David Ogilvy guaranteed he'd beat clients' best ads in a month-long test, or he'd pay for the ads himself. The top 20% of prospects skipped the test entirely, trusting his confidence enough to sign on immediately. That confidence funnel let him hand-pick premium clients and scale fast.
There's a great story. I think it's Ogilvy who, when he launched his agency, he's like, how do I get people to do this? And he basically made a killer offer. He was like, take your top performing ad that you've spent years iterating on and you got this to be your top performing ad. I guarantee that I will beat it in an A/B test head to head within a month. And I'm so confident I will fund the ad costs if I don't beat it in order to win your business. And what he said was the response rate on this ad was through the roof. But the best part was of the 100% of people that responded, he's like, we didn't even end up having to do it because the top 20%, the most expensive clients were like, okay, cool. Forget the A/B test and the mechanics and the contract for The fact that you're willing to do that, we looked into your track record. We are big believers in this. We'd like to just move forward and go ahead and retain you. We know that our agency would never be that confident to pull that up, so we're willing to work with you. And he's like, it was incredible. I use this killer offer to fill up the funnel and then I just picked the top 20% of clients in that funnel and that kickstarted Ogilvy, which became, you know, one of the big ad agencies.
