Andrea Fryrear, CEO of Agile Sherpas, joins us to share how her team has turned their annual State of Agile Marketing report into a powerhouse for leads and authority. For eight years, this original research has delivered inbound demand, backlinks, and credibility in a crowded market. We dig into why annual reports stand out in the age of AI and how to create one that delivers real business results. If you’re looking for a content asset that builds trust and drives growth, this episode is your blueprint.
TRANSCRIPT
Greg Alexander: Hey, everybody. This is Greg Alexander. You’re listening to the Pro Serv podcast. Brought to you by Collective 54. If you’re new to the show. We are dedicated to those that are in the expertise business that want to make more money, make scaling easier and make an exit achievable. And on this week’s episode, we’re going to talk to Andrea Fryrear, who is a well-respected member of our community about the power of proprietary research in today’s AI-driven business landscape. Got lots of questions for her. She’s an expert on this. But, Andrea, it is good to see you. Would you introduce yourself to the audience, please.
Andrea Fryrear: Absolutely. Hi, everyone. I’m Andrea Fryrear. I’m the CEO and co-founder of Agile Sherpas. We are a management consulting firm that specializes in improving the operational efficiency of large, complex marketing teams.
Greg Alexander: Okay. Excellent. All right. Well, let’s start with the basics. So what is a working definition of proprietary research?
Andrea Fryrear: So for me, this is a collection of data that we own. So it’s not based in anybody else’s research or anybody else’s audience or data. It’s something that that you have collected, and you can slice and dice and present in whatever way you like, so that it’s really owned and completely controlled by the organization that conducted the research.
Greg Alexander: Okay. And the reason why I reached out to you to be on the show is because you just published a report which is an example of proprietary research. So tell us a little bit about that report.
Andrea Fryrear: So this was our 8th annual report. We’ve done it every year for the last 8 years, really, since the 1st year that Agile Sherpas existed. We did this report. It’s called the State of Agile Marketing Report, and agile marketing is our specialty. That’s where we really like to play from our kind of niche in the market. And so we started running this report back in our 1st year of being a business, and it’s every single year our biggest performer in terms of lead generation, new contacts into the database. It’s a perfect excuse for me to go on like a podcast circuit, much like we are doing right now. People reach out organically and want to learn more about the data. We even do proprietary, like specialized cuts of it for our clients. If they’re in a particular industry, we’ll do a special Pharma version or financial services version just for them, and you can’t get that anywhere if you’re not a client. So, and of course we use the heck out of it all year to talk about particular data points. We use it in presentations. It goes in all of our training materials. It’s a real, a real workhorse for us.
Greg Alexander: Okay. Awesome. Alright. My next question. So what specific characteristics make proprietary research valuable as a lead gen tool versus other content marketing strategies?
Andrea Fryrear: So we had a big discussion. We start doing prep work for this in the fall, and we had a big discussion with my team about whether we should do it again. Is it worth the expense? Is it worth the time and effort that it requires? And I was adamant that it’s more important now than it’s ever been because of LLMs. And how easy it is for everybody to get a hold of all kinds of different answers, right, to things. But this is something that always gets attributed to us. We show up in LLM answers with our State of Agile Marketing cited so, so much. And it differentiates us, right? It allows us to stand out and to be a source of knowledge that you can’t get anywhere else. This comes from us and it’s just so powerful. Like it’s such a good standout thing. I mean, we do way less blogging now than we used to. And you know me, Greg. I’m a total content marketing believer, and that’s how I built my business. But this is like an anchor piece for us that I can’t imagine how we would run our marketing programs without it at this point.
Greg Alexander: You know, I find myself asking this question to myself when I’m thinking about investments to make. And that question is.
Andrea Fryrear: What can’t the machine do that it will never be able to do?
Greg Alexander: Because, as we’ve learned, the LLMs and all the models are getting smarter and smarter and smarter, so what I don’t want to do is invest in something that at least appears today to require human interpretation, access to certain relationships, things that the machine can’t do, only to find out that by the time I publish it the machine can do the same thing, right? So it’s a race, you know what I mean. So tell me, and maybe use your annual report, which I love because you’ve been doing for 8 years, and you’ve got proof that it’s working — what is it about that that makes you — like you were questioning — should we do it again this year, like maybe that ship has sailed. What is it about it that you feel so confident in that the machine is never going to be able to do?
Andrea Fryrear: So I think there are some things that machines can do around it. Like this year, we did it kind of traditional style where we went out to a panel, like a survey panel, to get our responses. I can see a world where we don’t have to do that in the future, where we have some agentic helpers, right, who are going and getting this distributed and those kinds of things. But the story component of it is still very human-driven, right? We have an advisor that we’ve worked with since our second year of running the report, and she sits down with us every fall and says, “All right, what stories do you want to be able to tell from the data?” And let’s craft questions that will hopefully allow us to tell those stories. We don’t ever really know till we get the responses in. But we set up the survey, and we set up the question and the flow of it to hopefully allow us to provide the kind of insights that support the work that we do — that make people want to reach out to us and collaborate with us. And so it’s evolved a lot over the years, as our offers have evolved and our clients have evolved. But knowing from a very, very strategic standpoint what the point of this content is, and then building it accordingly, is still a very human activity, at least right now. To your point, next year we may have a different conversation. But that’s certainly how it went this year.
Greg Alexander: You know I remember somebody saying this to me many, many years ago, and that is your network is your net worth. And if you think about Andrea’s answer to my question around what is it that you can do that the machine can’t do, and the machine will never be able to do — that panel, that survey panel she has access to — the machines don’t have access to that. This advisor that she has access to that’s helping her with the story narrative. Anytime that you can leverage your network — and I use the word leverage in a good way, I don’t mean exploit or manipulate your network — but leverage your network, the machine is a machine. It’s not a human. So there’s no human-to-human relationship. So for those that are listening to this and you’re thinking about your business, ask yourself this question: what is it that the machine cannot do, that it will never be able to do? And default to the network. I have access to this network, and therefore that allows me to do what?
Greg Alexander: Okay, let me go to my next question. So you give away this research, and many people would say you’re nuts for giving it away because there’s real value and you could charge for it. So tell me what went into the decision to give it away for free.
Andrea Fryrear: So this honestly comes from my content marketing background, where I just want to teach. And I just wanna give away as much knowledge as I can, and then people know, like and trust you, and they come back and that’s been proven out for us for years and years. But like I said, we also offer versions of it that are not out in the open, that only our clients can get access to. And we’re actually experimenting right now with creating packages that include specialized cuts of the data that you can’t get anywhere else. And so the kind of the first one’s free, right? You can get the big report and the big ideas. But if you want to go deeper or you want something specialized, then you do have to engage with us and pay for that additional detail and things like that. So I think you can kind of have it both ways.
Greg Alexander: Yep, okay. Now, the price to pay for a piece of research can be dollars for sure. And I get why you’re not charging dollars for the macro view, but you are charging dollars for the micro view. That’s a really good strategy. There’s another way to pay for a report, and that is the report’s behind a lead capture form. And you’re requiring me to give you my information. I hate that. I am no longer filling out lead capture forms on websites, for all the reasons that you might guess. But you’re still doing that. I would love to know why? Because I view you as a content marketing expert, and you probably thought about removing the lead capture form, just letting everybody pound it. So tell me what went into that thinking.
Andrea Fryrear: Yeah, I would not be surprised if we do take down all of our lead forms this year. I think it’s about that time, just from a state-of-the-industry kind of point of view. And I think a lot of people are like you, where they just — they see that form and they will walk and go try to find that information somewhere else. And now, the moment one person has that PDF out in the world, everybody has it basically. They’re gonna upload it somewhere, and it’s gonna be distributed. So really, this year was about — we know how to run this play. We know how to do the launch right. And so we followed our kind of standard playbook. We run the big webinar, people register, you get the report, right. We kind of did things as usual. But this is definitely something that’s on my radar for all of our assets. We have a dozen different assets on the site that are gated, and I think it’s about time to bring it all down, because everybody’s got it somewhere, anyway.
Greg Alexander: Yeah.
Andrea Fryrear: Yeah.
Greg Alexander: I know. But then — I mean, if you don’t have the lead capture form, then you don’t have the contacts going into the database. So how can you really market? I mean, I guess. Help me through that. I can see the argument in both ways.
Andrea Fryrear: Yeah, I mean, I think that it’s a much more omni-channel world that we’re going to have to learn to market in and we’re going to have to figure out how to get involved in conversations that are happening, not on our websites. Right? People are not going to be coming to our websites at the same point in the buying journey as they used to. They’ll still come, but we’re not going to get them as early as we used to. The way that our websites function, the way that content functions is just different now. I’m trying to figure it out alongside everybody else. But I think we just got to be ready to switch it up and try new things. And what works this month is probably not working in the fall, and probably not working at this time next year, and welcome to the age of experimentation.
Greg Alexander: Well, all the more reason to be agile. Right? I mean.
Andrea Fryrear: Right, exactly right.
Greg Alexander: You know, I’ll share a personal story. So I wrote a book called The Boutique, and that book is sold on Amazon, and Amazon doesn’t share the data with me as to who buys the book. So technically, my content is out there, and I don’t have a lead capture form in front of it. But I can tell you that we have converted many, many readers of that book to paying members of Collective 54, and they come to us — to your point — they come to the website way further down the buying journey. And then, you know, when someone, when one of my team members is on the phone with them, they say, “Well, how did you hear about us?” And they say, “Oh, I read your book 6 months ago.” Right? So eventually, and I guess this is where you have to have trust that if what you produce is high enough quality, the person will read it and say, “I want to talk to them.” So that’s the thing. I think we all have to get our arms around.
Andrea Fryrear: And I would add, like the LLMs are structured right now in such a way that they’re looking for authority to surface when they give answers. And with stuff like State of Agile Marketing, we get cited and linked just all the time, because it’s data that’s very interesting. And when people are writing content, sharing on social, they talk about it, and they talk about us in association with it. And so it helps surface us as an expert, as we’re trying to get positioned that way in the models — we want them to know we are the best place to find information about these topics. And so it’s this weird, nebulous thing that you kind of have to just like you say — trust is happening. But a report like our State of Agile Marketing helps that happen kind of while you’re sleeping. You don’t have to do manual outreach or go on podcasts or whatever — people are citing it constantly, and that helps us just build and maintain authority.
Greg Alexander: Yeah. And authority is the key word there, right? For sure. All right. So let’s talk about conversions. So the State of Agile Marketing Report — you’ve been doing it for 8 years, you know. I’m sure you have people that read it every year. They anticipate it coming out, etc. You probably use it to nurture leads, etc. Walk the audience through how you go from producing the report all the way through the funnel to converting somebody to a paying client.
Andrea Fryrear: Yeah. So like I said, we’re very strategic about the questions that we ask, and we always have a few that are like — you would be an idiot not to do what we sell, right? Like, look how amazing it is on the end if you just go through our process. Right? And so we have some of those questions that are very strategic in there. And we use those in sales conversations, and so forth. But you download it, and then we also have a 3-step email nurture that is very deliberate on — we want you to be ready to do something else with us by the end of it. And so this year it’s our product that I was talking about — that kind of package bundle of training and services and custom data. So we want you to be able to be ready to buy that by the end of the nurture. And so we give more value, give more value, make the ask kind of in the third email. Like I said, we built a lot of content over the years, and so we’ll offer up more blog posts or other gated assets. You don’t have to ungate, right? You gave us your email once. You can have everything now. So we do that as like a step-by-step, takes about 3 weeks to go through that after you download. And that’s always on — you know people download it throughout the year. So we do the Big Bang launch in April, and then it just works all year long.
Greg Alexander: Yep. Tell me a little bit about the effort to conduct the research, produce the report. Is this something you do in house? Do you outsource it? Is it a lot of work, a little work? Is it expensive, inexpensive? Tell me about that.
Andrea Fryrear: I could not do it anymore without a partner, because it is a lift. So we’ve worked with the same organization. Mantis Research is the name. It’s a woman that I know from the content marketing world, who is very, very good at what she does. It’s just her. She’s like, very on the ball from a content production standpoint. And so my team has gotten really good. We’ve done it 8 years in a row. So what she does for us now is craft the questions, field the panel, and then she does all the data analysis for us. And so she comes back and says, these discrepancies are not statistically significant — like, I would not emphasize these. There’s just not enough, right, to rely on that data. This, however, is a big deal, and we should emphasize this data. So she does a lot of that for us. But then my team builds the report, designs it in Canva, makes the blog post about it. We do all the content production, and that saves us a lot of money. In the years when we had her team doing kind of everything for us, it’s probably a $17,000 to $20,000 all-told investment. These days, it’s more like $12k because we’ve been able to take more of that stuff on ourselves. The other thing we’ve done in the past is get a sponsor, so we’ll get like a tech sponsor that has a complementary tool to us to come in and basically say, give us 10 grand and your name can go on the report. So it’s the Agile Sherpas plus IBM State of Agile Marketing Report. And then it costs us nothing, right? They defray all of those costs. The downside is, then they get some say in what the report looks like, and they have certain expectations about lead sharing. This year we did it all on our own, and I’m kind of spoiled to it now, because we got to do whatever we wanted. So I think we’ll probably do that going forward. But we have gotten sponsors most years in the past.
Greg Alexander: See. And I can see how maybe a smaller firm — with 20 grand, a lot of money — that might be advantageous for them. I would recommend — this is just Greg’s opinion — I wouldn’t do that, because whenever I see a piece of research has a sponsor, I say to myself that research has been bought and paid for. It’s not objective. It’s been slanted by the sponsor. It’s just glorified lead gen. It’s really not research. So just my 2 cents on that. All right, my last question, and I’d love for you to share with me what you think the vision for this is. Right? So 5 years from now, the State of Agile Marketing Report — your proprietary research — looks like what?
Andrea Fryrear: Hmm. 5 years from now. That’s a good question. What I’d love for this to be is a driver of enterprise value for us. I think historically, we’ve looked at it primarily as a lead generation asset, and it’s done a great job from that point of view. But to our earlier part of the conversation, I think proprietary data is getting really, really valuable, and we’re coming up on a decade of it that we have. And we have all the old data. Right? We release one cut of it, but there are so many other ways to slice and dice the data. Like, how does this correlate with that? And how do these things go together? And now we have over time — how do certain things change and evolve — that we’ve never released. Like, that’s a lot of value that I think we need to lean into harder. Especially as the economic climate we’re in right now — nobody wants to write me a $50,000 consulting SOW. People are not excited about that conversation. So if I can figure out what else we have to offer the world from an enterprise value standpoint, a decade worth of data that nobody else has is a pretty sweet sweetener.
Greg Alexander: Yeah, I would agree. I mean, they say data is the new oil. And if you have proprietary data, you’ve created scarcity value. So somebody’s going to want that data and be willing to pay for it. You know, at Collective 54, we have a version of this. We have this tool called the Firm Estimator, and it’s a tool that allows a member to enter some of their data, and it gives them an approximation of what their firm might be worth if they decided to sell it today. At this point, since we’ve been doing it for so long — back to your point about historical data — we update that every 90 days. And we see dozens, now hundreds, of exits or attempts to exit. So the data is very real. I would encourage you, Andrea, to think about turning this report into some type of real-time benchmarking tool. If you’re focused on enterprise value — which you clearly are, and congrats for that. That’s an evolution for you. I’m so happy to hear you say that. To the extent it becomes a real-time benchmarking tool, that will create real enterprise value for sure.
Greg Alexander: So listen, we’re so lucky to have you in the community. You’re constantly giving. And thank you so much. Congratulations on your latest release of the State of Agile Marketing Report. For those marketing agencies or people that might hire marketing agencies and want access to the report, where do they get it?
Andrea Fryrear: Stateofagilemarketing.com.
Greg Alexander: Well, that was easy.
Greg Alexander: Okay, great. All right, Andy. Well, thanks again. I appreciate it very much. And good luck to you with this. Okay.
Andrea Fryrear: Always happy to share. Thanks, Greg.
Greg Alexander: Okay. Thank you.
Note: This transcript was generated by Zoom.