How Agencies Demonstrate Expertise Through Building a Proof Library

Sei-Wook Kim (00:05.174) On today's episode, we're talking about proof — the case studies, artifacts, and references that turn the work you've already done into market-facing evidence of your expertise. Most agencies treat proof as sales collateral, but we believe it goes beyond that. We'll walk through the three components of proof, what proof unlocks across your whole agency, and how to actually build it when you feel like you don't have time. Peter Kang (00:31.132) All right, Wook, so the proof is in the pudding. We're talking about the pudding today. Let's start with the narrow view of proof. When people think about what are your proof assets or whatever, usually people first think of sales collateral. It's like, yeah, it's the stuff in a deck that BD puts together. When BD's like, yeah, we got some case studies that we're gonna show during our sales process — that's where a lot of the proof goes. That's part of it. Case studies are certainly an important part of it, and we'll get to that more. But the wider view that we'll get to today is that proof is really the artifact of your expertise. You gotta think about how do you solidify your agency's potency in the market, and you do this by making the work you've already done visible and verifiable. What are the components that can do this? When you think about some of these proof assets — we'll get to the case studies, which is the first component — agencies see proof assets as a chore. Putting together a case study is a big pain in the butt. But the right way to think about it is it's an investment in solidifying and institutionalizing their expertise. The creation of proof assets, if you really lean into it, is valuable in and of itself. So that's something to consider. Sei-Wook Kim (01:59.368) Yeah, it comes up time and time again, and we're guilty of this — we would work on really great projects for clients and then move on because you're on to the next project. Then six months later you don't remember the specifics enough, and you're trying to cobble together a case study and you're just making things up or not having all the details. It's a missed opportunity. Peter Kang (02:25.327) Yeah. Just to put this in the context of our agency foundation — the framework we've been talking about for positioning agencies — specifically when we talk about positioning, which we talked a lot about in episode thirty-four, it's about what your agency can do. Proof is the demonstration of it. Without proof, positioning is in many ways a facade without the backing. You really have to think about the investment that proof provides. Sei-Wook Kim (02:55.703) Cool. So let's talk about what proof is. Let's define it. We're saying there are three components: case studies, artifacts, and active references. All of these together serve the same job — to make your expertise visible and verifiable, to people on your team but also external to your team as well. Peter Kang (03:21.198) Yeah. What you might find in agencies is that instead of these three components neatly organized, you usually see a shared Google Drive that everyone has access to, and it's basically a graveyard of folders by client name. There might be some stuff in it like kickoff decks, some project schedules, whatever, but it only gets touched when someone's scrambling to put together some slides for a new pitch. That's a common occurrence in a lot of these agencies. Sei-Wook Kim (03:55.605) Yeah, for sure. All right, let's dive into the first component: case studies. Let's start by talking about what a strong case study looks like. There are a few things to dive into. The first is understanding the client's problem and clearly articulating what that problem is. Not a case study saying they need a new website, but what was the specific situation the client was in, what were the stakes at hand, was there something breaking that needed to be fixed, why did this whole engagement matter to them? That exercise in itself — just going through and articulating what the challenge is — shows you have some expertise. You understand what a client's problem is and how you went about solving it. Peter Kang (04:53.326) Yeah, definitely. The articulation is super important — it's really the setup that everything following builds on. The next thing is the methodology and process used to solve the problem. This is about how the agency approached the work: the diagnostic, the decisions that were made, maybe some of the trade-offs that happened during the project, as well as the exact sequence in which it happened. This is not like copy-pasting your scope of work and saying, all right, this is what we did. It's more that there's enough detail that if another agency peer looked at it, they'd be like, yeah, this all makes sense. But even more importantly, a prospect is able to follow it and go, cool, this is how they work. Getting this methodology and process part right is what separates a case study from a pretty portfolio piece. A portfolio basically just shows a snapshot of what shipped, but a case study really goes into how the team did its thinking. Sei-Wook Kim (06:05.184) Yeah. Another part is the outcomes, and really having some evidence that backs up the outcomes. Typically that could look like metrics, or in some instances a before-and-after view of how those numbers changed or what the business impact was on the client. The more specific you can be, the better. So it's like, did you increase conversion rate from one point eight to three point two percent in the course of ninety days? Be very specific with the outcomes. Also, make sure it's tied back to the original problem. Sharing numbers on their own has no context, but if you can tie them back to the original problem you were solving for the client, it closes the loop of that story. At the end of the day, not all engagements, not all case studies need to have numbers to be strong. If you have the numbers, lead with them and have that as part of the story. But if you don't, qualitative outcomes can also be very helpful. Peter Kang (07:20.705) Yeah. Those are the three big pieces — articulating the problem, the methodology and process, and of course the evidence-based outcomes. Then there are other elements within the case study that can make it really robust. Obviously there are visuals: screenshots, before-and-after comps of what the client had — if it's a website, that's especially powerful. Dashboard snapshots are good too. Any artifacts that were part of the process, diagrams, anything that makes it easily browsable. There's a user-friendliness you want with case studies — you just don't want a wall of text, so anything you can break up is great. And then if you want to level it up, you can also do video testimonials and embed videos, animation, and other visuals as well. Then there are client quotes. This goes beyond "yeah, this agency did a great job." It's more to the point of, hey, these guys really understood the problem and they helped solve XYZ, or they were able to really think through XYZ. In the client's voice, talking specifically about what the impact was and what changed. Team context is also worthwhile — who worked on what, what roles were involved if you don't want to name specific team members. It just gives the prospect reading the case study a way to picture what it's like to work with you. And lastly, the timeline. Part of the process and methodology is showing how long this took, and this is specifically important in those high-pressure-cooker situations where the client came to you needing to replatform in, you know, a hundred days and you were able to get it done. Being able to tell that as part of the story is another way to spice up that case study. Sei-Wook Kim (09:36.37) Yeah. Case studies are interesting because they can be used for a lot of different things. We've been talking about sales as a big one — you're in that high-pressure situation where a client needs to get something done, and here's a case study the sales team can use to show exactly what you did for the same kind of client and demonstrate your expertise in that conversation. But for different teams — marketing, for example — case studies can be used as source material for blog posts, social content, even conference talks. I remember Barrel, one of our agencies, did a project with this brand Sweet Lawrence and there was a partnership they did with Mattel for the Barbie movie. That case study turned into an opportunity at the Expo West conference where there was a big panel discussion — the CEO Lucas moderated a conversation with the client on stage, the person from Mattel — and basically had a whole conversation that stemmed from this one case study example of an engagement they had with the client. So it can go way beyond just the one artifact you're creating for your sales team. Peter Kang (10:55.99) Yeah, that's a great point. Sei-Wook Kim (11:00.403) Yeah. Some other groups: if you have partnerships — other partner agencies, tech partners, etc. — who want to understand what you do in more depth, it's good context for them so they can also send you referrals. Also, if it lives on your website and it's organized cleanly for AEO or SEO, prospects can find you through all the relevant search terms embedded within the case study. And then for team members — people who weren't specifically working on those engagements, and also new team members who join and want to understand what does this company do, what have they done, and get some more context. This is a great library for them to go through and have that knowledge get institutionalized across the company. Peter Kang (11:58.007) Yeah. What you're getting at with how these case studies get used is it starts to reframe them — as we mentioned before — not as a cost, but really as an investment. With that, it becomes a clear asset. That's why we talk about a proof library — think about it as an asset library you have. Part of what makes a really good library is that you can find things. You can search it. One thing that's important over time is whether you label things or put them in different folders or have some way to easily access them — you want to be able to organize a lot of these case studies in a few different ways. Obviously there's the easy one of just organizing by client name, which most people do, but you can go further. You can think of it by wedge — which we defined in the past as the specific problem you're solving for the client that gets you in the door. That could be conversion optimization, an e-commerce replatform, retention marketing, lifecycle marketing, a brand refresh. You can have case studies organized by these different wedges that might have been why you were hired. Then there's also a trigger way to think about case studies — a specific situation for the client that made them act and hire you. This could be a specific fundraising round, like all the case studies for Series B venture-backed startups. Or anytime there's a CMO switch, because there are very specific things that happen when a new CMO comes into a brand and you have to do some work for it. And other things like a forced platform migration where you have only a few months before something gets sunset. All those things you can categorize really well. And then the last part is just other characteristics of the client or brand that you might want to group by — whether they have a certain type of investor like PE-backed, whether it's a size like enterprise, mid-market, SMB, multi-unit, multi-brand, different verticals. Just having your library searchable or organized in these ways so that sales, marketing, partnerships — everybody can just access it in an understood way — is gonna be huge. Sei-Wook Kim (14:35.388) Yeah. The biggest point is that if it's hard to use, if you don't have the context, people are just not going to use it, or they're gonna go off and have one-off conversations with people one-on-one versus actually using this as a true library. That stuff is getting easier and easier these days — it could live in any format where AI can search it, all these platforms are really good at searching keywords. But the big thing is just having these case studies rich in everything: not just the process of what you did, but actually including the outcomes of how you impacted the client, and really having all of the points covered so that when somebody looks up and tries to find a case study, it has the full context about what it is that you did for a client. Peter Kang (15:29.034) Yeah, absolutely. Cool. All right, let's move on to the second component: artifacts. A strong artifact is a sanitized piece of the actual work that shows how the agency thinks and operates. This is different from a case study, because a case study might tell the story of how an engagement happened or the outcome. The artifact is the actual evidence of the agency's craft. It's something that's a bit more tangible — you can send it over to a prospect and they can poke around and look at it more closely. It's less about a claim and more about, yeah, this is what you guys are doing and producing along the way to the result. It's representative and it shows the way you actually work — not some glossed-up abstract representation of what you do, but actually representative of the actual work. And in many respects, hopefully it's useful on its own. The artifact might have value to whoever's looking at it before they engage with you. They go, cool — if it's a checklist or a diagnostic, this is actually helpful for helping us think about it. We've seen this with, like, when you show an intake questionnaire; some people find it really valuable to preview that. And lastly, it signals depth. For a lot of folks, just living in the slides, it's really hard for the client to wrap their heads around, all right, is this real? Having an artifact ready really helps. Some examples: roadmap templates, analysis frameworks, delivery checklists, audit samples, sample sprints, strategy docs that have been cleaned up a bit, even teardowns — just all these kinds of deliverables that are produced throughout the engagement. Sei-Wook Kim (18:32.717) Yeah. It doesn't have to be a static document either. I know one of our agencies in the sales process uses a live artifact where they can pull up a dashboard and show the performance of a specific client, or a sanitized version of it, so the client can see the artifact of what actually happens — and it's not just a representation of that. Artifacts can be used quite a bit in sales, like during that conversation where a client asks, hey, what exactly does that look like, or how do you guys actually approach that? You can include that as a live demo or screenshots. The marketing team can take those and turn them into content. If there's a specific diagnostic framework that you use, that could become a blog post, LinkedIn content, podcast topics — it can live in many different ways where you share that and show your expertise. Partnerships again — sharing it with partners and helping explain what you do better than just having a little deck on your process, but actually, here's the artifact of what we actually created. And then recruiting and onboarding: when you want to show candidates or people who join your team what the work actually looks like and what you do, there's nothing better than showing the actual artifact of what you made for one of the clients. Peter Kang (20:04.03) Yeah. On the partnerships and onboarding side, something could be as much as the way the design team sets up their Figma for mobile designs, or design systems, for example. If you're working with a partner who might be curious or who might actually have to make use of that, that's a great way to solidify the relationship with a partner as well. The partner can then more confidently tell whoever the prospect is that they're referring the agency to — hey, look, these guys know what they're doing, they have a really neat way that they're doing the design system stuff, and we really trust them to run with this project. You can see how artifacts work across those dimensions. Sei-Wook Kim (20:53.24) Yeah. The key thing with artifacts is to try to be as specific as possible and share the actual thing. If it's too sanitized or too general — here's what we do versus actually showing the thing — buyers or whoever is the receiving party can tell the difference. The other thing is, if you have it ready and documented and you're in a conversation, you can show people at the same time or even before a conversation versus saying, yeah, we'll follow up with that afterwards and deflect until later. It's about how you use that as a tool in those conversations. The last thing to think about here is don't be too precious about things. If you're afraid your competitors will take what you have and copy you — if someone's gonna copy a checklist that you made, they're not gonna outsell what you're actually selling. Peter Kang (22:00.016) Yeah, well, if that's what you're afraid of, you have bigger issues. All right. Moving on to component three: active references. When you talk about proof, this is very important — a strong active reference is a previous client or a current client who's willing to pick up the phone and speak credibly about a specific aspect of working with your agency. This is a lot of times what makes or breaks deals that are in the later stages. When we talk about what makes a strong reference: first, they're recent. You've talked to this reference in the last quarter, you've been in touch, and they kind of know what's been happening in your world as well. They've been briefed, so they know they're gonna be contacted, who's gonna contact them, and what they're likely to be asked. You definitely want to avoid blindsiding a reference and not giving them a heads up. There's also a scoping aspect: the reference you're putting in touch with a prospect is matched to a specific claim. If you have a client that you're trying to win who's more enterprise and you're trying to do a specific type of project, you want to match them with a client you've done similar work for. That's very important for an apples-to-apples experience for that prospect. And lastly, you want to be certain of the advocacy strength of the reference — not someone who's just willing to vouch, but someone who's really, really positive about the experience. I cringe recalling some of the lukewarm references we might have used in the past. It was terrible because if it's not a hell yes, it's basically a no when it comes to references. You have to make sure they are people who absolutely love vouching for you and go above and beyond to talk about you in a positive way. Sei-Wook Kim (24:29.203) Yeah. I remember there were instances where references hurt us when it was us providing the reference person — it didn't go the way we expected it to go. Peter Kang (24:40.375) Real. Sei-Wook Kim (24:42.825) Cool. If you think about references and how they get used, sales is a big one. Usually late in the sales process, when a prospect needs to de-risk and just talk to more people, you're obviously trying to match the right concern. If they need to see someone who's done a similar kind of company, similar kind of project — whatever is matched to their specific concern and issue — that's where you would bring them in. But even communication style, right? Peter Kang (25:15.544) Even style, right? Like communication style. Sometimes people are like, hey, I don't know if these guys can match our need for reporting, or speed of responses, or whatever. People are trying to look for those things. Sei-Wook Kim (25:32.373) Yeah, or location comes up — like, they're not geographically here, can we meet with them in person, is there another client I can talk to that had a similar experience? But also, if you think about your references in general and how you maintain that list and keep up to date with your references — that process of reaching out, talking to your references, seeing what's going on in their world, updating them about your business and what's happening — that could lead to more opportunities. Either with that person, or your reference could refer you to someone else in their network. That could be a byproduct. And it doesn't have to be a monthly thing. You can do a quarterly cadence or every six months — enough so that it doesn't feel cold when you reach out asking, hey, can you be a reference? Just keeping that list of people refreshed. Peter Kang (26:33.186) Yeah, I love that. Just to the point of a reference leading to another opportunity — that's huge because you're not only talking about a new business opportunity just by being in touch with your references, that reference makes an intro and they're already vouching for you upfront. So you're gonna get the warmest intros through the people who are willing to advocate for you. It's such a valuable asset to cultivate. When you think about what to avoid with references: number one, just having a list of people because they were good clients in the past or you felt they had a good experience — that doesn't mean anything. In many ways they've gone cold. You have to really think about the active piece in active references. Overusing references is another thing to avoid. This is why you do need options to select from and space out. I remember back in the day, especially in the early days when we didn't have that many clients and projects, we had a really good reference that we would hit up every couple of weeks for a new reference call, and at some point they were like, hey, I've got a lot of stuff going on, can you put a pause on the references for a while. So you've gotta make sure not to overuse them. Sei-Wook Kim (28:17.768) Yeah, on that note, you can't put so much on their plate. You're asking for their time. How can you treat your references right and try to add value to their lives if they're supporting you in that way. Peter Kang (28:37.163) Yeah, absolutely. Another thing to avoid is references talking about you in a generic way — they were great to work with, nice guys, whatever. You want them to be able to speak to, hey, they solved this specific problem, they were able to really help us with XYZ. That's where, in briefing your references before they take the call, you can highlight some of the things you think will be important for the prospect to hear. These are all things that can be prepared for. And then the last piece goes along with why you don't wait to write your case studies — you also don't ask for references too late. Six months after a project's closed, that moment of joy from launching something great together has long passed, and asking for a reference then is gonna be less effective. You want to catch them right when they're feeling really great about you and what you did together. Definitely hit at the right moment. Sei-Wook Kim (29:44.947) Yeah. On that note, let's talk more about case study timing and when to actually write the case study. A lot of agencies — we're guilty of this — miss the timing and then miss the opportunity to build that robust library of case studies. One of the rules here is to start drafting the case study during the engagement, while the content is fresh, while the team is still working on it, or immediately when something ends so that you have full context. Don't leave it off until "when we have time, we'll do our case studies" — and then you end up not doing it or doing it six months later. The reason is obvious: the details of the engagement really fade. There might be a quote a client said, or numbers you have to go back and reference, or you could have missed the opportunity to take a screenshot of the before-and-after website. During the project there could have been a really pivotal moment — a team member had a great insight, a client had a great quote, something amazing that would have been great to capture — and you just forget about it and move on. Being said, people will quickly move on to new engagements. Within weeks of a project ending is probably the longest you should go before getting all that data. Don't leave it off — we've done this a million times, you leave it off, six months later you lose the metrics, you lose the team context, the client has left, and you can't even get a reference or a quote. There's so much context there that is most helpful to capture while the engagement's happening. Peter Kang (31:47.306) Yeah. Just a couple of nuances: if it's a purely project-based engagement, you might want to start in the final two weeks drafting this thing, and then use that project-close moment to capture a quote and ask for that reference — stacking some of that as you're working on the case study. When you do a team debrief — and we talk about this as part of our agency habits, one of the most important types of habits is doing the debrief after an engagement — it's a really natural moment to write the case study against the debrief notes that come out of it. On the longer-term retainer side, these are ongoing relationships, but that doesn't mean you can't do case studies. You can focus case studies on specific initiatives, campaigns, and projects within those relationships. When we think about some of the clients in the past, Barrel has done a good job of this for some of their CPG clients like Kevita Creamery or McCormick — they might produce multiple case studies over the course of two or three years. It might be about a particular replatform, or rolling out a loyalty feature, a gifting feature, international expansion. One logo, multiple case studies. And QBRs — quarterly business reviews with a lot of these brands — are a great forcing function because you first have to prepare an internal case study to show the client: hey, here's some of the work we've done together. That recap section of the QBR is basically a draft of the case study. You can stack some of that together. Sei-Wook Kim (33:45.217) Yeah. You've already touched on a few different habits to make this easier. The debrief — you do an internal debrief, and that's the start of your case study when you have a lot of that content. The QBR — having gone through that, you have a draft you can use for your case study. Just thinking about other habits that make it easy: when a client is in a moment of joy — when they're like, this is great, you guys really hit it out of the park, or there's an outcome you really nailed — that's usually a good moment to ask, hey, would you be open to being a reference for us? Not six months later when they've forgotten the engagement. Other things that can make it easier: internally building templates. If there's a one-page form that team members can fill out with key points, it doesn't have to be some huge thing that takes hours. Any team member — junior, senior, doesn't matter — can take the first stab, or even someone from the marketing team who can take notes from debriefs, QBRs, and project notes and produce a V1 of the case study just to get things going. Peter Kang (35:22.528) With AI now you can have your debrief, then have a skill that ingests the transcript and outputs a first draft. Your skill or prompt could have this kind of template embedded to at least produce a first draft. There are ways to make this easy and it's only gonna get easier, but as with any habit, you have to take that first step to put this in place. Sei-Wook Kim (35:49.113) Yeah. Another way is you could outsource it. There are agencies and teams that do this kind of work where the bottleneck is taking all that raw information and putting it in a clean format. You can get external help that specializes in case study writing, and if your team focuses on all the inputs, someone else can take that and make it into a nice story with nice formatting. Peter Kang (36:18.205) Yeah, a shout out there — a couple of firms that do a great job with this: there's Verbatim, and then there's Testimonial Hero. They both do case study work for folks. Sei-Wook Kim (36:30.32) Yeah. A couple more habits to make this easier: you could have a quarterly proof sprint — one day a quarter where you just catch up on all this stuff, like indexing, writing case studies, gathering artifacts, refreshing your website, whatever the activities that aren't happening consistently. You can get the team really rallied around that in a concentrated amount of time. And the last thing here is someone has to own it. If someone doesn't own it, it probably won't get done. That person doesn't have to be the CEO or a senior person — it could be a marketing coordinator whose job it is to spend a few hours a week gathering all the inputs, building that library, making sure it's maintained, working with any external parties, and just making sure the work gets done. Peter Kang (37:33.387) Yeah, definitely. We've seen this at Barrel where they started with the design team primarily owning the case study work, and over time it did shift to a marketing resource. The fact was someone owned it, so it always got done. Accountability drives a lot of the results. Cool. All right, so we covered a lot. Just to recap: the three components of proof are case studies, artifacts, and references. Really think about investing in building that library. Write it while it's fresh, create it while it's fresh, hit up your clients while they're fresh to become references, and make sure that becomes a habit. Just to reframe it one last time: proof is really how your expertise shows up in the market. Make the right investments there. Thanks for joining us. Till next time, have a good one. Sei-Wook Kim (38:32.059) Thanks.