Buyers meet your firm in fragments.
A search result. A partner’s post. A homepage skimmed between meetings, one tab among a dozen firms promising the same things in the same words. From those fragments, a buyer builds a shortlist – and most firms never learn they missed it.
First Impressions runs as a four-week sprint: drawing out the expertise your partners carry in their heads, making it memorable, and deploying AI-enabled distribution to keep it top-of-mind with potential clients.
The firm they remember is the firm
they call.So make sure your first impression
earns a second look.
Firms build their presence from the inside out. Prospective clients experience it from the outside in.
Inside, everyone knows what makes the firm good: the partner who solved this exact problem eleven times, the framework that keeps winning pitches, the “unique methodology” that actually makes a difference. Outside, a prospect sees generic capabilities described in the category’s standard language, set against stock photography and AI filler. Swap in a competitor’s logo and nobody would notice.
Buyers have changed how they look, too. At any given moment, roughly 95% of B2B buyers have no specific buying agenda.1 When that changes, they call the firm they already remember. And more of them now start by asking ChatGPT or Perplexity for a shortlist – so a firm has to be top-of-mind for people, and top-of-memory for machines.
And “differentiated” does not mean “memorable.” Some firms have a meaningful difference that never comes through; many more have less than they think. The work starts the same, either way: find what’s true and specific about the firm, then make it stick.
What it does
- Draws out the expertise in your partners’ heads and turns it into sharper, more memorable points of view
- Gives those points of view a look that carries impact, not the sameness of stock art
- Rewrites the pages that matter, for clients and search engines alike
- Upgrades your presence on Google and the AI engines
- Installs AI-enabled workflows to fuel your website, social channels, email engagement, and your leaders’ profiles
- Follows a predefined method with pre-built components, adapted to your firm – never a blank page
What it leaves alone
- Your logo, your palette and, by default, your typeface
- Your platforms: the work incorporates the tools you already use
- Your CRM and sales process
- Paid media
- Your calendar: four weeks and a light handoff, not an open-ended embed
- Your partners’ evenings: nobody has to write
Nothing you love gets thrown out. The words, the structure, the imagery, and the workflow get upgraded; the brand remains your own.
Same eye, different buyer.
Tanjent sees a firm the way its buyers do: from the outside in. The Buyer’s-Eye View reads it like an acquirer. First Impressions reads it like a prospect with a dozen tabs open.
Most recently, as Global CMO of Merkle, a $1B+ customer experience firm, I led the team that delivered a demand gen reboot: sales-ready leads up 840%, marketing-driven opportunities up 95%, on a declining spend.
Tanjent runs on the same machine: a regular newsletter and ~2 social posts a week, drawn from one body of thinking, with AI doing the heavy lifting and a human doing the curation and polish. This page included.
Four weeks. Fixed scope, fixed fee.
For founder-led services firms – agencies, consultancies, tech services shops and specialist advisors – that know more than they show.
Half on signing, half at the end of week four. Includes the outside-in read, the build, the handoff and the 30- and 90-day re-measure. Visual refresh implementation quoted separately. Any T&E billed at cost.
After the handoff, we can run the machine indefinitely, from $5k per month.
Some firms bring genuine points of difference, often buried in their own interviews. Others find two or three plausible ones and no clear winner – weak tea drowning in ambiguity. The sprint surfaces the options and recommends one. Choosing between them, with every partner on board and the firm’s direction at stake, calls for a separate go-to-market strategy engagement, scoped separately.
And if there’s a question underneath about what the firm could be worth, the Buyer’s-Eye View starts there.
Twenty minutes tells us both if it’s a fit.
Start a conversation →1. The 95:5 rule: John Dawes for the LinkedIn B2B Institute, published by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. Source ↩