How to Win and Manage Enterprise Clients with Alex Birkett

Kuba Grajcar hosted. His guest, Alex Birkett, co-founded Omniscient Digital, an organic growth agency that builds SEO and content programs for B2B software companies, from seed-stage startups up to SAP, Adobe, and Loom. Kuba opened with the show’s standard question (your number one tip for agency operators), then dug into what changes when the client is an enterprise: how you win them, how you keep work moving through their approval layers, and who writes the content.

Start with “why you?”

Alex admitted he’d prepped for the wrong podcast and answered off the top of his head.

Top of the dome, top of the brain: differentiate. Why you? I think if you drill down into that question, it answers a lot more, it solves a lot more problems than just the positioning on your website. It helps solve services, product, packaging, pricing, positioning, geographic focus. There’s a million options for services. It’s a competitive space almost no matter what you do. So why you?

(Listen at 2:51)

Kuba pushed on how you differentiate in a commoditized space. Alex’s answer: understand how the buying decision gets made. Price is the first axis, and Omniscient chose not to compete there. Culture fit is another, which is why the founders put so much of themselves on tape: Alex’s weekly newsletter, and podcast episodes called Kitchen Side where the three founders talk shop. Prospects say it feels like being in the meeting room with them.

With enterprises, the hard part is getting things through the system

Kuba asked what works with large clients. Alex said the challenge flips: at a seed-stage startup, strategy is the hard part because every wasted effort is expensive.

When you work with enterprises, a lot more of the challenge is actually in getting things done, getting things pushed through, understanding the multiple layers of approval, the stakeholders and even the politics involved… So it’s really, do you have experience managing all of those different stakeholders, and do you have the confidence that you can take an idea… and get it through this kind of multi-layered, multi-phase gated system?

(Listen at 9:44)

The founders had all held leadership roles at HubSpot, Shopify, and Workato, so they’d seen that system from inside. For unblocking stalled work, Alex gave the unsexy answer first: a standardized, visualized process (editorial runs in Airtable under their director of editorial, Sam) and the five whys when something bogs down. A competitor’s blunter hack: call the contact’s boss. The other move is manufacturing momentum. SEO plateaus early, executives get anxious, so Alex front-loads small wins, even vanity ones like a new page hitting page two in its first week, and gives credit to whoever on the client side pressed publish, so they feel progress before the compounding starts.

Logos beget logos: how Omniscient broke into enterprise

Winning the deals is a chicken-and-egg problem. Omniscient’s early edge was a network of executives from the founders’ big-company days who already trusted them.

One thing I learned is that people at enterprises are risk averse. So if you haven’t worked with a similar company like them, they’re unlikely to work with you, all things equal… We were at a conference and after happy hour, after a couple of years, we’re like, hey man, why did you choose not to do a long-term engagement with us? And he’s like, honestly, the CEO said, basically you didn’t have a Salesforce logo on your website.

(Listen at 16:26)

Case studies were the way out. Jasper, an early breakthrough, was so early-stage that Omniscient stood up its blog from scratch; the case study attracted larger brands, and each logo pulled in the next. The trade: a Series A founder closes a week after the handshake, while an enterprise means procurement, legal, security, months of process, and an argument about net 60 versus net 30. “It’s kind of like choose your suffering.” Two adjustments came with bigger deals: the strategy team now joins sales calls, because enterprise buyers want to meet whoever will run the account, and a mentor taught Alex to stop dumping everything into the first deck and save the keyword list for a later conversation.

Writers who know the space bring ideas you’d never find

Omniscient is under 20 employees, organized in pods where an organic growth strategist and an editorial lead share accounts. Content comes from a deep bench of long-term freelancers, ideally specialists in data, AI, or fintech, since many clients are semi-technical. A writer who hits deadlines, absorbs a client’s style guide, and interviews subject matter experts so the piece isn’t “a book report about the top 10 existing Google search results” is, in Alex’s words, a gem. The expertise pays off in strategy too.

If somebody is a subject matter expert or is passionate about the industry, I find that they come to the table with a bunch of new ideas that I wouldn’t have maybe spotted… If somebody is writing day in and day out about data quality tools, they’ll write an essay and they’ll ping me and say, hey, this one section that we had in this piece, I think this is important. Maybe we should do an entire article on this. And I did a little bit of keyword research and I found that there’s search volume, and you’re like, let’s go.

(Listen at 30:48)

Stop watching competitors

Kuba’s closing question: one thing agency owners should start or stop doing.

I think agency owners, any founder obviously, can get too fixated on competition. But the reality is that the pie is extremely large… When you see these highlight reels and success theater, if you talk to the founders behind the scenes at a happy hour, they’ll tell you, yeah, it’s not all like that. This client is difficult, we had to fire them, we got this massive client churned.

(Listen at 37:35)

His analogy was NOFX, whose farewell tour he’d just seen: a band that never asked what a punk band would do, or what a competitor would do. For more of Alex, there’s the weekly Field Notes newsletter and Omniscient’s podcast, The Long Game.