Michael Cleary

But he does not think simplicity should automatically be the goal.

• When a company sells something complicated, with several audiences, services, products, use cases or decision steps, stripping the information down too far can make the site harder to understand rather than easier.
• His distinction is between making a website as simple as possible and making the experience as clear as possible.
• Clarity, in his account, can mean better hierarchy, more intentional navigation, clearer messaging, and breaking information into pieces people can digest.
• He is still for removing whatever does not need to be there; the line he draws is that once simplicity starts removing useful context, it stops helping.

He describes companies whose buyers need to see details, compare options, understand how something works, and get answers to a list of questions before they are comfortable taking the next step. Good design, in his framing, takes that complexity and makes it feel manageable without pretending it does not exist.

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A site can have a huge spike in visitors and still create very little value if most of those visitors are not a good fit, do not understand the offer, or were never going to become customers.

• What matters more is whether the right people take the right actions.
• Instead of the visitor count, he suggests asking whether the people filling out forms are a good fit, whether they understand what the company does before they reach out, and whether they are taking actions that show real buying intent.
• He then ties the answer back to what the site is meant to accomplish — qualified leads, demos, product sales, recruiting, or faster sales conversations.

He describes client work where total traffic went down while the quality of form submissions improved significantly. His reading is that this is a strong signal, not a problem: the people reaching out were a better fit, understood what they needed, and were further along in their decision-making than a large audience of unqualified visitors who never went anywhere.

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In B2B, people come back to the site throughout the entire buying process.

• They might find the company there in the first place, but they also return after a sales call to look at the work or dig into a service, and they send pages to a boss or a colleague.
• Someone who was not on the original call may be forming an opinion without ever talking to anyone at the company.
• His argument is that a website should make those conversations easier by answering some questions before they come up and giving sales useful material to send as a deal moves along — the sales team should not have to sell around its own website.

He gives the case of a salesperson having a great conversation, then the prospect going back to the website and finding it does not back up what they just heard. That, he says, makes the salesperson's job harder than it needs to be.

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The fix, in his account, starts with figuring out what people should actually remember about the company after they leave — not every service it offers or every feature its product has, but the one or two things worth sticking.

• Once that is decided, everything else gets easier: the messaging has something to build around, and the design has a purpose beyond looking good.
• He argues that beauty alone does not make a site memorable; the ones that stick have a personality and a clear point of view, so a visitor comes away understanding what the company does, why it is different, and why they should care.

He states the goal as the reaction he wants: not someone leaving a site thinking "that was a nice website," but someone remembering the company behind it.

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It does a lot of early communication on the company's behalf, answers questions before sales gets involved, helps candidates decide whether they can picture themselves working there, and gives clients a sense of how organized, credible, and thoughtful the company is. He adds that sites now feed search engines and AI tools that may form an opinion about a company before a person even lands on the page.

His conclusion is about intention rather than a checklist: a website is not just something you update when it starts to look old, and if it is trying to do that many jobs, it needs to be treated with real intention. He presents this as what a website actually does, not as an argument that every site must carry all those jobs equally.

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When a company is small, one person can stay close to everything, knows why decisions were made, and can answer most questions.

• That stops working at a certain size: more decisions happen without the founder in the room, and if they try to remain the person everyone comes to, they become the thing slowing everyone down.
• So he focuses on explaining the why behind what the company is doing, not just telling people what needs to happen — people who understand the goal and the thinking can make many decisions on their own instead of guessing what he would do.
• A related argument: hiring people who know more than you about marketing, finance, operations, or development is the point, and the useful response to being corrected is curiosity rather than defending what you already know.
• He also separates delegating from abdicating — real delegation gives someone ownership while staying close enough to supply context and support, whereas abdication is handing something off, mentally checking the box, and leaving the other person to fill gaps that should have been closed upfront.

He points to processes that quietly stopped working as the company grew: the meeting that used to take 20 minutes now has 12 people in it, the person who approved a handful of things is now the bottleneck for 30, and a process everyone once understood now needs three messages and a "wait, who owns this again?" His suggested test is whether the company, starting from scratch today, would still do it this way.

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On values, Cleary argues they are only genuinely useful if they help people figure out what to do in a messy situation.

• Things everyone agrees with — be honest, work hard, care about customers — give little direction when the right answer is not clear.
• The real test of a value, he says, is whether it holds when following it costs time, money, or an opportunity you would have liked to take; if a value never changes a decision, influences behavior, or forces an uncomfortable conversation, it is decoration.
• He is comfortable with values that describe the company you are trying to become, as long as the standard is actually enforced.
• On strategy, he writes about the difficulty of telling a bad quarter from a strategy that is starting to break down, warning against rethinking everything after one rough stretch and equally against using "stay the course" to ignore a pattern that keeps showing up.
• His rule of thumb: if the fundamentals are strong and the problem looks temporary, keep going; if the same issues appear quarter after quarter and the assumptions behind the strategy no longer hold, changing direction may be the responsible move.

He describes the temptation, when numbers come in below expectations, to immediately question the positioning, the sales process, the offer, the team, and sometimes the entire direction of the business — and notes that deals get delayed, budgets shift, and markets get weird, so a dip is not proof the strategy is wrong.

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It answers the question 'What should I measure beyond traffic?' with a concrete example from client work.

Cleary argues that traffic is the easiest metric to see, not the most useful one.

• A site can get a spike in visitors and still create little value if those visitors are not a good fit or do not understand the offer.
• Cleary describes client work where total traffic went down while the quality of form submissions improved significantly, because the people reaching out were better qualified and further along in their decision-making.
• The post lists questions a business should ask instead: Are the people filling out forms a good fit?
• Do they understand what you do before they reach out?
• Are they taking actions that show real buying intent?

For brands planning a campaign

Useful for an agency brief that needs to move clients away from session-based reporting. Supports a workshop or talk on choosing metrics that reflect buyer quality and intent rather than raw audience size.

It is a good introduction to Cleary's design philosophy.

Cleary pushes back on the common design feedback to 'simplify it.' When a company sells something complicated with multiple audiences or long buying decisions, stripping information away can make the site harder to understand.

• The goal should be clarity, not simplicity.
• Cleary points to better hierarchy, more intentional navigation, clearer messaging, and breaking information into digestible pieces as ways to make complexity manageable without pretending it does not exist.

For brands planning a campaign

Helps qualify an agency that can work with complex offerings. A campaign angle could focus on clarity audits for websites that have already been oversimplified or lost useful context.

Cleary does not see a website's job as simply generating leads and handing them to sales.

• In B2B, buyers return to the site throughout the sales process.
• They revisit after calls, share pages with colleagues, and a new stakeholder may form an opinion without ever speaking to sales.
• Cleary gives the example of a salesperson having a good conversation, then the prospect visits the website and finds it does not back up what was said, making the salesperson's job harder.
• A good website should answer questions before they come up and give sales useful material to send.

For brands planning a campaign

Supports a pitch to clients whose marketing and sales teams are misaligned. A workshop could map the pages buyers actually revisit during a deal and identify where the site is failing to support sales.

It answers 'How do you make a B2B company stand out?' without abstract branding language.

Cleary describes a common problem: a company is great at what it does, but the website sounds and looks like everyone else in the industry.

• The fix starts with deciding what people should remember after they leave: not every service or feature, but the one or two things worth sticking.
• Everything else gets easier once that is clear.
• Cleary argues that beauty alone does not make a site memorable; the best sites have a personality and a clear point of view, so visitors understand what the company does, why it is different, and why they should care.

For brands planning a campaign

A good basis for a messaging workshop or a content strategy offer that starts with one memorable idea rather than a full service list. Helps evaluate an agency's ability to define a point of view before design begins.

It answers 'Why treat a website with more intention today than a few years ago?'

Cleary traces how the website's job has expanded.

• It used to prove the company was real and help people get in touch.
• Now it influences sales, recruiting, brand perception, and client education.
• It answers questions before the sales team gets involved, helps candidates picture working there, and gives clients a sense of how organized or credible the company is.
• Cleary also notes that the site now feeds search engines and AI tools that may form an opinion about the company before a person ever lands on the page.

For brands planning a campaign

Useful for a talk that positions website work as cross-functional, not just marketing. Could support an audit framework that checks how the site reads to sales, recruiting, and AI-driven search results.

It answers 'What does Cleary teach about running a growing company?' and gives a fuller picture of the person behind the website posts.

Cleary describes a leadership shift that became necessary as the company grew: giving people context instead of just direction.

• When a company is small, one person can stay close to everything and answer most questions.
• At a larger size, that stops working.
• Cleary now focuses on explaining the 'why' behind decisions so people can make good calls on their own.
• The goal is a team that understands where the company is going well enough to decide what they think should happen, rather than guessing what Cleary would do.

For brands planning a campaign

A potential theme for an agency audience or client workshop on scaling teams and decision-making. It rounds out a speaker profile that would otherwise cover only website tactics.

Companies that sell something complicated — multiple audiences, services, products, use cases, or decision steps — can become harder to understand when that complexity is stripped away.

• His distinction is between making the site as simple as possible and making the experience as clear as possible, which he says can mean better hierarchy, more intentional navigation, clearer messaging, and breaking information into pieces people can digest.
• In a separate post he describes the same underlying move from the opposite direction: spend time deciding the one or two things a visitor should remember about the company, then build messaging, design, and visuals around that instead of around a full service list.

Starts from a piece of feedback clients commonly give, then reframes it around what the website is trying to accomplish rather than treating the feedback as the goal.

For brands planning a campaign

This is the most directly relevant material for an agency brief about converting qualified leads. A talk or workshop can be built around his distinction between simplicity and clarity, using complex B2B offerings as the working example, and around the exercise of naming the one or two things a buyer should remember.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

He describes client situations where total traffic fell while the quality of form submissions improved significantly, and treats that as a stronger signal than a large audience of visitors who never become customers.

• He lists the questions he thinks are more useful: are the people filling out forms a good fit, do they understand what you do before they reach out, and are they taking actions that show real buying intent.
• He then ties the answer back to the business objective, whether that is qualified leads, demos, product sales, recruiting, or faster sales conversations.

Replaces a familiar surface metric with a short set of diagnostic questions tied to the specific business objective.

For brands planning a campaign

This is ready-made workshop material for the stated brief on website performance metrics and buyer-intent signals. The agency could use his questions as the agenda for a session with a client, and his traffic-versus-quality example as the case that opens it.

Examples: Source 1

In B2B, people come back to the site throughout the sales process — after a sales call to look at work or dig into a service, sending pages to a boss or a colleague, with people forming an opinion who never spoke to anyone.

• He notes that a great sales conversation can be undercut if the website does not back up what the prospect just heard, and that a good site should answer questions before they come up and give sales useful material to send as a deal moves along.
• His framing is that the site is supporting sales the whole time whether the company thinks about it that way or not, and that a sales team should not have to sell around its own website.

For brands planning a campaign

Useful for the agency's positioning with clients whose sales and marketing teams work separately. It supports a workshop segment on mapping what a prospect needs at each stage and checking whether the site answers it.

Examples: Source 1

He points out that the site often does early communication on the company's behalf, answers questions before sales gets involved, helps candidates decide whether they can picture themselves there, and gives clients a sense of how organized and credible the company is.

• He adds that websites now feed search engines and AI tools that may form an opinion about a company before a person lands on the site.
• His conclusion is that a site should be treated with real intention rather than updated only when it starts to look old.

He presents this as a description of what a website actually does, not an argument that every site should carry all of those jobs equally; the point is that the work should be intentional.

For brands planning a campaign

Gives an agency a way to widen the conversation beyond lead generation — the same site is being read by buyers, candidates, and automated systems. It is a useful opening argument, and it also sets up the narrower measurement topic in the second item.

Examples: Source 1

Cleary says hiring people who know more than he does about marketing, finance, operations, or development is the point, and that the useful response to being corrected is curiosity rather than defending what you already know.

• He describes needing to explain the "why" behind decisions instead of handing out direction, so people can make calls without him in the room.
• He separates delegating from abdicating: real delegation gives ownership while staying close enough to supply context and support.
• He also describes processes that worked when the team was small — a 20-minute meeting that now has twelve people in it, one approver who is now a bottleneck — and suggests asking whether the company would start the same way today.

Uses a small concrete detail from company life to make the general point, rather than stating the principle abstractly.

For brands planning a campaign

Broader leadership and operations content, one step away from the website brief. It is relevant if the agency wants material aimed at founders and owners, and it shows the kind of decision-making language Cleary uses when he is not talking about design.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2 · Source 3 · Source 4

On values, Cleary argues they are only useful if they help people work out what to do in a messy situation, not if they are things everyone already agrees with, and that the real test is whether a value holds when following it costs time, money, or an opportunity.

• He is comfortable with values that describe the company you are trying to become, as long as the standard is actually enforced; otherwise they are decoration.
• On strategy, he writes about the difficulty of distinguishing a bad quarter from a strategy that is breaking down, warns against rethinking everything after one rough stretch, and warns equally against using "stay the course" to ignore a pattern that keeps repeating.

For brands planning a campaign

Adjacent to the website brief but useful as credibility material for an advisory or workshop format: it shows he thinks in terms of decision criteria and trade-offs rather than slogans, which is the same reasoning he applies to website choices.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

Each post tends to take one subject, open with a common default or piece of client feedback — "simplify it", "we've always done it this way", a traffic number — and then explain why the default needs qualifying.

• Several posts use a plain narrative of client or company experience, and some use short question or bullet lists to turn an argument into something a reader can act on.
• The posts stay in the voice of a practitioner describing decisions made with clients and inside a growing company; the material does not include case studies with named clients, published analysis of specific sites, or recordings of talks.

For brands planning a campaign

Sets expectations for a collaboration: the strongest available format is a written or spoken argument with clear decision criteria, not a demo or a visual teardown. An agency should plan to supply the client examples and site specifics if it wants a presentation or workshop built on real pages.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2 · Source 3 · Source 4

In one post Levin writes that a channel can be working while the system fails — the ads reach the right people and get the click, then the landing page, the offer, the trust, or the follow-up breaks — and that more budget will not fix it.

• A second post pushes the same point further: a good click is not the goal, a good outcome is, and the numbers closest to the campaign (CTR, CPC, impressions, traffic) can look healthy while people are being sent into a weak experience.
• Cleary's version of this is the website that keeps failing the sales conversation, and the traffic number that rises while nothing better happens for the business.
• Both write short practitioner posts that take one familiar metric or default and explain what it leaves out.

Levin works outward from paid media and the full path after the click — landing page promise, offer clarity, proof, mobile experience, and follow-up for people not ready today — and names alignment between paid, web, email, SEO, and analytics as the fix.

• Cleary stays on the website itself: what it should say, how clear it should be for a complicated offering, and how it should carry a buyer through a B2B sale.
• Levin is the better follow for someone diagnosing campaign performance across channels; Cleary is the better follow for someone rebuilding the site and its messaging.

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That is the same claim Cleary makes about a website doing several jobs at once and about a site that should back up the sales conversation instead of being sold around. Both also treat measurement as a question of contribution to growth rather than clicks or visits.

Dillon covers the whole channel stack and frames it as a digital growth ecosystem, with a twenty-year background and a repeating five-step framework — get discovered, build trust, convert attention, stay connected, measure what matters — aimed at owners who feel buried in platform changes.

• Cleary goes deeper on one asset, the website, and pairs that with posts on leading a growing company.
• Follow Dillon for a map of how the pieces fit; follow Cleary for what the website should do inside that map.

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Her posts argue that a channel can work while the system fails, and that paid media affects the website, the website affects conversion, email affects follow-up, SEO affects discovery, and analytics affects decisions.

• That gives the room a diagnostic sequence: check whether the landing page matches the ad promise, whether the offer is clear, whether there is enough trust, whether the next step asks for too much, whether follow-up is weak, and whether tracking is complete.
• For an agency whose clients blame the ads when the problem is a weak conversion path, this is the more useful starting frame.

The tradeoff is specificity to website design and buyer-intent signals.

• Cynthia Levin's material is about the marketing system and the paid-media path, not about how a B2B website should be structured, what makes a complex offer clear, or how the site supports sales conversations after a call.
• A workshop built only on her posts would leave the agency without page-level decisions and without the simple-versus-clear design lens that Michael Cleary supplies.
• Pair her system diagnosis with Michael Cleary's site-level questions if the agency needs the room to leave with a revised page outline.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

His posts argue that growing businesses often invest one tactic at a time while nobody asks how it all works together, and that systems, not isolated activities, scale. The framework get discovered, build trust, convert attention, stay connected, and measure what matters is a strong opening or closing segment for a workshop about why a website fix alone may not move qualified leads.

The tradeoff is direct usability for the brief's central task.

• Patrick Dillon names the connections between channels and gives a broad strategy frame, but does not provide the same page-level diagnostic questions about buyer-intent signals, form quality, or how a complex B2B website should be made clear.
• For a hands-on session on website performance metrics and conversion, Michael Cleary's posts give more concrete workshop material.
• Patrick Dillon is better as the framing voice for why isolated website work can fail, not as the sole source for page and intent-signal decisions.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2

Her posts cover how leaders and teams can build personal brand support inside a company, tie visibility to credibility, recruiting, pipeline, and lower customer acquisition cost, and systemize visibility into weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual habits. That fits an agency whose clients need demand and trust at the top of the funnel rather than another round of website conversion fixes.

The tradeoff is a different buyer task.

• The brief is about converting qualified leads on B2B websites and teaching website performance metrics and buyer-intent signals.
• Melanie Borden's material focuses on personal brand, LinkedIn visibility, recruiting, talent, and leadership credibility; it does not cover website design, page hierarchy, offer clarity, or conversion metrics.
• One of the two supplied posts is a short networking anecdote rather than a teaching argument.
• If the agency books Melanie Borden for this brief, it would still need a separate conversion and website module from another source; her posts cannot carry a workshop on website performance metrics.

Examples: Source 1 · Source 2