Holy guacamole, we need to talk about the most dangerous phrase in agency growth:
"I need more leads."
I hear this on almost every single discovery call.
Nearly. Every. Single. One.
Every time, I want to reach through the screen and gently(?) shake somebody by the shoulders.
"Lead gen" implies there's a person out there, credit card in hand, ready to say "LFG, I want to kick off RIGHT NOW!” And sure, those people exist.
Sometimes they even find you!
But building your entire growth strategy around catching people at the exact moment they are buying?
That's not a strategy. That's a scratch-off lottery ticket..
I was talking to a founder recently, super sharp guy, runs a $2M agency with 97% client retention and 50% EBITDA margins. On paper, his business is beautiful.
But he told me he'd had two sales calls all week, and his pipeline looked like someplace in Death Valley where they’d forgotten to pay the water bill.
He'd tried outbound contractors. He'd tried Google Ads. He was about to spend $5,000 a month on a LinkedIn branding agency to interview him and post clips.
His diagnosis fpr his growth troubles was "I can't find the silver bullet for lead gen."
Wrong diagnosis. Wrong medicine. Wrong pharmacy.
The Real Problem: You're Not in the Consideration Set
Even without even knowing your situation, I can almost bet that you don't really need more leads. By the time someone becomes "a lead," everybody in the world knows that they are looking, so you have jumped into marketing Hunger Games. There's only one winner, and in this case, the odds are not ever in your favor.
Many of the best agencies already know that you need to be in the room with the prospect before anyone else knows that there is a room.
Let me explain what I mean. When a company decides to hire an agency — whether it's for marketing, events, dev, whatever — that decision doesn't start with a Google search. It starts with a conversation. Someone says, "Hey, we should probably do something about [problem]." And then someone else says, "Oh, I know a person" or "I've been following this company that does exactly that."
That's the consideration set. And if you're not already in it, no amount of cold outreach or Google Ads is going to consistently save you.
So let's stop calling it lead gen.
What we're really talking about is:
How do you create enough relationships in the market so that you're consistently in the consideration set?
That's a completely different question, and it leads to completely different actions.
Why "More Leads" Is the Wrong Frame
When you frame your problem as "I need more leads," you end up chasing direct response tactics. You optimize landing pages, you A/B test subject lines, you hire outbound contractors who send 10,000 emails that all sound like a robot wrote them (because a robot did write them).
And maybe it works for a minute. But here's what happens:
You are only building visibility and opportunity to those people who are in=market at the very moment you happen to be emailing. Your carefully crafted email, delivered at the wrong time has all the impact of a dandelion.
That's not a pipeline problem. That's a visibility problem. Because the agencies that make it into the consideration set aren’t the best at Google Ads or cold outreach or whatever. They are the best at creating visibility, showing expertise & creating relationships.
You don't get into the consideration set through lead gen alone. You get there through presence, trust, and relentless visibility in the spaces where your buyers learn.
Build Your DemandOS, Not Your Lead Gen Machine
This is what I call DemandOS and it has impact way before anyone fills out a contact form.
Know Your Audiences (and Talk to All of Them)
Here's something most agency owners miss…your considerations set builder and the eventual buyer isn't just one person.
The real audiences you need to engage are the ones with influence and money. That is going to vary based on the life stage, scale & sophistication of your target client. It might be the CEO…or in the case of this founder, it is CEO, HR, investors, board members & operational leaders (Head of Sales, Head of Operations, etc.)
Map your audiences. Talk to all of them. Differently.(Want a quick way to create content that can target your various audiences? Here is The Agency Inner Circle content strategy that takes you from big idea to content designed to speak to a specific buying audience.)
Let Your Whole Team Be the Brand (Not Just You)
One of the biggest traps founder-led agencies fall into is this…you are the only interesting person in your company. Or at least, you are the only publicly interesting person.
But here's what I told this founder - you've got an ops manager who is clearly a monster at logistics…you've got team leads who live and breathe execution...
Let them talk… in their own voices, with their own language, focused on their own priorities
Here's what happens in the best companies…individual voices aren't a mimic of the brand, they add texture to it.
- Your CEO talks about the strategic impact of team offsites at a board level.
- Your ops manager talks about the 29 things that need to happen behind the scenes.
- Your team lead talks about what makes the difference between a forgettable event and one people reference for months.
Same core idea with different voices - the content amplifies exponentially.
Stop Being Afraid of Authenticity (It's Your Competitive Moat)
Here's what kills me. Most people on your team… especially the early stage folks…have spent their entire lives being told to stand in line, get good grades, go to college, and don't say anything that might upset the people in charge. Their whole existence has been optimized for pleasing authority figures.
So when you tell them "post on LinkedIn," they freeze. They write something that sounds like a press release had a baby with a motivational poster.
Your job as a leader is to free them from that.
Give them the core idea, and then tell them: "Fucking be yourself. Because if you're not yourself, what's the point?"
The prospects who read the authentic content will nehave in one of two ways:
- Those who share your vibe will lean in.
- The people who don't will stop listening. (They would have been bad clients anyway.)
That's not a bug. That's the whole gorgeous design.
The Exit Trap: Too Much Margin, Not Enough Growth
Here's a truth bomb that'll piss off some people - you can have too much margin.
The founder I was talking to had beautiful margins — 50% EBITDA on his fee revenue. And he wanted to sell the business for a 6-7x multiple.
But here's the problem. A buyer is going to look at that and say: "If you can generate that kind of margin, why the hell haven't you grown five times bigger, cut the margin in half, and made a lot more money?"
Too much margin tells a buyer you haven't invested enough in growth. It signals that the business is founder-dependent, that the sales process lives in one person's head, and that the asset isn't portable.
So if you're thinking about an exit, even a someday exit, you've got to solve two things simultaneously:
- Build market presence so leads come consistently (not in lumps).
- Use that consistency to hire someone internal into the sales seat.
And you want to do this not when you're desperate, not when leads are lumpy (and certainly not 6 weeks before you start talking to potential acquirers). You want to do this when you've got 5 to 8 qualified conversations a week and you can train someone to take the first call.
Because if you're the only one who can sell, your business isn't an asset. It's a really well-paying, really stressful job.
(And trust me — the person you hire will screw something up, and you'll want to fire them and do it yourself. Don't. That's the trap.)
Why This Matters Right Now
The rise of AI has made it trivially easy to generate content, send outbound emails, and create the appearance of quality marketing activity.
Everyone's doing it. Which means the bar for "showing up" has dropped to zero and the bar for "being memorable" has gone through the roof.
What can't be commoditized is your point of view, your team's personality, and the trust you build by being consistently, authentically present in your market. Demand OS isn't about more activity. It's about the right kind of presence that makes you the obvious choice before anyone even starts looking.
This Isn't for Everyone
DemandOS isn't for agencies who want a quick fix. It's not for people who think "more leads" is the answer, or who are too afraid to let their team post something unpolished on LinkedIn.
It's for agency owners who are willing to trade the lead gen slot machine for a real market presence. Who are willing to let their team be human in public. Who understand that the fastest way to grow isn't to chase more prospects, it's to become part of the consideration set to questions that haven’t neccessarily been asked yet.
If that sounds like you, maybe it's time to stop calling it lead gen and start building demand. Because sometimes, the best way to win more deals is to stop chasing them.