that pace and energy and enthusiasm can sometimes be better spent getting your shit together before going loud.

I've learnt that there's a difference between moving quickly and rushing. One builds confidence, the other simply hides uncertainty behind activity.

And it's remarkably easy to mistake movement for progress.

Launch the campaign, send the emails. Build the dashboard, watch the numbers.

It feels productive and sometimes it is. But sometimes all we've done is make the underlying problem much more visible. The machine isn't broken, it's just not plugged in.

And gee, I'm going to be really clear here. Please don't interpret this as 'disappear into months of strategy workshops and asset creation waiting for perfection'.

Businesses don't work like that.

Most of us are building while we're selling. Learning while we're doing. Adjusting as the market teaches us new things.

Momentum matters. Shipping matters. Learning matters.

But there's a world of difference between refining something that's fundamentally sound and hoping execution will compensate for foundations that were never quite ready.

There's a temptation in every commercial challenge to ask what we need more of. More outreach, visibility, content and prospect meetings.

Sometimes those really are the right answers but over the years I've found a different question is usually far more revealing.

What are we about to amplify?

Are we about to introduce something genuinely worth noticing? Or are we pushing activity out into the market simply because activity feels reassuring?

And look, I can pester prospects with the best of them. We can absolutely go hard. I'd just rather do that when we've got all our new business geese in a rhombus. It works better that way.

If there's one commercial belief I'm prepared to defend more stubbornly than almost any other, it's this.

Growth rarely breaks where you first notice it. Yeah, I know. Another phrase that sounds suspiciously crafted. But it's true: it usually begins much earlier, in the foundations that everything else depends upon.

This is a hill I'm perfectly happy to die on.

The biggest commercial mistake I've seen isn't poor outreach or bad cold emails or weak prospect lists or, heaven forbid, not enough activity and quickly enough.

It's racing to amplify before you've built something worth amplifying.

So yeah. If you think you might be suffering from premature amplification, treatment is available.

It usually starts by unplugging the amplifier for a week and asking whether you've actually built something worth amplifying.