"You're the best-kept secret in this industry."
People say it like it's a compliment.
It isn't.
A coach I talked to this summer has a couple of decades in the business and testimonials most people would kill for. People keep handing them that line. Here's what they think of it:
"They keep calling me the biggest secret in the country, which I hate that term now because it's losing me millions."
Best-kept secret is a nice way of saying nobody knows you exist.
And nobody buys from a company they've never heard of.
The shortlist is set before anyone calls you
6sense, a B2B research company, surveyed nearly 4,000 business buyers for its 2025 Buyer Experience Study.
- Buyers were 61% of the way through their buying process before they first contacted a vendor.
- 79% of them initiated that first contact themselves.
- Four of the five vendors on their shortlist were already there on day one.
- They bought from their top-ranked vendor 77% of the time.
Read that third one again.
By the time a buyer starts looking, most of the list is already written. Mostly from memory. Names a colleague mentioned and names that kept showing up in their feed while they were half paying attention.
If you're not one of those names, it doesn't matter how good you are. Nobody ever compares you to anyone.
Credentials don't fix this
You'd think a big enough résumé would carry you.
It doesn't.
I talked to the president of a leadership development firm whose senior team has the kind of bios that end arguments. Here's how they described the problem:
"We can get in the room and have compelling conversation. You know, it's just getting in the room, that is the challenge."
An executive coach who has spent a whole career in engineering put it even more plainly:
"You can't grow a business that nobody knows about. I've got a fantastic business, but there's zero to small traffic on my website."
The work is good and the reviews are real.
And it all just sits there. 🤷
Somebody else is getting your clients
When I asked that coach why a competitor owned the market they wanted, they didn't say the other guy was better.
Their answer: "He's done the marketing. I haven't. That's it."
The competitor teamed up with a marketer close to ten years ago and has been running the same playbook ever since.
The founder says, "Our work speaks for itself."
The work doesn't say anything. It's sitting in a PDF on a client's shared drive.
The competitor's ad says something to your buyer every week.
David Ogilvy liked to say you can't save souls in an empty church. You can be the best preacher in town and it won't matter if nobody walks in.
Referrals keep you a secret
Most "best-kept secret" firms run on referrals, which is why they stay secret.
A referral only reaches the people your happy clients happen to know, at the moment those people happen to need you.
A training consultant told me exactly how this plays out in their niche. When someone in learning and development needs a trainer, they post in their network asking for recommendations, and they get "five or six recommendations instantaneously."
So even when you get referred, you're one name on a list someone else handed over, next to five other firms that got referred too.
Congratulations. You're in a raffle.
Why paid traffic is the cure
Most of your market isn't buying right now. John Dawes at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute made that point with what's now called the 95:5 rule: at any given time, the large majority of business buyers aren't in the market for what you sell.
They will be, though. That exec coach put it better than I can:
"You can talk all day long about why it's a great idea to have a coach. They don't give a shit. Something has changed in their life."
When something changes, they reach for the names they already know.
Paid traffic is how you get to be one of those names on purpose. It means paying Facebook, Instagram or Google to show your ad to people who look like your best clients, week after week, whether or not they're buying yet.
That's what my agency does. We run those ads for B2B firms and put meetings with buyers on their calendars.
You don't have to wait for a client to bump into the right person at the right dinner. The right people see you on a schedule, and when something changes for them, your name is already there.
It also changes the first conversation. The coach from the top of this post:
"Whenever people come through to me through the website... Nine times out of 10, if they got the money, it's done. Because if I come to them, it's different."
What that looks like from your side of the desk
If you've never run an ad, here's what actually happens.
First, we test. Before real money goes in, we write a handful of short ads, each describing your buyer's problem a different way, mostly in the words your best clients used when they first called you. We run them for a few days on a small budget. The ones YOUR buyers respond to tell us what YOUR market cares about. Only those get the real money.
Then picture someone who runs a company like your best client's, scrolling their phone at night.
1. They keep seeing you. Not once. Every week or two, an ad from you shows up that describes a problem they recognize. Most of them aren't ready to buy this month. That's fine. Every time they see you, you get a little more familiar. This is how you get onto the list they'll make from memory later.
2. The ones who are ready tap the ad and land on one short page about you. Not your homepage. Your homepage was built for people who already know you. A stranger needs something simpler: who you help, what the first conversation is, and what happens on it.
3. They answer a few quick questions. How big their company is, what's going on, how soon they need help. Anyone who isn't a fit never gets offered a time, so your calendar only fills with people you'd actually want to talk to.
4. If they fit, they pick a time on your calendar right there, and get reminders before the call. No back-and-forth over email, and far fewer no-shows.
5. The ones who aren't ready yet keep hearing from you. Their name and email go into a contact list in your own system, and they get useful emails from you until something changes. When it does, you're not a stranger anymore.
6. You get on a call with someone who found you. They've seen your name for weeks. They chose to reach out. That's a very different first call from the one where you're chasing them.
Two more things, because they're where firms usually get burned:
You own all of it. The ads run from an account in your company's name, and that account keeps the record of everyone who ever saw or answered them. You pay Facebook directly. If we ever part ways, all of it stays with you.
You pay us per qualified call. Before we start, you and I write down what "qualified" means for your firm. You pay us when someone who meets that bar gets on a call with you. Not for clicks, not for names, and not for no-shows.
If the people who find you love you, and not enough people find you, book a strategy call with me. Bring the testimonial you're proudest of. We'll talk about how to get it in front of a few thousand more of the right people, and I'll tell you honestly whether ads make sense for your firm.