Robin Bonn
On The Agency Profit Podcast
“I always say to agencies, you need to fire yourself from the job of persuader. Don't talk people into working with you. Your selling and your conversion will be far stronger if you recognize that you're trying to help people as opposed to convince them.”
The Agency Profit Podcast · Agency Business · November 2026
Context
Asked about 'selling differently', the step after differentiation, Robin contrasts the old superstar-pitchman idea of agency sales with consultative selling that helps clients work out whether you are the right fit.
Transcript
…instrument because it somehow diminished their specialization. It's nonsense. So if new tools come along to help you deliver an outcome, happy days. That doesn't make you, you know, so it's the narrowness, which just doesn't make sense when it doesn't, you know, just doesn't stand up to scrutiny.
…And I want to get to price because everyone's obsessed with that. But I love talking about what is the work that should happen before you jump to price. So let's talk a little bit about sell differently and what some of the important things are once you've got your differentiation dialed in.
Well, I mean, I think this is where so much of the what I call cultural inertia in agencies sits. So what I mean by that is that there are so many embedded, you know, behaviors and mindsets and habits of the way that we've always done things. Even the kind of cultural touchstones, like I always think Bloody Madman's got a lot to answer for. It's a sort of harking back to the good old days, even though there were some pretty horrendous things going on in the world at that particular time, which we haven't quite sorted out yet, unfortunately. But let's not go down that route right now. But this idea that the sort of the superstar salesperson can come in and dazzle in the pitch. We love to buy into the iconography of that. And, you know, if you've ever been on the receiving end of sales pitches from technology companies, often they have much more of an engineering culture. So of course, they either send in the engineers and they bombard you with products or features, and you have to work very, very hard to try and work out A, what they're…
Now, so it's interesting. In my career, I started in retail sales with Apple. And then I shifted to doing more of like a, you know, going out hunting for what you want to eat sort of sales motion. And there is such a, it's so easy to do a consultative selling process when someone comes to you…
yeah, absolutely. I mean, the frustrating thing about this is that, you know, the point about technology companies, I thankfully started my career in a technology company and they invested the shit out of us, you know, as salespeople. It was a whole kind of Glengarry Glen Ross sort of, you know…
Okay. I want to talk about a couple of things here that you've said that I think are really interesting. First, you've sort of defended procurement. I think a lot of people like to hate on procurement. I think your words were like, outside of the context of procurement, all the procurement people I…