Why we publish our editorial standard before signing the retainer

An honest sales process is one where the client knows, before signing, exactly what they are buying. The opposite of that is the modern marketing-agency sales process, which operates more like a magic trick: a slide deck of vague capabilities, a price that materializes in the seventh email, and a contract that nobody enjoys reading. We declined to operate that way in 2019, and we have declined to operate that way since.

The editorial standard is a 47-page document. We send it before the discovery call, not after. It describes how we brief, draft, edit, fact-check, and ship every long-form piece on the client's site. It includes our internal style guide, the read-out-loud rule, the conditions under which we kill a brief, and the eight failure modes that disqualify a draft from publication. It is dull on purpose.

If the standard cannot survive being read by a client's procurement team, the standard should not exist.

Two arguments come up. The first is that publishing a standard creates a stick the client beats us with later. We have never found this to be true. The standard is a mutual document; if a client wants something outside the standard we discuss it openly, and most of the time we revise the standard. The second is that the standard reveals our methodology to competitors. We are sympathetic to the worry, but uninterested in it. Every agency claims to do "topical authority"; not every agency runs four read-out-loud passes on a draft before publication. Methodology is cheap; discipline is expensive.

The retainer that does not survive a slow read of our standard is a retainer that would not have survived month four anyway. The point of a long sales cycle is to fail quickly. The point of a published standard is to make that failure happen before the contract, not after.