Authority Guide

Who this is for

A company that knows something worth saying but has no audience to survey. Most firms are in this position and the honest answer used to be nothing at all, because a survey needs a list and a list takes years.

This works instead by borrowing standing rather than measuring it. If you can get five or six senior people in your market to give you half an hour, you have the raw material for something more quotable than most survey data, and considerably harder for a competitor to imitate.

What you get

• A framework or point of view at the centre, developed with you. The thing your market can argue with, and the reason the guide exists
• Five to eight interviews with named senior figures in your sector, recorded and transcribed
• Their words, attributed, with title and company, throughout the guide
• The guide itself, written and fully designed: layout, pull quotes, diagrams where the framework needs them, produced PDF
• A landing page built to convert, with a qualifying form rather than an email box
• Automated delivery to anyone who downloads it, and an alert to you the moment they do
• A launch kit: social cards, a promotion sequence, and copy to send it to your list

How it works

1. Framework session. We fix the argument the guide makes and who should be in it. The argument, in one page, for sign-off
2. Interview list agreed, approaches made, sessions booked. Who has said yes
3. Interviews recorded and transcribed. Transcripts as they land
4. Structure and first draft. The draft, before it is designed
5. Design, pull quotes, diagrams, PDF production. First full proof
6. Landing page, automation, then launch. The live page, then downloads

What we need from you

• Your point of view, honestly held. One session, and you have to actually have an opinion and be willing to publish it under your name
• Names. Who in your market would you like quoted, and which of them will take your call
• The introductions themselves. A warm approach from you converts; a cold one from us mostly does not
• Brand assets and permission to publish under your name
• One named approver, not a committee

What this is not

• Not research. There is no survey and no sample size, and we will never dress it up as one. If you want a number nobody else has, that is an Insight Report at £5,000, and the difference in price is almost exactly the survey and the fieldwork.
• Not a summary of other people’s work. Anyone can assemble that and it convinces no one. The framework has to be yours.
• Not guaranteed access. We will approach everyone on the list and tell you who said no. Usually enough say yes. Occasionally a name you badly wanted does not, and no fee makes that different.

Where this has worked

cube19, Making Your Staffing Firm Attractive for Investment or Sale. Thirty-eight pages, no survey, six named contributors interviewed and quoted with their titles: on the universal laws of attraction, on choosing when to partner, on how small the universe of potential buyers really is, and on why your purpose should not be to sell. The argument was cube19’s. The standing came from the people who agreed to be in it.

cube19, The CEO Guide to Scaling Recruitment Performance. Twenty-three pages on a single claim: that most recruitment KPIs count activity rather than improve performance, and that half the industry inherited its ratios from whichever agency somebody worked at last. One argument, held all the way through, which is what makes a guide quotable rather than merely useful.

Price and terms

£3,500. Half on signature, half on delivery of the first full proof. Design and production are included. Any paid promotion is separate and at cost. One round of substantive revisions at proof stage is included; further rounds are billed at £75 an hour, quoted first.

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