Author: Sue Howard

  • THOUGHT LEADERSHIP GAP COSTS RECRUITING FIRMS DEALS

    THOUGHT LEADERSHIP GAP COSTS RECRUITING FIRMS DEALS

    Your firm sells one thing a competitor can’t buy off the shelf: the judgment of the partner running the mandate. 

    Databases? Rentable. And research gets more automated every year. But whether a particular operator will hold up with a particular board… yeah, that right there’s the special sauce. 

    Too bad it only lives inside one person’s head. Because that’s a real marketing bottleneck and it’s shrouding your firm’s visibility. And decision-makers who can’t see you, can’t buy you.

    For most professional purchases, the buyer gets something to inspect before they commit. Software gives them a trial. A tire manufacturer offers clients actual tires to kick. But judgment? That gives them nothing physical to test. It’s not like your client can take your read on a candidate for a spin. There’s no free trial to see whether that candidate will hold up in front of a board. Those things only get revealed later, after the contract has been signed and the placement either works or it doesn’t. 

    So what’s your buyer’s next best thing to “kicking the tires?” Your thoughts. In writing. 

    In the 2025 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report, 63% to 64% of decision-makers said they spend more than an hour a week reading thought leadership, while 55% to 56% said they use it when vetting a vendor. 

    Then there’s this: 73% of hidden decision-makers said an organization’s thought leadership is one of the best ways to get a feel for the type and caliber of thinking it’s likely to deliver.

    For most B2B categories, the thinking becomes a proxy for the product. And in executive search, the thinking happens to be the product. So when a buyer reads a partner’s article, effectively the partner’s thinking and expertise in print, that’s an actual deliverable. And the reader is forming an opinion about it. 

    A quick disclosure, the Edelman-LinkedIn studies are commercial research, produced by a communications agency and a professional network that both benefit from the conclusion that published thinking moves buyers. Still, the direction has held across seven annual editions, which is why I’m comfortable using it here. Treat the numbers as directional, not exact.

    Silence isn’t a neutral position

    A more uncomfortable finding appears in the 2024 edition of the same study, fielded across seven countries at the end of 2023. Some 70% of C-suite leaders said a piece of thought leadership had at least occasionally made them question whether to keep working with an existing supplier. 

    Among the people who had questioned that incumbent relationship, 54% realized other suppliers were smarter or more visionary, 51% concluded another supplier understood their challenges better, and a quarter said the content led them to end or significantly reduce the relationship.

    Now, imagine you’re the incumbent. That’s a churn mechanism running without you in the room. In practice, it behaves like a reference check your firm never hears about. A client forms a comparative view of your firm, based on the insights of people you’ve never met, and in a conversation that excludes you entirely.

    Because when was the last time a client told you they’d read something by a competitor and found it sharper than anything you’ve written?

    Never, because nobody volunteers that. Of course they don’t.

    So let’s say a managing partner has placed four executives for a client over six years but published nothing in that time. That managing partner doesn’t hold a neutral position in the client’s mind. Because you can be sure the client is reading somebody. That reading is shaping conclusions about relative competence, with the incumbent as the default comparison.

    That’s what makes this situation uncomfortable, rather than merely suboptimal. A partner senior enough to own the relationship is senior enough that the market expects a view from them. 

    They’re also visible enough that the absence of one registers.

    Why it doesn’t get written

    The failure is structural, not motivational.

    Your hours turn into fee revenue through search execution and business development. Writing has to compete for those same hours, and it loses almost every week. The cost of an unworked mandate lands this quarter. The cost of not writing lands later, in some quarter you can’t see yet. 

    You already know this pattern from the client side. It’s why a company can fully agree that succession planning matters and still keep pushing it behind the seat that needs filling this month. Search firms defer their own version for the same reason. There’s nothing irrational about it. The math is simply brutal in the short term.

    The 2024 study found the same pattern on the production side. Some 50% of organizers cited under-resourcing as a main obstacle to effective thought leadership, 27% said they fail to engage senior talent in creating it, and 26% said they lack the skills to produce quality content.

    Inside a search firm, those three problems pile up on top of each other. The person with the insight has no spare hours. The person with spare hours doesn’t have the insight.

    Two of the usual substitutes fail by degree. Hand the writing to a marketing generalist and you get something technically competent but empty of real domain judgment. It joins the pile measured in the 2024 study, where 48% of decision-makers rated the thought leadership they read as merely good and only 15% rated it very good or excellent. 

    On the other hand, let the partner write sporadically and the material gets better, but the model still falls short. The 2025 report’s advocacy finding depends on consistency: 79% of hidden decision-makers are more likely to champion a proposal from a firm that produces consistently high-quality thought leadership. Four posts in March followed by silence until October isn’t a pattern a buyer can rely on.

    Finally, the third substitute fails in a different way, and it’s worse. Generate the work wholesale with AI and you get the domain-empty problem faster, plus a cost the other two don’t carry. Consider buyers who treat published thinking as evidence of the caliber of your thinking. They’ll read that AI-generated content as evidence that no thinking even happened at all. The first two substitutes at least offer a weak sample of the product. This one only offers a sample of cutting corners.

    What a partner-level pipeline keeps separate

    The workable model separates the scarce input from the inputs someone else can supply.

    You already make that separation everywhere else in your firm. A partner doesn’t personally build the target list, schedule interviews, or format the position specification. Associates and researchers handle that work, and no client has ever decided the search is somehow less the partner’s because of it. What the partner holds is the calibration: they discern which operator will survive which board, whether the mandate on the table is really a succession problem wearing a growth-hire label, and whether a candidate’s stated reason for leaving is the real one.

    The leverage model isn’t new to your firm. You’ve simply never pointed it at the writing.

    So the partner supplies the judgment, the casework, and the positions they already hold. Research, structuring, drafting, fact verification, revision, and cadence management still need someone competent. That person just doesn’t need to be the partner.

    That gives you a very different workflow from commissioning articles. You interview the partner instead of briefing them. The raw material is what they already believe and what they’ve watched happen, and drawing it out takes a structured conversation rather than a writing assignment. Spend an hour walking through why the last several CTO mandates stalled at the offer stage and you can surface the argument and the evidence in the same sitting. Hours spent drafting the article happens offline. Then the draft goes back to the partner so they can correct the view. Not the commas.

    Measured honestly, the partner contributes one conversation and one review pass per piece. Even a calendar that can’t absorb a drafting session can absorb that.

    The objection worth taking seriously

    There’s a real argument against this, and it isn’t the flimsy version about authenticity in the abstract.

    A partner who publishes positions they haven’t personally worked through gets exposed the first time a client asks a follow-up question in the room. In a business built on judgment, holding a view you can’t defend in person is worse than holding no public view at all. 

    In executive writing, you can’t outsource the thinking. A piece drawn from a partner’s own mandates survives the follow-up questions because they lived it. A piece cobbled together from plausible-sounding takes can’t.

    Remember the supplier-questioning data I mentioned earlier? Well, it cuts both ways. Silence gives the client a reason to look elsewhere, but so does publishing work that exposes thin thinking. 

    So the objection isn’t about whether to write, because the data suggests that’s a given. The real issue is more about where the positions come from.

    What the writing actually buys

    In a word, your writing buys recognition.

    In the 2025 report, 53% of decision-makers said that when an organization produces high-quality thought leadership, it matters much less to them how well known that organization is.

    Now apply that finding to the market you’re competing in. Hunt Scanlon’s March 2026 report put the Big Five global firms at a record $7.43 billion in fees and the top 50 US firms at $6.69 billion, up 11% from the prior year. And yet, your access to a defensible position is exactly the same as a partner at a global firm. 

    That means you can raise your firm’s visibility through your own high-quality published thinking.

    Some 86% of decision-makers said they’d be moderately to very likely to invite an organization into an RFP process when it consistently produces high-quality thought leadership. Another 60% said they were more willing to pay a premium to work with an organization that produces it than with one that doesn’t. Both figures come from a survey fielded in late 2023, so weigh them accordingly. Still, if you’re defending retained fees against procurement pressure, the second number is more useful. An RFP invitation can be won on relationship history, but fee integrity usually can’t.

    And here’s the encouraging part: the bar is lower than the effort makes it look. Only 15% of decision-makers rate the thought leadership they read as very good or excellent. So the bar isn’t what’s stopping you. 

    I’ll leave you with a suggestion. Pull up the last three pieces published under your firm’s name and read them the way a client vetting you would. If none of them takes a position a competitor could argue with, that’s the measure of your judgment currently circulating in the market.

  • PLACEMENT CASE STUDIES THAT CONVERT

    PLACEMENT CASE STUDIES THAT CONVERT

    Every executive search firm has its list of proudest moments: a critical C-suite placement that saved a failing product roadmap, a discrete recruitment of a competitor’s top VP, or the smooth execution of a highly sensitive founder succession.

    But too many tech search firms reduce those transformative business milestones into a generic wall of company logos, or worse, a dry bulleted list under the heading: “Recent Successes.”

    In the enterprise tech ecosystem, reducing that high-stakes executive placement to a logo is a tragic waste of revenue-generating asset potential.

    If a single retained placement is worth an average of $150,000+ to your firm, your marketing can’t read like a sterile inventory of firms.. Your marketing can’t read like a sterile inventory of firms.  Instead, structure your past wins as high-performance narrative assets, and you’ll position your firm to consistently win those exclusive enterprise mandates from the most sought after venture capitalists, private equity boards, and Chief People Officers.

    To illustrate, let’s break down the strategic anatomy of a high-ticket B2B case study designed to convert cold tech boards into retained clients.

    1. Reject the “Resume Format” (Focus on Corporate Life-Cycles)

    Have you ever noticed how traditional recruitment case studies often tend to read like extended resumes? Here’s a typical example: “We found a candidate with 15 years of experience who went to an Ivy League school and put them at a SaaS company.”

    How many of these do you think enterprise tech buyers see in a day?

    The reality is that those buyers don’t care about a candidate’s linear history; what they really care about is lifecycle alignment. They want to know if you can find a leader who can solve their specific, current operational bottleneck.

    Here’s the fix: when structuring a case study, frame it as a narrative, and build it around corporate friction. A 2024 review of the research found that readers pulled into a story push back on it far less than readers handed the same information as a flat list. Stories are better at disarming readers and drawing them in. 

    So was the client facing a 14% customer churn rate? Were they drowning in technical debt? Were they trying to transition a legacy architecture to cloud-native? Find the story and establish the macroeconomic villain immediately. Otherwise, without that tension, you lose narrative value, and in turn the reader’s attention. 

    2. Isolate the “Invisible” Search Mechanics

    Any agency can run an inbound keyword search on LinkedIn or post a job description. Elite search firms command premium retainer fees because of their invisible, proprietary sourcing mechanics. So your case study should pull back the curtain on that process. 

    Here’s a tip: don’t just say you “found talent.” Detail the architecture of the search:

    • How did you map the passive market to identify leaders who weren’t looking?
    • How did your partners confidentially navigate the ecosystem without triggering market rumors?
    • What peer-to-peer strategic narrative did you use to convince a highly compensated, thriving executive to consider a risky turnaround opportunity?

    By spelling out the sophistication of your process, you justify your premium pricing and prove you’re a consultative partner, not an order-taker.

    3. Quantify the Velocity and the Ultimate ROI

    In B2B tech, a C-suite vacancy is an expensive bleed. Every week a Chief Product Officer or VP of Engineering seat sits empty, product shipments stall, engineering morale drops, an attrition chain reaction is triggered, and market share strays dangerously toward competitors.

    To address this, every high-performance case study should feature speed and long-term fiscal impact.

    • The Velocity Metric: “Secured the shortlist within 21 days; placed the executive within 62 days.”
    • The ROI Metric: Don’t just stop at the placement date. Follow up with the data. Did the new CPO lower product churn by 10% over the next 12 months? Did they help secure a successful Series C funding round?

    Showing the business trajectory after the placement connects your recruitment expertise directly to enterprise revenue expansion.

    The Corporate Blueprint: The Hero’s Journey for Search

    When structured correctly, a B2B case study functions as a corporate Hero’s Journey:

    1. The Client (The Hero) is facing a critical growth plateau or transition crisis.
    2. The C-Suite Vacancy (The Villain) is actively draining market share and delaying product roadmaps.
    3. The Search Firm (The Guide) deploys a precise, passive sourcing methodology (The Magic) to uncover the elusive 1% of talent.
    4. The Placement (The Resolution) churn stabilizes, engineering accelerates, and ARR is preserved.

    From Execution to Asset

    As a Managing Partner, we know that your days are consumed with vetting talent, managing client relationships, and closing mandates. Squeezing in time to sit down, interview your consultants, extract the technical nuances of a turnaround, and write a high-performance corporate report probably isn’t a realistic expectation.

    On the other hand, staying silent leaves your best revenue-generating assets on the table.

    If your firm is ready to transform past placements into strategic content pipelines that convert enterprise tech prospects into long-term retainer clients, let’s talk.

  • TURN ALERTS INTO SEARCH MANDATES IN 48HRS

    TURN ALERTS INTO SEARCH MANDATES IN 48HRS

    You’ve got the alerts running. Funding rounds, CEO changes, an acquisition closing, a board seat turning over. Setting that up was the right call, and the monitoring costs close to nothing now, which is exactly why every firm you compete with has done the same thing.

    So detection isn’t your problem. It hasn’t been for years.

    Here’s the problem. The window a trigger opens lasts days. Producing a message good enough to send into it takes most firms weeks.

    The shortlist is written before anyone calls you

    Start with what your buyer is actually doing, because it isn’t what most business development assumes.

    6sense surveyed around 4,000 B2B buyers for its 2025 Buyer Experience Report, published November 12, 2025. The median deal size in that sample ran between $200,000 and $300,000. Close enough to a retained fee to be worth your attention. Asked whether their team could rank a shortlist in order of preference before speaking to a single seller, 94% said yes. That early favorite went on to win the deal 77% of the time, though that edge has softened from 83% in prior years.*

    You already know this mechanism. You just know it from the other chair.

    A candidate who gets your call has survived a cut that happened in a meeting they weren’t in, on evidence they never saw, against people they’ll never be told about. The interview mostly confirms a decision that got made already. Your own business development runs the same way. Except this time your firm is sitting in the candidate’s seat.

    Two more findings from the same survey sharpen the point. The average buying cycle compressed from 11.3 months in 2024 to 10.1 months in 2025. The split between independent buyer research and seller engagement moved from 70/30 to 60/40. The private phase is shorter than it was, and there’s proportionally less of it.

    Why speed still looks like the wrong answer

    The same report carries the best argument against everything above, and I’d rather hand it to you now than have you find it on your own later.

    Buyers initiated 79% of engagements in 2025 against 82% in prior years. 6sense calls that shift trivial on its own, and it’s right to. But trivial or not, it moves in one direction: toward the buyer opening the conversation, not the seller. Sellers who reached out before buyers had finished their own research saw win rates fall rather than rise, per a separate 6sense study fielded in 2023

    Read quickly, that says outbound timing is irrelevant. The ranking happens in private, and knocking on the door early makes things worse.

    The distinction turns on what a trigger tells you, and it’s worth going slowly here, because the two situations look identical from your desk.

    Early outreach into silence is a guess that a company will buy. That’s the behavior the 6sense finding punishes. You arrived before your buyer had any reason to think about the category at all.

    A trigger is a different animal. A CEO departure filed on an 8-K isn’t a prediction that the internal conversation will start. It’s evidence that it already has. Your message isn’t landing ahead of the research window. It’s landing inside it, during the weeks when the ranking is being written.

    That distinction is reasoning, not measurement. No published study separates trigger-prompted outreach from cold outreach inside the 6sense data, and I went looking again before writing this. You’re being handed a mechanism rather than a finding, and you’re entitled to know which one you’ve got.

    How long the window stays open

    Nobody has measured this well. 

    PredictLeads, writing in August 2026, tells you to send trigger-based outreach within 24 to 48 hours and to name the event in the first line. That’s guidance drawn from practice. No dataset sits behind it. For funding announcements the same piece describes the opening as widest across the first few weeks after the announcement rather than on the day itself.

    Recruiterflow’s executive-search business development guidance, from June 2026, gives the operational version without numbers. Reach out within days of a trigger and you’re read as an informed advisor. Reach out three months later and you’re read as a cold caller. Same event, same firm, same message. The date on the send decides which one your reader sees.

    Both are the trade’s working consensus rather than evidence, and I’d treat them that way. What the survey data does support is the direction. The private phase is getting shorter, so whatever the window was, it isn’t lengthening.

    Leadership change is the trigger class that grew

    The Conference Board published its CEO succession report on November 24, 2025 with Egon Zehnder, ESGAUGE, and Semler Brossy, working from SEC Form 8-K filings by Russell 3000 and S&P 500 companies through October 3, 2025. S&P 500 CEO turnover ran at a projected 13% for 2025 against 10% in 2024. Russell 3000 succession announcements held steady at 11%.

    The number that turns into revenue is the sourcing split. External appointments to S&P 500 CEO roles ran at 33% in 2025 against 18% in 2024, which pushed internal promotion below 70% for the first time in eight years.

    Turnover rose. The share of those seats filled from outside nearly doubled.

    There’s a second-order effect that firms working these mandates report and no published dataset tracks. A new chief executive reviewing an inherited team produces function-level searches over the following year. My read is that this makes the trigger a claim on a sequence of mandates rather than a single one. Of course, that’s just my opinion because no one has actually enumerated it, but I stand by it.

    The bottleneck is drafting, not detection

    How many of the alerts that fired at your firm last month turned into a message that actually went out?

    Most firms don’t have that number written down anywhere, which is its own kind of answer.

    A message that works on a trigger can’t be converted into a template with a merge field. Your recipient knows what happened at their own company in far more detail than you do.

    Which isn’t an argument against templates as such. They earn their keep at volume, where the math forgives a weak message because there are ten thousand more behind it. Retained search never had that cushion, and a generic congratulation on the raise proves only that you read a headline.

    What earns a reply is a specific claim about what that event does to a leadership team. Holding a claim like that means you worked out a position before the event happened.

    Instantly’s 2026 cold email benchmark report, covering sends from January 1 to December 18, 2025, puts the average reply rate at 3.43%, with top performers above 10%. Those are the vendor’s own platform figures, drawn from what it describes only as billions of interactions across thousands of workspaces, with no sample size disclosed. Two other findings in the same report matter more here anyway. First-touch emails generate 58% of all replies, and the strongest-performing emails run under 80 words.

    That combination is the whole challenge. The first message carries most of the outcome, it has to be short, and it has to be written inside 48 hours.

    Anyone who’s cut a two-page memo down to a paragraph knows which version takes longer to write. Compression under time pressure is the hardest writing there is. It’s also the job most firms hand to whoever happens to be free that afternoon.

    What a pre-built library actually contains

    Not templates. A template fails for the reason above.

    Think about the difference between a kitchen that freezes finished meals and a kitchen that preps its stock and chops its vegetables before service opens. The freezer can’t serve a table that orders something slightly different. The prep kitchen has done most of the work in advance and still cooks the dish to the order in front of it. A template is the frozen meal. A worked position is the prep.

    What survives contact with a live trigger is the part that could have been written in advance. Your firm’s position on what that class of event does to a leadership team, the evidence behind it, and the question it puts to the person reading. Built once per trigger class, revised quarterly.

    The funding round. The CEO or founder transition. The acquisition close, where two leadership teams become one and a good share of the seats turn out to be duplicates. The new function the company has never staffed before. The senior hire that failed inside a year, which nobody wants to discuss and everybody needs solved.

    Take the CEO transition class. The pre-built half is your position on what happens to a leadership team in the twelve months after an outside chief executive arrives, the evidence behind it, and the question it puts to a chair or a CHRO. The half you write inside the window is the name, the date, the predecessor’s tenure, and the one line about that company’s situation that proves you read past the headline.

    Inside the window, only that second half is left. In my experience that’s closer to a 40-minute job than a three-week one, and 40 minutes fits inside 48 hours.

    One number worth not repeating

    The claim circulating in the sales-tooling market is that signal-based outreach replies at 15% to 25%, set against Instantly’s real, published 3.43% cold-email baseline. That pairing shows up on vendor page after vendor page. What doesn’t show up is an agreed source for the 15-25% half of it. One page points to its own guide. One cites “research from Salesforce and industry benchmarks,” unlinked. Most cite nothing at all. The 3.43% is the one number in that comparison anyone can actually trace. The multiple is a figure laundered into a fact by proximity to a real one. 

    Which leaves the argument resting on the mechanism rather than the multiple. A message referencing an event your reader lived through last week isn’t competing with cold email. It’s competing with the other four firms that saw the same alert. The one that already had something worth reading got there first.

    * 6sense also sells account-based marketing software, and a finding that buyers decide before contacting sellers happens to suit its product story. Its methodology is disclosed and its samples are large, more than most vendor research offers. The commercial interest is still real.

  • WRITE BETTER EXECUTIVE PLACEMENT CASE STUDIES

    WRITE BETTER EXECUTIVE PLACEMENT CASE STUDIES

    Locate the page on your site dedicated to showcasing wins. Most firms have one. Usually it’s a logo wall, or a list sitting under a heading like “Recent Successes,” with bullets that read something close to this:

    • Placed a CTO at a Series B SaaS company. 
    • Placed a CFO ahead of a funding round. 
    • Placed a VP of Engineering in 62 days.

    Every one of those is true, but none of them serves as proof.

    That’s the contradiction most search firm marketing carries. Your whole pitch to a board is that your people assessments consistently outperform internal talent teams and boutique competitors. But what you publish to support the pitch is a record of outcomes, which is precisely what a firm with a worse process and better luck would publish.

    And it isn’t a volume problem either. Content Marketing Institute and MarketingProfs (≈980 respondents) found that 75% of B2B marketers used case studies or customer stories last year. So the problem isn’t that your buyer is short of these narratives, it’s that they’re drowning in interchangeable ones.

    Your logo wall is more a liability than an asset

    Customers who can’t differentiate don’t stop deciding. They fall back on whatever criterion still distinguishes the options, and in professional services that’s price or brand recognition. 

    For a retained practice that charges premium fees, those are the two worst grounds to compete on. The firms that win on them are the largest global brands and low-cost firms. You’re neither.

    So a case study achieves more than typical formats do. It’s the one artifact where you get to show a buyer the reasoning behind the result, before you’re ever in the room to explain it. Choosing a logo for that slot wastes the chance to show your reasoning; it only signals that you’ve worked with someone before.

    Outcome-only versions keep getting written

    Three real constraints produce it, and none of them is laziness.

    The first is confidentiality. AMost clients do not want a public story about approaching a competitor’s vice president, and a sensitive founder succession is worse. Outcomes are the part you’re actually cleared to publish.

    The second is time. To extract technical details you must sit a consultant down and reconstruct an eight‑month‑old search. That’s an afternoon you don’t have to spare between two live commitments.

    You’re confident about the third. The placement happened. You can verify it. The judgment behind it feels arguable, and putting arguable things in marketing copy takes nerve. 

    I’d call all three rational. They’re also why the generic version keeps getting published, and why the firm that solves them gets a very quiet advantage.

    The real measure of a placement result

    Here’s the mechanism.

    Any outcome fits equally well with almost any process that led to it. “We placed a CPO in 62 days” fits with a market map, a structured assessment, and eleven confidential conversations… or one lucky referral from a partner’s neighbor. The sentence doesn’t discriminate between those, which means it can’t move a buyer who’s trying to work out which one you are.

    Think about two contractors bidding on the same renovation. Both recently completed a job; one brings photos of the finished kitchen, while the other describes finding rot behind the sink and how they handled it. Only one of those two has told you anything about what happens when your job goes sideways.

    A board evaluating your firm is hiring the second contractor. They already assume you can fill a seat. What they’re trying to determine is how you make decisions in circumstances that are unpredictable. 

    Which means the measurement unit of a case study is the decision, not the placement.

    Vacancy cost over speed

    Speed is the metric almost every search firm reaches for, and I understand the pull. It’s clean, it’s numeric, and clients complain about slow searches constantly.

    But the research doesn’t back it up.

    Chen and Li, published in Review of Accounting Studies in 2023, measured job vacancy duration directly from the creation and deletion dates of job postings by US public firms between 2007 and 2018, then tested it against’ those firms’ later profitability. Their findings differ by role level. Companies that filled low-skill roles quickly and those that delayed high-skill hires both saw higher future profitability. They conclude that profitable firms are selecting carefully where selection quality actually matters, and moving fast where the cost of the empty seat dominates.

    Sit with that for a second, because it inverts the usual pitch. In the segment you work in, a quick fill doesn’t clearly indicate positive performance. To a sophisticated buyer, “62 days” may look like the company stopped searching prematurely.

    I want to present this caveat bluntly and upfront. That study is about corporate job postings at large public companies, not about retained search engagements. In those job postings, vacancy duration doesn’t equate to your time-to-shortlist. 

    Another important clarification: Chen and Li’s “high-skill” isn’t an executive designation, it’s any posting paying above the median for its industry and year, so their sample extends well beyond the C‑suite. The essential signal remains because the buyer’s influence operates the same regardless of seniority: speed and selectivity balance against each other in senior roles.

    The practical version is simpler. Stop leading with the elapsed days. Speed only becomes an asset in your case study when you’ve first established what the empty seat was costing, which is a different number entirely, and a much better one.

    Using the client’s own numbers

    This is where the original argument for velocity should have been sitting all along.

    SHRM’s 2025 benchmarking research, based on a survey of 2,371 members fielded between January and March 2025, found that executive hires cost nearly seven times more than non-executive hires. The follow-on data is more interesting for your purposes. In SHRM’s 2026 recruiting benchmarking, drawn from over 4,600 organizations, median time-to-fill for non-executive roles fell to 39 calendar days while time-to-fill for senior-level roles was unchanged, and executive cost-per-hire rose. 

    Read that as a two-speed market. Average hiring became faster and cheaper, while senior-level roles saw no improvement. That gap is your entire commercial case, and it belongs in your case studies as the client’s problem rather than as your boast.

    Clients consistently undervalue the impact on the team while a seat is vacant. In 2023, Pieper and colleagues used data from 239 general manager departures across units of a US retailer between 2012 and 2014. Writing in the Journal of Applied Psychology, they found that the turnover that follows a manager’s exit is delayed and uneven rather than immediate. The takeaway for companies is: the absence of resignations in month one produces a false sense that the unit had absorbed the shock.

    That study tracked retail store general managers, not technology executives, but the lag they describe between a leadership exit and the resignations that follow doesn’t obviously depend on organizational level. So when a CTO seat sits open for five months and nobody quits, the board concludes the unit held. The resignations arrive in month seven, and by then they get attributed to compensation, or a manager, or the market.

    If your case study is the document that connects those two events for a buyer, you’re no longer selling recruitment. You’re selling the thing they got wrong last time.

    Name the client’s problem in numbers a CFO recognizes

    The old advice was to open a case study with the client’s pain instead of the candidate’s resume, which is right as far as it goes. The trouble is that “they were drowning in technical debt” is a vague descriptor. Better to replace it with measurable language such as “X in annual maintenance costs” or “Y hours/week lost to legacy systems.” Converting the problem into numbers (e.g., $/month of wasted spend, % of revenue impacted, days of downtime per year) gives it a magnitude the buyer’s finance function will accept. 

    McKinsey surveyed 50 CIOs at financial services and technology companies with revenues above $1 billion in July 2020. Those CIOs reported that 10-20% of the technology budget earmarked for new products was being diverted to tech debt, with the debt itself estimated at 20-40% of the value of their entire technology estate before depreciation. Because the sample is small, dated, and biased toward large enterprises, treat it as a reference point rather than a Series B benchmark.

    Used properly, it sounds like this in a case study: “The client’s engineering organization was spending roughly a fifth of its new-product budget servicing decisions made three architectures ago, which is at the upper end of what McKinsey’s CIO survey found, and it was the reason the roadmap had slipped twice.”

    Assigning a figure makes the executive measurable.

    The counterfactual test

    Here’s the diagnostic, and you can run it on your existing case studies this afternoon.

    Take any sentence in the piece that describes what your firm did. Consider whether a competent competitor might have chosen differently.

    “We mapped the market thoroughly” is uninformative because no firm claims a partial map.

    “We excluded every candidate whose only scaling experience came from a company that already had a platform team, which cut the viable pool from thirty-one to nine” is a defensible filter because a competent competitor could absolutely have gone the other way, and plenty would have. In that sentence, you described a decision you owned, with a consequence you accepted.

    Treat your marketing as a test. If nobody could have chosen differently, you haven’t described a choice.

    What goes in the decision log

    To capture those lines, you need to do it while the search is running, they can’t be reconstructed a year later.

    Have the lead consultant keep a short running note on each mandate with four things: 

    • The moment the brief changed (and why)
    • The excluded candidate profile(s)
      The objection that almost cost the placement
    • The trade-off you proposed and the client’s initial resistance

    Four lines per search. The search takes only minutes, and the results are hard to retrieve afterward

    On confidentiality, the rule I’d apply is to anonymize client details while describing the setup. “A 400-person infrastructure software company,” “a post-Series C,” “eighteen months into a cloud migration” gives buyers concrete context without names. The decisions stay in. It’s the logo that comes out, which is a pleasant irony given what most firms currently publish.

    Look back after twelve months and analyze both attributed and unaccounted outcomes. A case study that says “product churn fell from 14% to 9% over the following year, though a pricing change landed in the same quarter” is more persuasive than a clean claim, because the restraint tells the reader you weren’t willing to overstate the rest of it either.

    Why the story form does the work

    One last piece of evidence, because it explains why any of this beats a bullet list.

    Readers absorbed into narratives developed stronger story‑consistent beliefs, and more favourable evaluations of the people in it. And they remained consistent even when participants knew the story was true or made up. This finding is from Green and Brock’s narrative transportation experiments (four studies — 97, 69, 274, 258 participants; Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2000). 

    That research used general readers and fictional narratives, not boards evaluating search firms, and it’s twenty-six years old. I maintain that the mechanism still applies here, because a decision narrative is the only format that lets a buyer follow your reasoning as it unfolds rather than receive its conclusion. That’s my interpretation, not a direct finding.

    A bullet prompts the buyer to accept a result. A decision narrative allows them to watch your thought process and decide if they want that thinking for their own problem.

    Where to start

    Open your best case study and count the sentences a competitor couldn’t have written about their own firm.

    A count of zero means you have nothing more than a receipt.

  • WINNING THE MANDATE BEFORE THE RFP LANDS

    WINNING THE MANDATE BEFORE THE RFP LANDS

    An RFP for a CEO search lands on a Tuesday, with three weeks to respond. A named committee, a defined scope, and a scoring rubric are attached. It reads like the opening of a competition.

    But really, it’s closer to the end of one.

    How many of those have you answered with the quiet sense that the thing was already settled? Not cynically. Just the feeling that you were filling in a form for a conclusion somebody already reached weeks ago.

    Most firms build business development around that document and the material that answers it. You know, the pitch deck and the proposal template. Both built for the moment a client announces a search and invites firms to compete, but by then the outcome has often largely been determined. 

    That’s a rational place to have put the money. The RFP is the first point where the work becomes visible, and it tells you what you’re being scored on. Little else in business development does either.

    Which is how a firm ends up with a proposal template on its fourth revision and no clear idea whether anyone reads past page two.

    The buyer research has gotten specific enough to work from.

    Where the decision actually gets made

    6sense’s 2025 B2B Buyer Experience Report, published 12 November 2025 and drawing on nearly 4,000 buyer responses across North America, EMEA and APAC, tracks the point at which buyers first contact any vendor. The point sits 61% of the way through the buying process, having moved earlier from about 69% the previous year, mostly under cost and AI-adoption pressure. Six to seven weeks sooner, in practice.

    Earlier contact sounds like an opening. It isn’t, and what’s already happened by the time it arrives is the reason.

    By then the buying group has assembled a shortlist of roughly four vendors and put that list in order of preference. 94% of buying groups rank their shortlist before they speak to anyone.

    Buyers then purchase from one of those four Day One names 95% of the time, up from 85% a year earlier. 77% said their first vendor conversation was with the firm that eventually won.

    That 95% needs stating precisely, because it circulates in a mangled form. It doesn’t mean the first name on the list wins 95% of the time. It means the winner comes from a shortlist that already existed before anyone picked up a phone. Think of it as a guest list, drawn up in private long before the invitations go out. The RFP is the invitation. Which makes the operative question something other than how to rank first. It’s whether you’re on the list at all when somebody sits down and writes it.

    Now, here’s the obvious objection. The first conversation is doing the work, and the ranking is just the noise. 6sense tested that directly. Among buying groups that hadn’t ranked a shortlist in advance, the first vendor they spoke with won only 57% of the time, against roughly 80% among groups that had. So the first-contact advantage is mostly pre-existing preference showing through. A horse that leads at the first turn usually wins the race, and not because leading at the turn made it fast.

    An RFP, where one exists, confirms a decision already narrowed to four names. A better response competes for the remaining 5%, plus whatever movement happens among those four. 6sense found that 42% of buyers reported a preference shift after speaking with sellers, while only about one in four buying groups changed their final choice.

    Why the answer isn’t earlier outreach

    So contact them sooner, right? That’s the obvious fix. But the data doesn’t support it.

    I’m going to guess that you’ve already tried the obvious version of this. More outreach, earlier, to more people, with better subject lines. Nobody runs a firm for long without having tested that theory at their own expense.

    Earlier 6sense research, published in January 2024 and based on 934 buyers of B2B purchases over $10,000, found that buyers initiate contact themselves 83% of the time, and that sellers reaching out before buyers finished their independent research saw win rates fall rather than rise. Early outreach produced no measurable improvement in when buyers responded or in how deals resolved.

    A faster email isn’t the mechanism. A firm nobody already knows doesn’t become known by interrupting a process the buyer is deliberately running in private. What’s required is presence that predates the trigger.

    6sense’s 2025 data attaches a number to that. 85% buyers had prior experience of the vendor they picked. Prior experience. Not prior contact during the evaluation. 

    Which raises the question every firm outside the incumbent set has to sit with. How do you build prior experience with a buying group that has never met you?

    The people deciding aren’t the people taking your call

    There’s a second reason outreach underperforms, and it comes down to who’s actually in the room.

    Edelman and LinkedIn’s 2025 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report, fielded from 17 March to 3 April 2025 among 1,934 US business professionals, separates two populations inside the buying group. Target decision-makers are the functional experts who evaluate the service directly. Hidden decision-makers hold the final say while representing a function that doesn’t require deep knowledge of what’s being bought. Finance. Legal. Operations. Compliance. Procurement.

    71% of those hidden decision-makers report relatively little or no interaction with the sales representatives. They’re inside the decision and outside the sales conversation at the same time.

    Here I want to be straight about where the evidence stops and where I start. Edelman surveyed general B2B buying groups. Nobody has run this study on retained search specifically. But my read, from how these mandates actually get bought, is that a search mandate takes this shape more often than not. The CHRO runs the process and takes the calls. The CFO approving a six-figure fee, the board member who has to be comfortable with the shortlist, the general counsel reviewing the agreement, the procurement lead benchmarking your rate against a contingency shop, none of them are on the phone with a search firm, and any of them can end your candidacy without ever having spoken to you. That’s my argument rather than Edelman’s finding, and I’d rather name it than dress it up as data.

    Same goes for something else I believe. 6sense’s category of prior experience with the buying group runs wider in search than in most B2B categories. It takes in every executive you’ve placed who now sits on the hiring side, every candidate you interviewed for a search that went to someone else, every director who’s read something you published, and every board member who watched you run a process from the other side of the table. I’ve seen mandates arrive through all of those doors. Also a professional observation, not a measured finding.

    What reaches people who never take your call is published work. 95% of hidden decision-makers say strong thought leadership makes them more receptive to sales and marketing outreach, which puts the sequence in an order most business development gets backwards. The content isn’t what follows the introduction. It’s what makes the introduction land.

    What builds a Day One position

    Published judgment has direct evidence behind it at the point of procurement.

    The 2024 edition of the Edelman-LinkedIn report, fielded in 2023 across 3,484 executives in seven countries, found that when an organization consistently produces high-quality thought leadership, 86% of decision-makers would be moderately or very likely to invite that organization into an RFP process. That’s the exact transaction at issue. Content converting into an invitation. The 2025 edition dropped the question, so the figure carries a 2023 fielding date and there’s no newer version to swap in. What the 2025 edition does show is that the effect holds once you’re in the process. 79% of hidden decision-makers say they’re more likely to advocate for proposals from companies that consistently produce high-quality thought leadership.

    The harder problem, for a firm the client hasn’t used before, is incumbency. This is where the 2025 data earns its keep. 53% of both audiences agree that when thought leadership is high quality, brand recognition matters less. Asked what governs their final choice of vendor during an RFP, hidden buyers put expertise in the relevant area first, at 85%, ahead of strategic fit at 76% and understanding of industry trends at 74%. Understanding of the client’s actual business challenges came in fourth, at 68%. The vendor being the safest choice ranked last, at 41%. In effect then, buyers rank demonstrated expertise over brand safety.

    Sit with that ordering for a second, because it inverts what most boutique firms quietly assume about themselves. The reputational cover that a Big 5 name carries into the room is the consideration buyers rate the least. Demonstrated understanding of the client’s actual situation, the one thing a smaller firm can produce in writing without needing anyone’s permission, is the consideration they rate highest.

    On fees, the 2024 edition found that 60% of decision-makers said good thought leadership made them willing to pay a premium. Same caveat on the date. It describes a fee defense a retained firm otherwise has to build from a standing start, in a room where a CFO is working from contingency comparisons.

    The market is moving the same way

    Hunt Scanlon reported on 25 March 2026 that the top 50 search firms in the Americas billed $6.69 billion in fees, up 11% with 75% of ranked firms posting growth. Scott Scanlon’s framing was that the winners over the next three years will be the firms that move upstream to shape leadership strategy rather than execute it.

    Upstream is a positioning claim. And positioning claims get made in writing long before they get made in a room. A firm that intends to be consulted on leadership strategy has to be visibly thinking about it, somewhere a director can find without asking. 

    What this argument doesn’t settle

    I’d rather hand you the weak joints than let you find them on your own.

    None of the buyer-behavior data here was collected on executive search. 6sense surveyed technology, services and manufacturing buyers whose median purchase ran between $200,000 and $300,000, and for services buyers on their own it ran higher, between $300,000 and $400,000. That’s the retained-fee territory on a senior mandate, and nearly half the respondents were VP-level or higher, which makes the transfer more defensible than most. Nobody has run this study on boards and CHROs buying search.

    Edelman’s 2025 sample is the softer joint. US-only, weighted toward director and manager level CXOs at 40%. It describes the wider buying group better than the person who signs, and the 71%, 95%, 79% and 53% figures all carry weight here while describing that population. A skeptical reader has room to refuse the transfer. I think it holds, because the hidden-buyer finding is about function rather than seniority, and a general counsel reviewing a search agreement is doing a general counsel’s job at any altitude. Try weighing it for yourself.

    6sense also sells account-based marketing software, and a finding that buyers decide before contacting sellers happens to suit its product story. Its methodology is disclosed and its samples are large, more than most vendor research offers. The commercial interest is still real.

    None of that changes the direction of the finding, though. It changes how much weight any single number will bear.

    What this changes, operationally

    The RFP response stops being your primary business development asset and becomes formality you assemble from existing material in an afternoon. Your case data and your references belong in a maintained library, not in a document written under the deadline at eleven at night.

    The asset that does the actual work is the body of published writing indexed to the events that create mandates. A funding round. A CEO departure. A first hire that didn’t take and nobody wants to discuss. A new product line needing a function the company doesn’t have yet. A firm that has already written intelligently about what those events do to a leadership team is on the list when the list gets written, without having sent anything at all.

    So here’s the audit, and you can run it this afternoon. Take your last five mandates. For each one, ask what there was to read with your name on it in the ninety days before the client called. If the answer is nothing, those mandates didn’t come to you through the proposal. They came through a relationship that already existed, and there are only so many of those.

    The number I’d hold onto is 94%. That’s the share of buying groups that had already ranked a preferred vendor before speaking to a single one of them.

  • TEXT SELLS: SEARCH FIRMS WIN WITH WORDS NOT LOOKS

    TEXT SELLS: SEARCH FIRMS WIN WITH WORDS NOT LOOKS

    I’ve made a habit of opening around ten or so executive search firm sites in a row, and by the fourth one I can usually predict the rest. Hero banner: diverse professionals, mid-handshake. Stock skyline. Three service tiles reading “Executive Search,” “Leadership Advisory,” and “Talent Strategy.” A logo wall. An “Our Process” graphic with four numbered circles.

    None of it’s wrong exactly. It’s just indistinguishable from every competitor you’re pitching against, which means it does none of the work a website is supposed to do for a firm that sells judgment instead of inventory.

    That’s a structural problem wearing a design problem’s clothes. Your whole pitch to a board or a founder is that your read on people beats the alternative, whether that’s their internal HR function or the boutique down the street. A site built from stock photography and templated copy says the opposite. It says your marketing got assembled the way everyone else’s did, by the same process, quite possibly even by the same agency pulling from the same stock library. And if the site can’t show distinct thinking, why would anyone assume that the search process behind it is any different?

    Who’s actually looking at your site

    Before we argue about what belongs on the page, let’s get precise about who arrives at it and what kind of mood they’re in.

    Research published in March 2026 by SurveyMonkey and Reddit, drawing on 1,202 US business decision-makers surveyed at the turn of the year, found 83% of them research a vendor privately before they’ll speak to anyone in sales. And they move fast. 65% finish inside a week.

    So your site is being read by someone who’s already decided to evaluate you in private, who has days rather than weeks, and who hasn’t given you a chance to explain yourself in person yet.

    The same study found those buyers trust peer recommendations (73%) a good deal more than a vendor’s own website (55%). Which sounds like an argument for giving up on web copy entirely, right up until you look at what buyers say gets in their way. Their complaints are all about missing substance. 48% can’t find authentic testimonials from real users. Another 46% struggle to parse the information vendors hand them, and 44% simply can’t get specific details about a provider out of the material on offer.

    Read that list again, because the whole problem is sitting inside it. Buyers aren’t saying vendor websites are ugly; they’re saying they’re vague.

    Experts and ordinary readers don’t judge a page the same way

    The instinct to put your marketing budget into photography and layout isn’t irrational, and there’s well-known research sitting behind it. But the findings are narrower than most people quoting them let on.

    The Stanford Web Credibility Project’s 2002 study of how people assess websites is the one that gets cited the most to justify design spend. Alongside it, the researchers ran a comparison almost nobody cites, and that’s the one that should matter to you. In “Experts vs Online Consumers,” also published in 2002, ordinary consumers and domain experts evaluated the same health and finance websites. On finance sites, 54.6% of what consumers said about credibility came back to how the site looked. Among finance experts assessing those same sites, it fell to 16.4%. What the experts assigned weight to instead was substance. 40.3% of their comments went to the breadth and depth of what the site actually taught them.

    Two people can walk through the same house and see completely different buildings. One reacts to the kitchen and the light in the front room. The structural engineer goes straight to the foundation and the age of the wiring. Neither one is being unreasonable. They’re each applying the standard their expertise handed them, and the engineer’s standard doesn’t care about a fresh coat of paint.

    A board evaluating your firm is the equivalent of that engineer.

    Now, that research is old. Twenty-plus years old, and the web has changed a great deal since 2002, so treat those percentages as directional rather than current. The direction has held up since then.

    A peer-reviewed study from 2019 by Sam Wineburg and Sarah McGrew put professional fact checkers, PhD historians, and Stanford undergraduates in front of the same live websites and watched what each group did. The fact checkers were off the landing page in about 32 seconds, gone to check the site against other sources. The students stayed put for roughly 100 seconds, and 60% of them picked a deceptive site as the more trustworthy of the two they were shown. Two reasons came up over and over. The logos looked official and the design looked tidy.

    But here’s the part I want you to notice. The historians, expert in their own field but not in this one, landed a lot closer to the students than to the fact checkers. So expertise on its own doesn’t make anybody immune to a well-designed page. But relevant expertise does. My read is that a board that’s sat through a dozen search firm pitches has exactly the relevant kind, and your site gets about half a minute of its attention before somebody goes looking for a second opinion.

    Eyetracking work lands in the same place but from a different angle. Nielsen Norman Group’s research on photos as web content first published in 2010 and still maintained today found users completely ignored large decorative images and skipped straight past stock photos of generic people. Attention went to pictures carrying actual information: real people in real places and documents you can read. In one test on a firm’s staff page, users spent 10% more time on portraits of the team itself than on the biographies beside them, even though the biographies took up more than three times the space. Photographs of real, named individuals earned attention. Generic imagery of nobody in particular didn’t.

    Consumer research points the same way on authenticity. Getty Images’ “Building Trust in the Age of AI,” published in 2024 and based on responses from more than 30,000 adults across 25 countries, reports that 98% of consumers treat authentic images and video as central to trust, and close to 90% want to be told when imagery was generated by AI. That data was gathered in 2022 and 2023, which is ancient for a topic moving this fast, so I went looking for something current. Clutch surveyed 401 US consumers in September 2025 and found 84% still want brands to disclose AI imagery, with 65% worried about authenticity in what they’re being shown. Much smaller study. Same direction.

    I’ll be straight with you about that evidence. It’s consumer research, and your buyer is a board director rather than a shopper. Nobody has run this study on people hiring search firms. My own view, and I’ll own it as a view rather than dress it up as a finding, is that it transfers, because what’s being measured is a general reflex about manufactured-looking material and not something peculiar to retail. Imagery that looks manufactured gets read as manufactured.

    Why this bites harder for you than for most businesses

    All of this matters more for a search firm than it does for most B2B categories, and the reason is simple enough. What you sell isn’t visual at all.

    There’s no factory floor to photograph. No physical good to render in a product shot. Nothing about the actual work, which is conversations and references and market mapping and judgment calls made quietly, resolves into an image.

    So the stock photograph on your homepage isn’t standing in for the product. It’s standing in for the absence of anything else to show.

    If you’ve ever sat down to write your own site and found yourself reaching for a photograph because the words weren’t coming, that isn’t a failure of effort on your part. How do you photograph 20 years of knowing which VP of Engineering survives a founder transition and which one doesn’t?

    Think of a restaurant with no menu in the window, just a big photograph of happy people eating. You learn nothing about the food. You learn only that the owner had a photograph and decided to use it, which raises an obvious question about what they’d have shown you if they’d had something better. With nothing else to go on, a reader draws the inference, and it isn’t a flattering one.

    What buyers say actually moves them

    If your buyer is an expert, in a hurry, and hunting for specifics they keep failing to find, the useful question is what kind of material closes that gap.

    Buyers have answered this pretty directly. The 2025 Edelman-LinkedIn B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report, which surveyed 1,934 global business executives, found 73% of hidden decision-makers (in Edelman’s framing, people with final sign-off but not always deep expertise in what they’re buying) say an organization’s thought leadership helps them judge the type and caliber of thinking that organization will bring to their work.

    Sit with that sentence a second, because it describes the exact thing you’re trying to sell and can’t otherwise put on a page. Judgment stays invisible until somebody demonstrates it. A well-argued piece of writing is a demonstration.

    The rest of the report runs the same way. 71% of decision-makers say thought leadership does more than conventional marketing or sales material to show a vendor’s potential value. 55% use it as part of vetting. 79% say they’re more likely to advocate internally for proposals from firms that consistently publish high-quality work, which matters enormously in a category where the person reading your site usually isn’t the person who signs. And roughly two-thirds of them spend more than an hour in an average week reading this kind of material. The appetite is there.

    Every one of those signals is text-driven. A named partner’s byline on a specific, well-argued analysis does more for your credibility than a professional headshot of that same partner standing in front of a blurred office background.

    The copy-first alternative

    None of this argues for a text-only website out of some minimalist preference. It argues for a website where the thing doing the converting is written material only somebody inside your firm could have produced.

    Here’s the test I use. Could a competitor paste those words onto their own site without anyone noticing? “We have deep networks in fintech” passes the test for any firm in the market, which is another way of saying it means nothing at all. An analysis of why the last several fintech CTO searches in a particular market stalled at the same stage, and what you now do differently at that stage, can’t be lifted by anyone who didn’t run those searches.

    Stock photography can’t be proprietary. Writing tied to a specific person’s judgment is close to the only thing on a services website that can be. That’s my read rather than a research finding, and I’d defend it anywhere: proprietary is the whole game on a page where every competitor buys from the same stock library.

    There’s a budget implication in all this, and it’s an uncomfortable one. A stock photo subscription and a template redesign are the default spend because they’re easy to see finished. A written body of work, case studies structured around real client problems and named-author analysis of hiring dynamics inside your niche, is harder to produce and slower to accumulate. Which is why most of your competition don’t have one. The firm willing to make that investment is betting on a credibility signal buyers have already told researchers they respond to, over a design convention the research says they scroll past.

    The baseline test

    Here’s a diagnostic you can run on your own site today. Strip out every stock photograph and see what’s left standing.

    I’ve watched firms do this and go quiet for a minute. If what remains is three sentences of service description per page, the site was never making an argument for why you, specifically, should be trusted with a leadership hire that shapes the company for years. If what remains is a body of specific, attributable, well-reasoned writing, the photography was decoration sitting on top of a real asset.

    Most firms, if we’re honest about it, land in the first case. So strip the photography off your own site tonight and read what’s left. Whatever’s still standing is your actual argument for the mandate, and if that takes under a minute to get through, the photography was never the problem you needed to fix.

  • YOUR SEARCH FIRM’S VALUE OUTPERFORMS INDUSTRY CLICHÉS

    YOUR SEARCH FIRM’S VALUE OUTPERFORMS INDUSTRY CLICHÉS

    Boutique. Deep network. Rigorous process. Vetted talent… Are any of these in your executive search firm’s marketing copy?

    Because, if it isn’t already obvious, most other executive search firm websites are also making these same four claims. Read a dozen of them back to back and the only real way to tell them apart is the logo in the corner.

    So what exactly is setting you apart? (By the way, you might want to take notes, because this is how you crush your competition.)

    Here’s the thing, I’ve done that reading, more of it than I’d recommend to anyone. The strange part is that almost none of those firms are exaggerating. Technically, the claims are true. They just don’t say… well, anything, actually.

    Like plenty of other good firms, maybe you’ve sat down to fix the About page, gotten three paragraphs in, and ended up with something that read like everyone else’s anyway.

    Why is it so hard to write one sentence about your own firm that a competitor couldn’t legitimately paste onto their own page word for word?

    Fret not my friend, I got you. Before you rewrite another line, I’m going to explain the specific mechanisms that’ll take your marketing copy from pedestrian same-o to stand-out impressive.

    The swap test

    Here’s the diagnostic, and you can run it on your own website this afternoon. Take any sentence that describes what your firm does or how it works. Now visit your closest competitor and picture pasting that exact sentence onto their page, unchanged. If it would still be true over there, that sentence carries no information about you.

    Try it. I’ll wait.

    The principle underneath is falsifiability. A claim carries information only if a competitor could credibly assert the opposite. Run the standard search firm vocabulary through that test and almost none of it survives.

    Nobody markets a shallow network. Nobody advertises a careless process or unvetted candidates. When every competitor asserts the same attribute and no competitor asserts its negation, that attribute stops working as a differentiator and starts working as a category label. “We run rigorous searches” conveys exactly what “we are an executive search firm” conveys.

    It’s the same reason a menu promising fresh ingredients tells a diner nothing. No restaurant anywhere advertises stale ones. The words take up space and read like a claim, but they move nobody, because the opposite was never available to claim in the first place.

    The buyer-side data backs this up. Gartner found in 2021 that 64% of B2B customers can’t tell the difference between one supplier’s digital experience and another’s, and 76% reported doing nothing differently after engaging with supplier content at all. That’s most of the buying population processing an entire category as interchangeable.

    Now, buying a retained search isn’t like buying software. Your mandate gets decided over months, through referrals and conversations that no survey captures. But those conversations start somewhere, and for most buyers that somewhere is a website they read before they called anyone. The shortlist gets built at exactly the stage Gartner measured.

    Which is a rough thing to read if you’ve been writing this copy yourself, at night, between active searches. That’s the normal condition in this business, and it’s exactly why the generic version keeps getting published.

    Why the search category is more exposed than most

    The industry is unusually fragmented. Roughly 5,500 firms operate in US executive search, and not one of them holds more than 5% of the market. AESC, the global membership body, represents more than 16,000 professionals across 1,450-plus offices in 70-plus countries. Whichever way you count it, your buyer is looking at several thousand firms they have no prior basis for ranking.

    Think about that from their side of the table. They aren’t choosing between you and two others they know well. They’re choosing between you and a category.

    No firm holds meaningful share, but a handful of names are the ones every buyer has heard of, and recognition is what breaks a tie. Unless you’re one of those names, your positioning does almost all the work of separating you from whoever’s open in your buyer’s next browser tab. Generic vocabulary means that work isn’t happening at all.

    What it costs

    Have you ever lost a mandate to a firm you’re fairly sure does worse work than you do?

    Most people who’ve been at this a while have one specific loss in mind. It still comes up years later.

    When a buyer perceives no meaningful difference between suppliers, they don’t stop deciding. They switch to whatever criterion still discriminates, and in professional services that’s price or brand recognition. Ordinary commodity behavior. Faced with two identical bottles of water on a shelf, nobody researches the watershed. They take the cheaper one, or the label they’ve seen before.

    For a retained firm, that’s the worst outcome, because the two firms that win on those criteria are the biggest global brand and the cheapest contingent shop. Charge a premium fee and you’re sitting in the one position where neither tiebreaker helps you. You aren’t the recognized name. You aren’t the low bid. A comparison decided on those terms is one you lose before your buyer has read a word you’ve written.

    What makes a claim do work instead

    Gartner’s 2019 research on what it calls “sense making” points at the alternative. Customers who got supplier information they found genuinely helpful in rationalizing a decision were 3x more likely to close a larger deal with less regret. The copy did cognitive work for the buyer instead of just throwing generic descriptive attributes at them.

    That’s the function. At the sentence level, the form it takes is precision.

    There’s a finding in consumer research that lands directly on this. Precise numbers read as more truthful than round ones. Zhang and Schwarz found that people infer that a precise figure (when communicated by a human) is less likely to be an estimate, and therefore more likely to be something someone actually measured. Janiszewski and Uy showed the same effect in negotiation, where precise opening prices produced smaller counteroffer adjustments than round ones did.

    You already know this from outside of work. Someone who says they’ll be there in twenty minutes is guessing. Someone who says eighteen has checked something. The number carries an implied claim about where it came from, and we all price that in without being asked to.

    Applied to your copy, the whole difference shows up inside one sentence. “We have placed 31 CTOs into Series B and C SaaS companies since 2019” would be doing something structurally different from “extensive experience placing technology leaders.” The first invites verification. The second forecloses it. Buyers feel that difference even when they can’t articulate why.

    The four cliché families and what each is substituting for

    Scale claims

    “Deep network.” “Global reach.” “Extensive database.” “Unparalleled access.” These are substituting for a named population.

    What actually belongs in that slot is a defined universe. How many people actually fit the profile, and how many of them you have a current relationship with. Plus where those two numbers came from. A firm that’s done that work can write a sentence shaped like this: “There are roughly 400 people in North America who have run engineering through a Series B to Series D transition in the last five years, and we’ve spoken with 130 of them since January.” Whether your real figures are 400 and 130 or something else entirely, a sentence built that way has described a network. “Deep” has described nothing.

    Quality claims

    “World-class sourcing.” “Top-tier talent.” “Vetted candidates.” These are substituting for a stated standard.

    It’s better to name the screening criterion, then name what it excludes. For example, you can say you disqualify candidates who’ve never operated without a dedicated support function, and you’ve said something falsifiable. Something a competitor is free to disagree with. That last part is the test.

    Relationship claims

    This is the family I see abused most, and I have some sympathy for it, because the feeling behind it is usually real. “Trusted partner.” “True extension of your team.”

    But what’s missing is a described mechanism, and the fix is naming what actually happens in the work. Specifically, the thing that wouldn’t happen at a transactional firm. A firm that delivers a written market map in week one, before presenting a single candidate, and then revises the role specification with the client based on what that map turned up has described a mechanism. Your buyer can picture it. They can ask you about it, and hold you to it in month three. Name the artifact or name the meeting, and a feeling becomes a process someone can evaluate.

    Identity claims

    “Boutique.” “Niche-focused.” These are substituting for a stated constraint. Boutique tells your buyer nothing at all. “We only run searches for companies between $10M and $80M ARR, and we turn down enterprise mandates” tells them what you’ve given up to be good at one thing. A specialization that costs nothing to claim doesn’t read as a specialization.

    The pattern across all four is the same. The cliché is sitting exactly where a number, a standard, a constraint, or a mechanism belongs. It’s load-bearing filler, which is why generic copy is so persistent. Strike the cliché without supplying the replacement, and now the page has a hole in it. Firms reach for this vocabulary in the first place because the underlying specifics were never assembled.

    And that’s the part most firms aren’t always ready to commit to, because writing specific copy is an exercise in taking stock, and that takes time and deliberation.

    Where the raw material actually comes from

    You almost certainly hold the inputs already and have never pulled them out.

    Your placement records have completion rates in them, and time to placement broken out by role type. Retention at 12 and 24 months too, if anyone was tracking it. Your intake notes have the recurring failure pattern you see in a segment, the one you find yourself explaining out loud in every first meeting.

    And then there’s the input I almost never see a firm publish. The mandates that you turned down.

    Declined mandates outperform everything else because they carry a cost. Say you declined 40% of inbound mandates last year, explain the criterion you used, and you’ve made a claim no competitor can copy without either matching that discipline or lying about it. Run that sentence through the swap test and it fails to transfer. Which is the whole point. Any claim that won’t survive being pasted onto a competitor’s website is a claim that describes your firm instead of your category.

    Where the vocabulary has to change first

    Priority order matters here, because rewriting everything at once isn’t realistic when you’re already buried in live searches.

    Prospect conversations go first (before anything’s been signed). That language costs nothing to change, and you use it every time a prospect is deciding between you and whoever else they called. A cliché on your website gets skimmed. Say it out loud to someone who’s still choosing and they’ll ask what you mean by it, and either the specifics are there or they aren’t.

    Fee justification copy goes second. It’s the one moment your buyer openly asks what the premium buys. A cliché delivered right there sends them straight back to price.

    Website and outbound copy go last. They mostly reflect whatever vocabulary you’ve already internalized everywhere else, and rewriting the site first tends to produce a page you don’t talk like in the room. Buyers catch that gap faster than they catch the copy.

    I know putting the website last sounds backwards, since the website is usually what starts the whole conversation about messaging in the first place. My take is that fixing it first just buys you a better-written version of the same mismatch.

    The one way this backfires

    Specificity without substance is worse than a cliché. A precise claim that turns out to be inflated is verifiable, which makes it falsifiable in the wrong direction. A cliché merely gets ignored. A fabricated number ends the conversation permanently.

    Doing the work to surface those realities ensures your copy is clear and verifiable. And in a sea of marketing vagueness, durable specificity will set an unattainable bar for your competitors.

  • INCREASE EXECUTIVE RECRUITING INMAIL RESPONSE

    INCREASE EXECUTIVE RECRUITING INMAIL RESPONSE

    Here’s something that’s been bothering me for a while: so many boutique and high-value executive search firms style their outreach after high-volume staffing agencies. Same batch sends, same templates. I imagine them covering their eyes when clicking ‘send’, just hoping the same math holds up in a completely different market. 

    But it doesn’t hold up, and the reason comes down to who you’re actually trying to reach.

    Typically, LinkedIn InMail gets about a 10% to 25% response rate. And if you’re sending in high volume, LinkedIn requires you to stay above a 13% floor (measured over a 14-day period), or risk losing your sending privileges. For a high-volume staffing firm, that’s manageable, because it’s a numbers game, and for them the numbers cooperate. 

    Retained executive search doesn’t get that same advantage. A retained search practice is reaching a much more selective audience, namely currently employed senior executives who aren’t looking to move. That’s a much narrower and more guarded audience.

    And standing out in that inbox is becoming even harder than it used to be.

    LinkedIn’s own data shows that candidates tagged “open to work” respond roughly 37% more often than everyone else. Flip that number around and it says something uncomfortable about the population search firms are actually chasing. I’m talking about the VP of Engineering or the CTO who hasn’t touched their profile settings in two years. That’s your target, and it’s exactly the persona for whom a 13% floor becomes almost impossible to hit. 

    It isn’t a volume issue, even though it’s tempting to treat it like one. Sending more InMails to more executives won’t rescue a message that reads like a mass-send, and passive candidates have gotten very good at spotting one. The good news is that this is solvable, not by sending more messages, but by sending better ones.

    Why the typical recruitment message template fails

    Almost every recruitment message follows the same 3-beat structure:

    1. Flatter the candidate’s background
    2. Drop in a generic description of the client company and role
    3. Close with a request for a call. 

    Each beat adds friction and lowers your odds. And LinkedIn’s own response-rate data explains why.

    InMails under 400 characters get a 22% higher response rate than average. That flattery-plus-role-description template routinely runs three or four times that length before it even gets to the ask. 

    Then there’s personalization. LinkedIn data shows that personalized InMails outperform bulk sends by about 15%. And by “personalized,” I don’t mean a merge field swapping someone’s job title. I mean specific to the work they’ve actually done.

    Finally, there’s the ask, which is where even top firms trip up. The people you’re trying to reach are busy, often busier than you are. A 30-minute call is a real commitment to ask of someone who hasn’t shown any signs of looking, especially before you’ve offered them a shred of value. 

    None of this is rare; it’s actually standard practice. That’s the problem.

    A high-volume recruiter can absorb a bad response rate by sending more messages. Executive search doesn’t have that cushion. When you’re working a narrow slate of five to eight qualified passive candidates for one mandate, every non-response is a big hit on an already narrow pool.

    Your first impression is the only one you get

    According to LinkedIn, 65% of InMail responses arrive within 24 hours, and 90% arrive within a week. Past that window, responses basically stop coming. There’s no long tail of executives circling back to messages from three weeks ago. It either lands the same day or it stops existing to that reader. 

    That’s the risk. There’s no second draft once the thread’s gone cold.

    What actually works

    Here’s a framework built around what the data actually supports.

    1. Lead with an observation, not a compliment

    “I read the writeup on your team’s migration approach” is a claim about the candidate’s work. “Impressive background in cloud architecture” is a claim about a candidate’s LinkedIn profile. Only one of those proves you did the homework.

    1. State the problem, not the role

    Open with the specific operational bottleneck your client is facing. It implies the job without spelling it out, and it engages better than any dry job description ever will. It also happens to be shorter. A problem statement runs maybe a sentence or two. A job description runs a paragraph. This gives the candidate something immediate and concrete to react to, something a generic pitch can’t match.

    1. Ask for something smaller than a call

    Think about how much friction a calendar invite adds for someone who isn’t even looking. A more effective alternative is to ask permission to send a short written brief the candidate can read in their own time. “Can I send you two paragraphs?” Is a much smaller ask than “can I have thirty minutes?”

    1. Keep it under 400 characters

    Cut the compliments, lead with the problem, and the message lands more naturally. That’s the range where LinkedIn’s own data shows the strongest response rates. 

    What actually changes, operationally

    None of this needs new tooling or a different channel. It needs research on each candidate before the first message goes out. It’s slower per send than a templated blast, but the return more than makes up for those extra ten minutes. 

    Retained firms working small, specific pools feel shortlist erosion in a way high-volume firms never do. This tradeoff protects against exactly that by trading volume for quality, on purpose.

    A combination of shorter messages, real personalization, and a lower-friction ask, sent to a slate of currently employed, non-searching executives, makes all the difference for high-value executive search firms. I won’t quote you a top-performer number, because the 30 to 40% figures floating around trace back to B2B sales campaigns, not retained search. What I can tell you is that 98% of recruiting messages already personalize by name. The merge field buys you nothing anymore. Referencing the work is the only personalization left that moves anything.