The person who books a call with you is rarely the person who approves the invoice. I kept circling that idea in my Unscripted SEO interview with George Little, who runs BrandZap, a consultancy that helps B2B companies, usually in SaaS, craft their brands and websites. His answer is to write for one person and then hand that person everything they need to win the argument inside their own company.
My analogy on the show was a home construction project, whether it’s a kitchen remodel or precast concrete walls going up around the property: you need to speak to the homeowner, because they’re the one with the money, even though the kids are the ones who’ll live with it. B2B flips that. Often the person doing the shopping isn’t the one who’s going to eat the meal and say whether they’re happy. If you sell consulting, you’re writing to the shopper and getting judged by the table.
Write to the one person who actually emails you
George’s first move sounds backwards. You’d expect a consultant selling to a team to write for the whole team. He doesn’t.
“Like I actually make it really specific to one target audience. For me, it’s product marketers or sort of marketing managers.”
He picked them because they’re the ones who reach out to him and do the interface. The services he describes still have to hold up when anyone on the team vets them, “But the way I’m communicating it is speaking in a language that that person inherently knows and uses.” The payoff is the reaction he’s after: “this person knows exactly what my problem is.”
Look at your last ten inbound leads. Who sent them? If it’s the marketing manager every time, your service page should sound like a marketing manager’s Slack thread, not like a CFO’s board deck. You’ll get to the CFO. Just not on the homepage.
Arm the internal champion before the CFO meeting
Once you’ve won that one person, your job changes. George put it as “you’re each other’s champion.” If someone is going to walk your proposal into a CFO’s office and say they think the company should spend money on you, “you need to make sure that you help that person make that argument.”
He starts by asking them a direct question: “what are the obstacles that you see in bringing this on?” Then he builds collateral around the answer. Here’s what I’d hand a champion, based on what he described and what’s worked for me:
- The objections, answered in writing. Ask what they expect pushback on, then write the one-pager that answers it.
- A proposal tuned after a call, not off the shelf. George’s site doesn’t say “get started now.” It says here’s what I’m offering, let’s talk, and I’ll tune it to what you need.
- Something they can show their peers. A tool, a dashboard, a before-and-after. Something with their name on it.
That last one is George’s whole point. When he hands a client a tool that writes meta descriptions or builds pages to the brand standards, there’s no gatekeeping around it, because “I’m just making that person look better in their company among their peers.” Your champion’s promotion is your renewal.
Sort your AI use into three buckets
When I asked what role AI plays in his stack, George had a cleaner answer than most agencies I’ve talked to. He sorts it into three categories:
- Stuff he has no base knowledge of. His example was a contract: is this going to help me or hurt me?
- His own workflows. If an image takes him two hours, he looks for a way to make it faster and “make me the reviewer of these things.”
- Tools that enable his clients. Tools that execute on the brand standards he made, so the relationship keeps going after the brand pack is delivered.
The third bucket is the business model. He said it plainly: “I don’t want to be gobbled up by the machines.” If you only use AI in the first two buckets, you’re faster, but you’re still selling the same deliverables your client can now get from a chat window.
Sell the tooling, not just the output
George told a story you’ll probably live through soon, if you haven’t already. A client sent him a deck that Claude made with Claude Design, using his brand presentation as the seed. It got the colors and fonts. Some of the layout and image selection he didn’t agree with. He could have fought it. Instead he wrote Claude a better set of instructions for how the brand works and told the client to go to town.
“I’m not presenting that like, do I hire the human or do I secretly use AI? It’s more like, no, this is a consultant who understands AI and probably will help me use it better.”
Two years ago that would have felt like giving the game away. George’s experience is the opposite. He’s now “much more open to being like, I built these 10 pages with AI, but they’re all based on my standards and the thing that I taught it,” and clients respond with “okay, now we can do a bunch of different iterations” instead of firing him. His read on where consulting is headed:
“you’re not just here to make outputs and make opinions, but to make tooling.”
I’ve felt this from the SEO side. Ross Hudgens and I talked about how you can’t sell SEO as a count of deliverables anymore, and I’ve argued that a tool beats a blog post when you want links. George takes it a step further: “Your biggest distraction for your clients is AI trying to do the thing that you’re also trying to do.” He even built his own Loom replacement with Codex, which he figures will save him “almost $300 a year.” If a consultant can do that for himself, your client can do it for the report you send every month.
Use “fractional” for the relationship, not the search
I asked George whether he leans on the word “fractional” when he pitches. “I use the term only when like discussing the relationship, that sort of feel of the relationship for folks.” An earlier version of his company tried to sell a “fractional creative director,” and it failed because nobody was searching for it. (I wrote up the search side of that lesson on SEO Arcade.) Buyers were looking for agencies and freelancers, and George positions BrandZap in between: working in-house with somebody, more like a fractional approach, without making the label carry the sale.
He closed with a question for my next guest that I keep thinking about: “Where is the next marketing space that is going to be available?” He thinks LinkedIn was the last free one and “now LinkedIn is business TikTok,” while paid search has become too expensive for a ground-floor start. My answer was smaller communities: a couple of SEO Slack groups, some pay-gated Skool groups, and Reddit if you’d asked me five years ago. George’s through line was the same one this whole article runs on: “any one of these things needs to be a human to human connection in some way.”
The full conversation, including George’s self-hosted models and his case against AI gradients on SaaS feature pages, is on the George Little episode page. You can find George on LinkedIn or at brandzap.xyz.
So who emailed you last, and what would they need to walk your proposal into their CFO’s office? What tool could you hand them that makes them look good on Monday?