By Introductory note from Rand: In case you missed Paddy’s December post about this extraordinary research, let me give him a brief intro: Paddy’s had a long career in marketing agencies, and now coaches other agency owners and runs The New Leader newsletter (I’m a happy subscriber). Paddy’s contribution here cannot be overstated – he’s assembled a vast array of survey data from 612 agency owners and consultants to help explain the state of the digital agency world.
Please, once again, welcome Paddy Moogan to the SparkToro blog!
Late last year, I partnered with my friends at SparkToro to run a survey for agency owners and consultants, seeking to get a handle of the state of the world right now for digital agencies and consultants.
You can check out the previously released results here if you missed them:
- The State of Digital Agencies in 2024: Big Challenges, Bigger Optimism, and Is Remote Work Here to Stay?
- Bad News for the Four-Day-Week, The End of the Office-Based Agency and is Hybrid Working Really Hybrid?
Today, I want to do a deep dive into the sales and marketing portion of the results which provide some great insights and benchmarks that you can use to judge your own performance as we head into 2025.
As a quick reminder, here is a quick breakdown of those people who took the survey:
And you can get a little more info here as well.
Now, onto the results…
Existing and past clients dominate the top sources of referrals for agencies and consultants
A whopping 66% of respondents said that the top source of referrals for new business are referrals from their existing and past clients.
There are two ways to interpret this in my opinion.
The positive spin is that there is clearly a hell of a lot of great work being delivered by agencies and consultants if so many are seeing referrals as their number one source of new business.
The less positive spin is that this is a very, very big reliance on a single source of new business, which should always make a business owner at least a little nervous.
Sure, if you’re going to rely upon a single source of referrals, this is probably the most safest! At the same time, I’d be putting in place plans to ensure that I’m getting a diverse range of referrals to feed my new business pipeline.
On a similar note, referrals from partner companies was second in the list, with nearly 13% citing this as their top source of referrals.
I do believe that this is generally an untapped opportunity for most agencies, particularly those who choose to specialise in just one or two areas of digital marketing. For example, if you only offer digital PR services to clients, then the chances are that you can partner with agencies who don’t offer this but do offer SEO or Paid Media.
I’d also call out outbound sales activity here which just over 6% of respondents said was their number one source of new business referrals. We went deeper into this area to see what was really going on.
60% of agencies have carried out outbound sales activity
This one surprised me a little – 60% is higher than I would have expected but I would attribute this relatively high percentage to the fact that there are a lot of lead generation consultants and agencies who target digital agencies.
I’d venture a strong guess that of these 60%, most of them have trialled some kind of lead generation consultant or agency, as opposed to building their own outbound sales function.
Having tried both approaches over the years, I can say that both are difficult in their own way and hard to make work at scale. It’s certainly not impossible, but a lot of work is required.
If you outsource to a lead generation company, then you need to ensure that they fully understand their service offering, ideal target clients and represent your company well.
If you build a function yourself, then you need to find the right staff with the right experience, whilst giving them as many tools and resources as possible to give them a fighting chance of being successful.
So, of these 60% of folks who have tried outbound sales, how many have been successful?
Only 10% of agencies say that their outbound sales efforts were very effective
Well, in summary, not that many.
Unfortunately, this echoes my own experience, particularly when it comes to working with external lead generation specialists.
On the plus side, over half said that their efforts had been moderately effective which almost certainly means that they’ve been able to close at least some new business from outbound sales efforts.
Whilst 34% said that their efforts hadn’t been effective at all.
I do also feel (and have been told) that the outbound sales industry has become a lot harder over the last few years, particularly post-pandemic. I suspect that in the midst of a downturn for many companies (not just agencies) we saw a spike in outbound sales messages which was also compounded by the advancement of many automated solutions.
(We’ve all received those clearly templated sales messages that follow up after the standard 5, 7 and 14 days!)
Most of the positive experiences that I’ve heard have either been more than a few years ago, or have come via a very, very focused campaign that offers some clear, tangible value (or potential value) to the recipient. The latter can be quite difficult, even for those who have a compelling offer, simply because of the volume of messages that we all receive each day in our email and on LinkedIn.
Larger agencies are more likely to have full-time sales staff
This one isn’t overly surprising, but is still a good benchmark for agency owners to be aware of.
We can see that as the agency size increases, the chances of them having staff who are dedicated to sales full-time also increases.
Despite a sales role technically being one that is revenue generating, it’s not billable in the traditional sense of running an agency. It can also be harder for smaller agencies to justify a sales position because if they have a small team, then it’s not going to take many new client wins to “fill up” those staff, meaning that you may not have the available capacity for a full-time sales person to sell.
What about full-time marketing positions?
Very few smaller agencies have full-time staff dedicated to marketing the agency
It’s a very similar story to the previous chart in that the larger the agency, the more likely that it is that they’ll have full-time staff who work on marketing.
Again, this makes sense and for me, it’s even harder to justify hiring a full-time marketing person than a full-time sales person at a small agency.
Somewhat ironically, agencies can find it hard to connect their marketing activities with direct new business. Whereas it’s a lot easier to do this with sales people.
If we also remember the chart above which shows that existing and past client referrals are by far the biggest source of new business for agencies, it may be even harder to justify a full-time marketing hire.
The tipping point certainly seems to be around the 26+ person mark where suddenly, more than half of agencies say that they have full-time marketing staff.
When they get to this point, agencies will typically be at a good stage of revenue whilst having a healthy margin – big overheads probably haven’t kicked in just yet! So putting budget into a marketing hire almost certainly adds up from a commercial perspective.
Prior to this, it’s likely that an agency has a choice between a marketing hire or another delivery focused hire such as an SEO or PR.
Times are hard for most agencies when it comes to new business
What about the sales pipeline? How are agencies and consultants feeling about the volume of business in their pipeline right now?
As we can see, sentiment is a little mixed with opinion being divided almost equally between the sales pipeline between worse or better than the previous year. Whilst 43% of respondents said that it’s about the same.
If we go a little deeper into the data and segment this question by agency size, we do get another level of insight.
We can see that there is a slight trend here. The smaller the agency, the less positive the respondent feels about their current pipeline of leads. One could speculate that this correlates with their likelihood of having full-time sales and marketing staff, but in all honesty, that may be a slight stretch and less about causation.
The sentiment of this data also fits with another question that we asked in regards to the biggest challenges that agency folks and consultants expect over the next year.
By a decent margin, new business sales was the biggest challenge across all respondents. Whilst this will probably always be a big challenge for agencies, combining these data points certainly shows that the agency landscape is certainly a tough one when it comes to new business right now.
This isn’t helped by the fact that it can take many weeks for a sales lead to actually close.
Anecdotally, I’ve heard (and experienced myself) that this timeline has become more extended over the last 12-18 months, with potential clients generally taking longer to appoint agencies and then also taking longer to agree commercials and contracts.
We can get a little more insight by looking at the following chart where we asked respondents to give us the approximate value of their sales pipeline right now, as a percentage of their revenue. This can give us a fairly objective view of just how healthy their pipeline is.
Whilst a very, very full pipeline can also be a cause for concern, the above does worry me a little. Most agencies said that their sales pipeline is worth up to 25% of their revenue. If we assume even a moderate close rate and factor in standard churn, this doesn’t seem like an overly healthy picture for most agencies right now.