At WordCamp US 2026, our Chief Business Officer, Vivek Jain, described a shift he has watched build over 15 years as the first person enterprise customers talk to: they now describe what they want without naming WordPress at all.
That sounds like bad news for a WordPress agency. Vivek reads it the other way. The platform has become trusted enough to be the vehicle rather than the thing being sold, and he mapped four shifts in enterprise buying that trace the move from a platform identity to an outcome identity.
Watch the full talk for those shifts, the car-buying story behind them, and the three questions Vivek uses to distinguish a platform-led agency from an outcome-led one.
Watch the talk here
The WordPress Agency Is Becoming Invisible: Why That Is a Good Thing
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Show transcript
Hello everyone, thank you for attending. I’m Vivek. I work with rtCamp. I’m the Chief Business Officer, and today I’m gonna talk about the changing customer perception about WordPress agencies. I’m gonna talk you through a few shifts that we have been observing, how we have adapted to it, and a few takeaways that you all can take and think over with your team.
I’ll first start with what this talk is not about. Sorry to disappoint you. This is not an AI talk. There is only one mention of AI and not more than that. This talk is not about WordPress getting weaker. In fact, WordPress is getting stronger, there are newer adoptions, larger deployments, and there are companies who are coming into WordPress who always lived in the license ecosystems. For them, open source was never part of the conversations. They are coming onto WordPress, so WordPress stronger, better. That’s not the story.
It’s not a talk about agencies not doing a great job. In fact, agencies have been doing a stellar work, they’re doing more meaningful work than ever. The average time that a customer is staying with the agencies, at least for us, is now more than six years. So that tells about how enterprises are using WordPress and how they are staying with it.
So, what is this talk about? This talk is about that change of that compounded identity that a customer perceives. That is changing. So for WordPress, from an enterprise customer perspective, they think differently about a WordPress agency now and sometimes they don’t even see it. I’ll take a pause here and take a quick show of hands. So in the room, how many of you have interacted with a lead or your customer who mentioned their requirement, but that didn’t mention WordPress at all in that requirement? All. I’ll just take it a little further. A customer mentioning a requirement, they mentioned WordPress, but they mentioned something that is just beneath the requirement that is assumed. See if you hear that there.
So this is what I’m going to talk about. That WordPress is not part of the conversations. It just starts a little before than that.
My job primarily involves working with customers. I’m usually the first point of contact with customers. And I’m doing this since, in my 17 years with rtCamp, I’ve been doing this since 15 years. In the last few years, I’m seeing some shifts, and these shifts give me a pattern, and those are the patterns and shifts that I’m gonna talk about. There are many, but I’m gonna walk you through just four of them, which would give you a picture of what the shifts are and what those mean to us.
The first one is the RFP. In enterprise setup, requirements usually start with an RFP. A few years ago, the RFP would start with platform requirements, the stack tech requirements, the security, the performances, the strategic questions about what customer actually wants, they used to sit somewhere on third or fourth page of that RFP. That has changed. Now the RFP starts with that business requirement, what they actually want from the website after it is there. How the content operations would look like, how the pipeline would look like, how their editorial team, the marketing editorial team, would use the website, how fast they want the content to be published. In there, WordPress is mentioned sometimes, but again, now WordPress has shifted back to third or fourth page. Now this shift tells us something, that customer is now thinking, they’re not starting with “hey we need WordPress work,” they are starting with a business problem and how a platform like WordPress could solve it.
The second shift, that’s the biggest one. Who is actually making the decisions? So if you all ever have been, in the last few years, if you had been in a decision-making room of a customer, the customer making a final decision, there you would see it was dominated by IT before, head of engineering, director of technology, security heads. There were business teams, but those were just consulted. They were not primary decision makers. The rooms that my team sits in now, those are led by the business teams. And they have business leadership at the center.
Think of people like director of content operations, director of digital experiences. There could be a CMO, there could be a CRO. Now, the business teams, they are not consulted parties, they are the primary buyers, and IT is still there, but IT is now playing a supporting role to validate the engineering and the decision that the business team is taking.
The IT is just there to support and validate the decisions, but they are not the primary buyers anymore. And as per a Gartner survey that was done earlier this year for B2B buyers, it says that a B2B buying group now consists of five to fifteen people that are coming from at least four different functions. So now a decision-making group is coming from different functions, different expectations, different success criteria, and different view of the platform that they want. And since the people in the room have changed, so have the questions that are coming with them. So that’s another shift.
The third one, and that is a very important one that I felt. Whom we are now compared with. A few years ago, we were compared with other WordPress agencies. Similar styles of working, similar portfolios, similar case studies. The customer just had to make decisions around, I would say, logistical decisions, whether price point, their comfort, the geography, where they can find quick replies, where they find the teams. But that is not the list that we are compared upon now. We are not compared against other WordPress agencies.
Now we are compared against other digital experience providers, system integrators, software implementation partners for other platforms. And sometimes these competitors, they are not even working with WordPress at all. Or they are working, if that is a secondary solution that they provide. So customer has narrowed down the problem to who can help us with the outcome, and not who can help us with WordPress.
The fourth shift, again the customer themselves, the first point of contact that is talking to you about the requirements. Even their requirements have changed. They are not coming in with “hey, we want to move to WordPress,” or “hey, we want to rebuild our website to WordPress.” Their requirements talk about something like “hey, we are modernizing our marketing team operations. We want a better editorial governance across the full set of brands that we have.” Or “we want to enable a marketing team that can just fasten our pipeline and give us a better solution.” So you see the customers, they are not starting with the platform choice and then working outwards. They are actually starting with the business problem first and they are working inward to find that particular solution.
So to sum up, four shifts: one is the RFP language is changing. Second, the people in the room are changing. Third, the agencies that we are competing with, those are not WordPress agencies. And most important one is, customer also has a different way of expressing their requirements.
So that said, what does that shift mean to us? This tells us something about the change in how enterprises are thinking about the outcome and experience. And in my opinion, this is not just about an enterprise buying experience, that shows in the general buying experience too. And this is something I’ve related to my own buying experience, when I was buying my own first car.
Flashback a few years ago, I wanted to buy a car. My auto engineer friends, they said, and I was always like, okay, German cars are the best cars. You should start with a German car if that’s your first car. I was like, okay, I would buy a BMW. I looked up, oh no, that’s expensive. Maybe I buy a German car which is not as expensive. So I went with Volkswagen. The model is called Volkswagen Polo. And for a second option, I had this because if not BMW, I might as well have a car that matches the BMW iconic blue color. So I had two options and I was very much into Volkswagen. I wanted to buy it because I was a fan of it. I walked into the Volkswagen store, I booked the appointment with the rep and they started with all about how great the engineering of the car is, the turbo engine, the top speed, the torque, and I was super impressed. That was the car I thought I’m gonna buy, and that’s it. Like I love it.
Then I walked into Suzuki. I went there and it also comes with a reputation. It comes with a reputation so much that a generation before me always preferred Suzuki as their first car. I walked in there and I said, “Hey, I saw the Baleno and I like it.” And they were like, okay. So before you make a decision, I would like to talk to you about a few things. And they asked me, is this your first car? What kind of, would you drive it inside the city or on freeways? Do you drive with stick? How experienced are you with driving? How big is your family? How do you want your driving experience to be? And they just build on top of that conversation. And when I was back home, I thought over it. And any guesses? Think from a customer perspective, from my perspective, what I would have bought. Any guesses? Even after it had a four months of wait, I booked a Baleno, because after a point, the cars didn’t matter, the conversations did. Engineering, of course, I was impressed by the engineering, but I went with a car which just suited my expectations, the outcome that I wanted.
And that is the learning I took from there, and that is the pattern I’m applying to WordPress and the general enterprise buying experience. So the customers, they’re not leading with appreciation for engineering. They are coming in with a problem in their head and the experience, like what experience they can get. And they’re not talking to just, like I did with two car providers. They are also talking to multiple vendors right now, and the vendor who can relate most to the outcome and the experience that the customer would want, that is where the customer leads toward.
And that brings me to a very important point: that in our space, the platform identity is now changing to an outcome identity. So what’s the difference? If it’s a platform identity, a customer looks at us as WordPress experts. But if it’s an outcome identity, the customers are looking at us as a partner who can actually solve a business outcome. Of course, in their mind, they know that we are WordPress experts, but they know that we are solving a business outcome for them and not just implementing WordPress for them.
Now, these are shifts, and these are shifts I’ve seen in the last few years. But is there a reason behind it, why these shifts are happening? These shifts are now a trend for us, and we have pivoted a lot to meet these shifts. One of the reasons for these shifts is a change in who the customers are now. A few years ago, the major customers of WordPress, the major users of WordPress, were digital companies, the media companies. For those customers, website was the product.
A reader would land on the website, content would render, ads would render, revenue will be generated, and that’s where the business happened. And if the website is your product, it becomes a first-order decision. It’s not an afterthought. You lead in with the platform that you want, and then you look out and find the right partner for you.
But for the customers that we are dealing with now, their website is not the product. They would be coming from different industries, they would be coming from financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, insurances. Their product could be a physical device, their product could be a document, their product could be a service as well, but website is not the product that they are selling. Their website is just a channel for that product. And by that I mean the website just becomes an enabler to get them noticed by their customers and helping sales close. That’s not their primary product. So the way I think about it now, the deliverable is a business outcome they want, and WordPress the platform now becomes just a delivery vehicle.
That said, when someone is buying, or they are leading for a mission critical business outcome, they don’t want to be fully reliant on a rented vehicle. They would want to own the vehicle, they would want to own something they can have, extend it, they can scale up or down, and this is what exactly WordPress gives them. So the reframe is not that the vehicle has stopped mattering to them. The vehicle still matters. It’s just that the customer has stopped asking about the vehicle first into the conversations. They are talking about the business outcomes first.
And when that is happening, how we as agencies change, or what that means for us. When an agency is operating from a platform identity to an outcome identity, even the customer’s mental model is changing. They are not thinking of you just as a WordPress vendor that involves just WordPress. They are bringing you bigger problems. They are bringing you problems like conversion optimization, governance, digital experiences. So that essentially means that the range of those problems the customer could bring to you is broadening, and that means more work. And is it because we are doing anything differently technically? No. It’s just that the way we position ourselves, the way we are putting up our narrative, that is changing and customer sees us differently now.
And for us, it changes as well, and even for customers. So when they see a vendor from an outcome identity, they don’t just introduce you as “hey, this is a WordPress vendor.” They would say, “hey, this is the vendor who has helped our marketing to hit their conversion goals. This is the company that has helped us build editorial governance across our 20 brands.” So the shift is from a vendor to an enabler.
And what it means when the shift happens, there are a few changes. I’ll just tell it from my experience. When we saw that shift, there are a few things that we did, and we’re still doing that at rtCamp. There are many places these shifts show up, and many places that you have to change.
The one of the first places is of course the places where you are not there to talk about yourself. It’s your website, it’s your socials. And that is where the customer lands first. The first adaptation that one could do as an agency is, your website should think from a customer perspective and answer their whys. So by why I mean, you could have a website that talks a lot about WordPress, a lot of case studies, the great things that you have done. But it’s not actually saying what problem is solved. And that essentially means when a customer or lead who is coming to your website, they may see something that “hey, it’s a great WordPress agency,” but they are not able to relate. They’re not able to find the problem they’re trying to solve. And they may just walk away. And in any way, the agency is really good. They’re doing great work. It’s just that the customer didn’t find something relatable and they just walked away.
And it’s not just about the website. If it’s an AI tool, AI chatbot, I used AI, I told you that I’m gonna use AI once, so even there, if your website doesn’t reflect the content which is solving the problems and just talking about, so the thing is, your content, if I can just reframe it, your content should talk more about whys rather than what and how. So this is a reference from Simon Sinek. I’m a big fan of his work. What he says is, it’s a leadership principle, but we apply that on our work and our socials. That we should, before thinking about what and how, think about why.
And by why I mean solving that customer’s problems. And if that is not there, customer is gonna land on your website. The first thing that they have, and this is from a customer POV, so answering the whys helps to build our own website content, but the customer thinks this: what’s in it for me? They are on the website, they are looking at, or maybe they landed on one of your landing pages, they’re looking at your case study, but they think, what’s in it for me? And if your content, your website, your landing page, your socials are not answering that question very quickly, I think the customer is just gonna walk away and they’re gonna move somewhere else. And this is not just a customer who has come for a WordPress problem. They’re just walking away from you as an agency. They are walking away from using WordPress because they feel, oh, WordPress may not be the right solution for the problem I want to solve.
And we may notice or not, but customers and leads, and by that I mean the people who are curious, who are lurking in, because in my experience, we get a lot of inquiries from the marketing people who have joined their companies recently. They are marketing managers, junior marketing executives who are there at a company and they are trying to transform how the web work is done.
So one of the companies that we work with, and we have just recently started working, they are into physical product manufacturing, which is a sensor that they build for big civil architectures, geo-sensors. For them, everything was working great. What they wanted now was, they felt that “hey, our website could do a better job at talking to the people,” because they said, “hey, we don’t get a lot of leads from the website, but what we are aiming is, we are being checked on a website before the conversions, we want the website to be better.”
And that was initiated by a very junior marketing person who felt WordPress has something, and those are the queries we got from them. So my point is, the queries coming out, the people who feel curiosity about WordPress, they are coming onto your website, and your website and your socials should answer that.
And just a quick example of how we have done that. If you’ll see on our own homepage, of course it mentions WordPress, it mentions a lot of things. But now it also has, which is tangible. We are saying that we migrate and unify. If you are a brand with many brands, we can migrate and unify.
We can help your developers to just publish content without doing any tickets. We can just help you launch faster. And in there, we’re not mentioning WordPress at all. It is just an outcome-driven section that just speaks to the person who is coming onto the website and that they could have a problem.
The second part is what we have adopted. So the website, the socials, become your first point of contact with the customer. Like you don’t know them, they’re just there, they’re looking up. The second place, which is the most important one, now they’re talking to a human, which is your sales team, your inside sales team, your reps, your account executives, and they’re talking to them. And this is where what we have done and what I would recommend is to just go back to basics. So Neil Rackham had a SPIN selling framework, which is Situation, Problem, Implication, Need-payoff.
This basically is just a method to make sure that you are not just leading with what you know and your expertise. You are leading with first understanding where the customer is, what their possible problems are, asking them, “hey, if you don’t solve the problem, what is it going to cost you?” And then you’re ending with, “hey, if we solve the problem, what change it will make.”
And I’ll just give a quick example for that. Somebody coming to us, saying that “hey, I want to move from Sitecore to WordPress.” We know the situation. They want to move from Sitecore to WordPress. We don’t have to ask that because we already know it. Then we’ll ask the problem, “hey, why do you want to move from Sitecore?” And then they will say, “marketing has a very tough time to publish content faster.” And then we can just ask another question, “and why is that?” “Because any changes go to the engineering team, it takes a lot of time.” Great.
So if your marketing team is not able to push content faster, what is it costing you? “It’s costing us almost two weeks of delayed brand launches, landing pages, and we are losing to our competitors because they are faster than us and they’re moving fast.” Then the last part. If we solve this particular problem, if we create a system in which your team is able to just go onto the website, build the page, and push it, what change would it make? They would say, “if you publish faster, that means our landing pages are out there, we are getting more leads, and probably we may see a five percent rise in our SQLs that are coming to the website.” So now you know the problem, now you know the solution, and now you know your actual goal.
And this is just my version of SPIN selling, which is a simpler version that we follow. It’s called “Start a conversation and conversion will follow.” So if you’re genuinely trying to have a conversation and you’re not going in to just sell something, WordPress, it’s not about WordPress. If you’re just not going and pushing for a sale, you’re just genuinely trying to have a conversation. So you would look up the person you’re talking to, what problems they possibly could have, and you would want to solve, you will have that empathy to solve that problem. And that automatically turns into more conversations.
And if a customer or a lead you’re talking to, if you have more conversation, they build trust and of course there will be a point where they would become your client and you will be able to serve them.
Going back to the SPIN sell, so we understood the questions, we understood the problems that they have. Here now, WordPress still is the answer. You see, we are solving the problem using WordPress. But now WordPress is the answer to the right question, which is us building an experience that could help their marketing team push content faster. So that’s the second space, which is the sales side, where you’re trying to learn about the customer, their problems deeply, and also the end goal, what is the business outcome they want. Once you know that, you are able to have a better conversation and then bring in WordPress, which could give them confidence that “hey, WordPress is the platform that could give us that solution.”
The second place where we as an agency have adapted, and that’s my recommendation as well, is the delivery of the site. Historically, delivering the site, making it live, that’s where conventionally we feel the delivery is. But that has changed. The site delivery is now not the finish line. The site delivery is not the outcome that customers have signed up for. The customer has signed up for their goal, which could have been a pipeline conversion, editorial velocity, governance, or whatever they are chasing, and those results take a few months to appear. And they show unevenly. My point is, the agency’s job doesn’t end at site delivery. It actually starts from there.
And it ties back to my SPIN selling point where you asked the client, “hey, if we solve the problem, what would it mean to you,” and they said, like, five percent lead conversion. So after site delivery you keep chasing them, every month you get feedback that “hey, have you reached your five percent conversion goal?” Yes, great. If you haven’t, what else can we do? Can we help you with the design? Can we help with something else? Or is there more UX work you would want? My point is, knowing the end goal, it just helps you to align with that customer’s outcome and continue with it.
We covered sales, what it means for sales, what it means for delivery. The last part is the talent that you have. So with these trends, the shift of the customer’s conversation, the focus on the outcome is changing. So for your existing teams, there is not a big reskilling or upskilling that is needed right now.
It is more of just a change in narrative. If they are not comfortable yet to sit in the room when the customer is asking business questions before technical questions, I think that is where more internal conversations can happen so that they can be ready for those rooms. And for hiring, if you’re hiring someone new, hiring people with WordPress, of course, that will be great. But what we have essentially done is, we have looked for talent who are good with outcome-based consultation and selling and they are able to have business-first conversations rather than leading with WordPress.
So to sum up, we have seen shifts. We have seen what it means for us and agencies: platform identity to outcome identity. So has everything changed? I don’t think so. What stays the same? So my next two points will tell you what still stays the same and has not changed.
First is WordPress is still, the Claude give me this word, I like that. WordPress still is the substrate. It is the most important thing. It is not going anywhere. So your technical depth, you being fluent in Gutenberg patterns, your team thinking, when they’re talking to a customer, thinking live in WordPress implementation, thinking about APIs and things like that. So all those things are still at play. That WordPress expertise is not going anywhere.
That is the foundation of the work, still there. Community matters, contribution matters, and being part of the ecosystem, being aware of the ecosystem and where the software is going, it still matters. The reframing is just for the positioning and the perception that the customer is having, and just to adapt to that.
And then, platform identity, outcome identity. Does one need to have a FOMO that “oh I have to move to an outcome identity? I should change my whole narrative”? Not really.
There are customers, and in real numbers, who want a WordPress expert. They exactly know what they want, and they are in the market to choose a good WordPress partner. And for them, leading with WordPress is absolutely correct. There is no change needed there. And so, what I’m describing, the outcome identity, is not a replacement to what one is doing right now. It’s just an addition. The outcome identity is now growing with the platform identity. And just how the ecosystem is, there are multiple ways to grow in that ecosystem and all are valid.
So that’s it. Are you able to make out whether you are a platform-focused company or an outcome-identity company? If not, there are just three quick questions that you can ask yourself and go back and ask your team.
One, you can ask your client, “hey, if you were to introduce me to your peers or to another brand in your network, how would you do that?” If they say “WordPress partner,” that is your first indication that your customer is looking at you only through the WordPress lens, just a sort of software implementation partner, not a partner who can solve the bigger problems.
Second, and that’s an important one, there could be a few deals where you would have felt that you’ve done a stellar job, you had great conversations, great demos with the customer, but still you lost that deal. And if you would know, you would have lost it to a competitor that you didn’t know were there in that list. And those won’t be the competitors that you usually come across when you’re working. Those could be somebody which is outside of the ecosystem doing something else.
Third question would be, for your current project, and that’s a question you can ask your teams as well, whether, after getting the site live, did we chase the customer to understand whether we actually hit their goals or not, whether we met their goals or not. If not, that’s a sign that there are some changes, if at all you want, you can go there.
To sum up, I started my talk that a shift is happening and platform is becoming a secondary decision, it is not a bad thing at all. It’s a great thing. It’s a sign of a mature ecosystem where the platform has become strong enough that it is trusted by the clients and the new people that are coming in. And that’s a great place for WordPress to be. And it’s a great place for us agencies to be in. This is absolutely not a case against WordPress. This is a case for what for us as WordPress agencies is coming next. That’s been Enterprise. Thank you.
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Credits
Abhijit Prabhudan
Author
Abhijit Prabhudan
Author
Works on content systems, publishing workflows, and knowledge management. Diverse experience spans editorial, marketing, ecommerce, and IT support. He operates across open source platforms, hand…
Babita Manna
Editor
Babita Manna
Editor
Babita is a writer and an editor on the marketing team at rtCamp. She has been part of the open source ecosystem for some time now and has grown fond of the ideas and communities that make it what …
Contributions and Updates: Vivek 
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