# ★ Featured · October 2026 Promethean Research What Agencies Actually Pay: 1,040 Job Posts, Decoded
Promethean Research (Nicholas Petroski) · Digital Agency Pay Bands
Nick Petroski pulled 1,040 job postings from 259 U.S. digital agencies and built median pay and 25th–75th percentile bands for every major agency role, from junior coordinator to executive. It fills a real gap: Glassdoor and every other salary aggregator lumps your developer in with the one at a funded SaaS startup, which makes their numbers useless for pricing an agency payroll. These are agency-only numbers. Comp is your biggest expense, so this is the benchmark to check before next year's budget gets signed.
Salary bands Comp planning Org design Margin math
See all the pay bands → Key Findings
- The ladder across all agency roles (median posted pay): Junior $57K, Mid-level $80K, Senior $90K, Lead/Manager $111K, Director $145K, Executive $185K. The middle 50% of directors land between $125K and $170K.
- Mid-level to senior is only a $10K bump. The real jumps come at lead/manager (+$21K) and director (+$34K). Agencies pay for running people and clients, not for years in the seat.
- Developers are the priciest seat in the building. A senior developer runs a $131K median against $88K for a senior marketer and $100K for a senior designer. A dev lead hits $170K, versus $103K for a marketing lead.
- Inside marketing, the cheapest specialties are the ones AI is commoditizing fastest: SEO and search ($80K), content and copywriting ($80K), and generalist digital marketing ($78K). Strategy and planning ($108K) and analytics and reporting ($104K) pay noticeably more.
- In sales, closers earn a $113K median and partnerships people $118K. SDR, BDR, and sales support roles come in at $70K. Account and client leadership roles run $125K, while account coordinators sit at $45K.
- Why it matters: on a $5M agency with $2.5M in comp and a 15% net margin, payroll running just 5% over plan knocks about $100K off net income (after tax) and drops margin from 15% to 13%.
Recommendations · Tim's Take
- Pull your payroll and line it up against these bands this week, role by role. Most owners have no idea whether they're overpaying or underpaying, because "market rate" has always meant whatever Glassdoor said. A 5% miss on comp eats two points of margin, and in an industry running 13% net that's the difference between a business and a job.
- Look at where the money goes in marketing. Strategy and analytics pay more than SEO and content because buyers value judgment over output. If your service mix is built on the cheapest roles in this data, you're selling the work clients think AI does for free. Shift the offer toward the expensive seats, because that's where the pricing power is.
- Hire a closer, not another SDR. The founder who's "too busy to sell" usually tries to fix it with a $70K BDR and gets a calendar full of bad meetings. A $113K closer who can actually run a deal pays for themselves. SalesOS is the system that gives either one something to work with.
- The $10K gap between mid-level and senior is a retention warning. If a senior title buys almost nothing, your best mid-level people will leave to get the lead or manager jump somewhere else. Build a path to the next real step, or budget to replace them.
- Read it for what it is: posted ranges, not actual pay, and some sub-roles rest on fewer than 10 postings (they're marked with an asterisk on Promethean's page). Use it as a sanity check, not a comp plan. If paying above market is your strategy, fine, but make it a deliberate choice instead of something you drifted into.
# ★ Featured · October 2026 The 2026 State of B2B GTM
Growth Unhinged (Kyle Poyar) · GTM Strategist (Maja Voje) · presented by Ploy
Kyle Poyar and Maja Voje polled 300 B2B software and AI companies in September 2026 on what's actually generating pipeline, the second year they've run it. This isn't an agency survey. It's a survey of the people agencies sell to, and the companies agencies compete with for their own pipeline. Their theme for the year is "pipeline, pipeline, pipeline," and the channel scorecard reads like a warning label for any agency still pitching volume.
Pipeline Channel ROI AI search (AEO) Signals GTM barbell
Read the full 41-page report (PDF) → Key Findings
- Pipeline is the #1 GTM challenge (18%), ahead of scaling repeatably (10%) and positioning (9%). Growth marketing is the #1 priority GTM hire.
- Network and intros is the most popular channel and the best bet for ROI: 62% call it core, and it ranks #1 for companies at $5-50k and $50k+ ACV. Founder-led sales is still the most common primary motion (26%), and 44% of companies under $1M ARR run on it.
- AI search (AEO) jumped 11 points to 39% "core," moved into the tried-and-true quadrant, and is the #1 channel for increased investment in 2027 (50%), with signal-based outbound right behind it (48%). Intimate events saw the biggest jump in planned investment (42%).
- The over-saturated corner is cold outreach and paid ads. "Spray and pray" outbound, AI SDR sequences ("near-zero reply rate, and it hurt our sending reputation"), and mass AI-created content dominate the what-didn't-work list. Agentic campaigns sit at 7% core, down 4 points.
- 43% of GTM teams now report a big impact from AI, up from 24% last year, and only 4% report none. Claude replaced ChatGPT as the #1 most impactful GTM tool. 7 of the top 10 "must try" tools weren't on last year's list.
- The closing prediction: the next battleground is positioning and messaging. "Every company sounds the same, and customers are tuning out. Being great at AI won't matter if the pitch falls on deaf ears."
Recommendations · Tim's Take
- These are your clients and prospects telling you what they'll pay for. Their #1 problem is pipeline that converts, not more activity. If your pitch is "more content, more ads, more sequences," you're selling the exact thing they just listed under "what didn't work." Sell the outcome they're losing sleep over, or watch them hire a growth marketer to do it in-house.
- The best channel in B2B is still a person who knows you. Network and intros, intimate events, founder visibility. That's true for your clients and it's true for your agency. Most agency owners at $1M to $20M are still running founder-led sales whether they admit it or not, so stop treating referrals as luck and build them into a system.
- AEO crossed over from experiment to table stakes. Half of these companies plan to put more money there next year. If your agency can't explain how your clients show up in ChatGPT and Perplexity, somebody else will, and they'll take the SEO retainer with them. Start with your own agency: Visibility Lab shows how you show up in AI search today.
- The "GTM barbell" is the most useful idea in the report. Win on relationships or win on AI, and beware the space in between. That middle is where the generic, do-a-bit-of-everything agency lives. Pick an end, or pick a lane narrow enough that you own both ends for one kind of client.
- Their prediction for 2027 is my whole thesis: positioning and messaging decide who wins once AI flattens execution. When every shop has the same tools, the one with a sharp point of view gets the meeting. SalesOS is where that conversation gets forced.
- Read the fine print. It's a sample of software and AI companies, skewed toward fast growers and AI-natives, and it's presented by a website platform that's on its own "must try" list. Take the direction seriously and the precise percentages with a grain of salt.
# ★ Featured · 2026 ADWEEK Dealroom The Agency Sale Standoff
ADWEEK Dealroom · Evros Group (Andreas Roell)
The first data exclusive from ADWEEK's new Dealroom vertical, powered by M&A advisory firm Evros Group. Three groups answer the same questions and get put side by side: independent agency owners weighing a sale, strategic and PE-backed buyers, and financial investors. The finding that runs through all of it: appetite is high on every side of the table, and almost none of it is closing. Worth reading even if you never plan to sell, because the traits that earn an M&A premium are the same ones that earn a client premium.
M&A appetite Valuation gap AI as filter Premium traits
Read the full report → Key Findings
- Appetite is high on every side of the table. 51% of independent agency owners say they're interested in selling and another 20% are unsure, while 78% of strategic and PE-backed buyers and 93% of financial investors are actively hunting deals. More than 70% of owners are open or undecided.
- The deals stall on price. Valuation mismatch is the number one constraint for both buyer groups (78% of strategic buyers, 64% of financial investors), and buyers describe mid-quality agencies "holding out for 2022 valuations."
- Supply looks plentiful but thin on quality. Not one strategic buyer rated 2026's opportunities "very strong," and 67% called them "mixed." Financial investors were harsher: 36% rated opportunities "weak," 57% "mixed," and just 7% positive.
- Growth is the clearest valuation driver, named by 78% of strategic buyers and 100% of financial investors, followed by EBITDA margin. The premium goes to differentiated businesses that pair growth and defensible margin with a credible data and AI story.
- AI is a filter, not an automatic premium. Owners are 96% motivated to adopt AI yet rate their own adoption a 3 out of 5, and buyers see the gap. Half of financial investors say agencies most overestimate "internal adoption versus external value creation," and strategic buyers warn of "AI vaporware" that evaporates in diligence.
- The market split in two. A small premium tier where sellers hold real leverage sits above a large, still-transactable middle where valuations are measured, processes drag, and preparation decides the outcome. Data and analytics now ranks level with AI as a top acquisition priority, named by 69% of financial investors.
Recommendations · Tim's Take
- Half of owners want out, buyers are sitting on cash, and the deals still don't close. What's missing is proof. Buyers quit paying for potential and started paying for evidence, and every owner still pricing off a 2022 comp is going to sit on the market until the number gets worse, not better.
- The traits that earn an M&A premium are the same ones that earn a client premium, so read this even if you never sell a share. Growth, a margin you can defend, a lane nobody else owns, and AI that moved a real metric. Build those and you win better clients this year and a better multiple whenever you want one. Skip them and you're the "mixed quality" pile that 93% of investors are complaining about.
- "Waiting for a better market" is the story undifferentiated agencies tell themselves on the way to a lower number. The survey says it plainly: for generic shops, AI drags value down over the next few years, so holding out quietly becomes accepting less later. Time isn't the lever. The work you do before you go to market is.
- "We use AI internally" is worth nothing to a buyer, and it's worth nothing to a client either. 96% of owners call themselves motivated and rate their own adoption a 3 out of 5, and the people writing checks can smell the gap. Show the metric your AI moved, or you're selling vaporware the diligence team has already flagged.
- Read who ran the survey. An M&A advisor gets paid when you transact and when you hire them to get "market-ready," so the "you need a partner to get there" framing comes built in. The signal underneath is still real, and for a $1M to $20M owner it lands the same either way: get investable on purpose, or get sorted into the discount pile. Differentiation and a demand engine that doesn't run on founder heroics are where that starts, and SalesOS is where the positioning conversation gets forced.
# ★ Featured · 2026 Promethean Research The Digital Agency Growth Guide
Promethean Research (Nicholas Petroski & Meghan Goetz)
Promethean's 75-page 2026 strategy guide on why revenue generation is broken at most agencies and how the leaders are quietly pulling away. Built on a decade of consulting plus Promethean's primary research programs, with expert contributions from David C. Baker, Chris DuBois, Karl Sakas, and Dan Englander. Where the Industry Report above benchmarks the industry, this is the operating manual for growing inside it.
Revgen system Account management Referrals AI & pricing
Read the full 75-page guide (PDF) → Key Findings
- Fast-growing agencies grew 34% in a year while slow agencies declined 15%, a 49-point spread that's abnormal for a mature professional services industry. The dividing line is whether an agency runs revenue generation as a system or leaves it to founder heroics.
- Revenue generation and account management together are less than 13% of the typical agency's headcount. Across 3,172 positions at 1,228 firms, sales and marketing make up roughly 7% and account managers another 6%. The two functions most responsible for winning and growing revenue are fewer than one in eight employees.
- Account management is the highest-leverage revenue function in the research, yet 97% of the typical account manager's pay is fixed salary, with a variable slice too small to change behavior. AMs own retention and expansion but get compensated like a back-office role.
- Referred clients stay about 1.9x longer than clients won through events, networking, or outbound, and they come with lower acquisition costs and larger deals. Despite that, most agencies treat referrals as a passive channel with no system, no owner, and no measurement.
- Retention economics beat acquisition. Customer acquisition cost for mid-market clients typically runs $5,000 to $15,000, while retention costs a fraction of that. 42% of agencies report average retainer tenure over two years, but a quarter of retainer engagements still end within a year. A healthy LTV/CAC ratio is 3:1 or better and the industry runs around 3.6:1, while anything below 1:1 means an agency pays more to land a client than the client returns.
- A third of agencies have fully implemented AI, but it is concentrated in production while sales sits at the bottom of the maturity curve. AI also collapsed value-based pricing, with adoption falling from 31% in 2024 to 18% in 2025, and rewarded the agencies that raised rates anyway. As execution commoditizes, the pitch that converts shifted from "we have the team and experience to do the work" to "we know what to do, why, and how to make it produce results in your specific context."
Recommendations · Tim's Take
- The 49-point spread between fast and slow agencies is the whole report in one number. Fast grew 34%, slow shrank 15%, same market, same year. That gap isn't talent or luck, it's whether you run revenue as a system or as a thing the founder scrambles to fix every time the pipeline empties. The gap widens every quarter you wait to pick a side.
- Your revenue engine is understaffed and you probably can't see it. Sales, marketing, and account management are fewer than one in eight people at the typical agency, and then owners act surprised when growth stalls. You staffed production to the hilt and left the function that brings in money running on fumes. Fund the engine or stay stuck, and if you want a system instead of more headcount, that's what DemandOS builds.
- Account management is the highest-return revenue function in the entire dataset and you're paying it like a help desk. 97% fixed salary means your AMs have zero financial reason to push the rate increase, the expansion, or the referral ask. If you want retention and growth, put real variable comp behind the people who own retention and growth.
- Referrals produce your longest-tenured, cheapest, biggest clients and almost nobody runs them on purpose. Referred clients stay 1.9x longer, and most agencies still treat the channel like weather, something that happens to them. Name an owner, build the ask into project closeouts, and measure it the way you measure outbound, or keep leaving your best channel to chance.
- Stop spending to replace clients you could have kept. Acquisition runs five to fifteen grand a client and retention costs a fraction of that, yet a quarter of retainers die inside a year. Every logo that churns is you paying full price to refill a bucket you punched a hole in. Retention is cheaper than acquisition and it is not close.
- The pitch that worked five years ago is now a liability. "We have the team and the experience to do the work" tells an AI-era buyer they're paying you for something a subscription does cheaper, which is also why value-based pricing slid from 31% to 18% in a single year. The agencies that raised rates and sold judgment over hours grew anyway. If you can't defend your price against "AI can do that," the problem is your positioning, not the buyer. SalesOS is where that conversation gets forced.
# Research · October 2026
How 200 SEO Agencies Sell AI Search
AI Page Ready
AI Page Ready went through the websites of 200 SEO agencies pulled from non-sponsored Clutch listings, across seven regions and three size bands, and logged who sells AI search, what they call it, what they promise, and whether they'll audit it. It's a snapshot of how your competitors are packaging the hottest service line in the category, and most of them are packaging it badly.
AI search (AEO/GEO) Service packaging Positioning
Read the full study → Key Findings
- 133 of the 200 SEO agencies (two-thirds) now advertise AI search. 99 of those have a dedicated service page and 92 promote it on the homepage.
- Only 4 of the 133 make AI search the opening message on their homepage.
- Nobody agrees on what to call it. "GEO" is the most common label, used on 41 of 78 service pages (53%).
- 124 of 133 promise visibility in AI answers. Only 49 connect the service to a commercial outcome.
- 68 of the 200 offer an SEO audit, while just 45 offer an AI-search audit.
- Small shops lag: 58% of agencies with 2 to 9 employees advertise AI search, against 74% of those with 10 to 49. By region, 84% of UK and Ireland agencies sell it, against 60% in the US.
Recommendations · Tim's Take
- Two-thirds of SEO agencies sell AI search and 4 lead with it. That's a service line bolted onto the menu, not a position. If AI search is where your clients' buyers are headed, burying it on page six of your services list tells them you aren't sure either.
- 124 agencies promise "visibility in AI answers" and 49 tie it to revenue. Visibility is the new rankings report, a metric clients stop paying for the minute somebody asks what it did for pipeline. Sell the commercial outcome, or get ready to defend a screenshot of a ChatGPT answer at renewal.
- GEO, AEO, AI SEO, LLMO... the industry can't settle on a name, and the client doesn't care about the acronym anyway. Describe it in their language (getting recommended when a buyer asks AI for a shortlist) and you are the only one in the pitch who sounds like you know what you are selling.
- The audit gap is an open door. Fewer agencies offer an AI-search audit than an SEO audit, and an audit is the easiest way to start the conversation. Run one on your own agency first: Visibility Lab shows how you show up in AI search today.
- Read it for what it is. It measures what agencies say on their websites, not whether they can deliver, and it comes from a company in the AI-readiness business. Take the direction seriously and the precise splits with a grain of salt.
# Research · October 2026
Half of Agencies Use the Same Five Phrases
Agency Field Guide (Tim Kilroy) · 6,453 agency websites
Agency Field Guide read the home, about, and services pages of 6,453 English-language agencies and counted the stock phrases. Full disclosure: this one's mine. It's here because it puts a number on the problem I talk about more than any other. Every agency sounds the same, so buyers sort you on price, a referral, or the bigger name.
Positioning Messaging Proof
Read the full analysis → Key Findings
- 50.7% of agencies use at least one of five stock phrases. "Data-driven" leads at 33.6%, followed by results or ROI-focused (19.1%), client-centric (15.1%), "an extension of your team" (6.9%), and "not your typical agency" (0.6%).
- Service breadth is the biggest predictor. 37.0% of agencies listing 1 to 3 services use a stock phrase, against 68.6% of those listing 10 or more. Use of "data-driven" jumps from 18.4% to 53.2%.
- Niche and location barely move it. Single-industry agencies use a stock phrase 52.6% of the time, against 51.0% for agencies serving four or more industries. U.S. and Canadian agencies land at 50.8% and 50.6%.
- Beyond the big five, "transparent" shows up on 36.5% of positioning pages, "innovative" on 33.6%, "strategic, growth or trusted partner" on 26.1%, and "full-service" on 23.5%.
- The cliché users usually have the proof. Of agencies using three or more phrases, 70.1% publish case studies with metrics and 81.2% put numbers on their positioning pages, against 49.3% and 62.1% for agencies using none.
- Only 10.8% of heavy phrase users, and 4.9% of agencies using none, say who they won't serve.
Recommendations · Tim's Take
- Run the logo-swap test on your homepage tonight. Put a competitor's logo on it. If nobody would notice, your positioning is a fill-in-the-blank, and the buyer will pick between you on price.
- Picking a niche doesn't fix your copy. Single-industry agencies lean on the stock phrases just as hard as generalists do. A niche tells buyers who you serve. It doesn't tell them why you.
- The real fix is a shorter menu. The more services you list, the more you hide behind adjectives that fit all of them, and agencies selling 10 or more services lean on stock phrases at nearly twice the rate of focused ones. If you can't describe what you do in one sentence, you have an offer problem, and new copy won't solve it.
- You probably already have the proof, so move it next to the claim. Keep "data-driven" only if the same page defines it, proves you work that way, and shows what it did for a client. Otherwise cut it, because it's only there since everyone else has it.
- Say who you are not for. Barely one agency in ten does, which makes it the cheapest differentiation available and the line that makes the right buyer lean in. Finding the point of view under the adjectives is where DemandOS starts.
# Industry Report · 2025
The State of Digital Agencies
SparkToro (Rand Fishkin)
SparkToro's 2025 survey of 376 agency owners on revenue, pipelines, AI adoption, pricing, and what's actually working in the agency game. A useful pulse-check that complements the longitudinal Promethean dataset above.
Pipeline Pricing AI threat
Read SparkToro's write-up → Key Findings
- Only 12% of agency owners say things are healthy. 41% call it a struggle, 47% land on "meh" — and yet 64% still expect revenue to grow next year.
- 86% of agencies are running on a pipeline they describe as average or worse. Just 14% call their pipeline healthy.
- Six times more owners say their sales cycle got longer (29%) than say it got shorter (5%). The biggest jumps were in the 7–8 week and 12+ week timelines.
- 79% of agencies have no dedicated marketing staff. 70% have no dedicated salespeople. The founder is doing both jobs at once.
- 85% of agencies live on retainer, and 86% of those retainers are under $10K/month. 64% planned to raise fees, only 16% actually did.
- 53% now see AI as a real threat, up nine points from 44% the year before. 66% worry there'll be fewer jobs for junior staff.
- Referrals still run the game (client/past-client #1, partner referrals #2, content marketing #3). Events and speaking jumped to #4. 73% say LinkedIn is their best social channel.
Recommendations · Tim's Take
- 64% of owners expect growth next year while 88% say the business is struggling or "meh." That's not optimism, that's a forecast nobody built a plan against. If your 2026 number doesn't have a named pipeline source for each dollar, it's a story you're telling yourself to get to sleep.
- 86% of agencies have a pipeline they admit isn't working. The pipeline is the single most leveraged thing in your business, and most owners don't have one. If demand generation isn't a system inside your agency, the pipeline will keep starving you no matter how good the work is. DemandOS is the fix.
- The fee-raise gap is a positioning problem, not a market problem. 64% planned, 16% did, and 48% talked themselves out of it. If you can't defend the rate to yourself, you definitely can't defend it to a procurement team.
- 79% of marketing agencies don't market themselves and 70% don't have a salesperson. That's the ceiling nobody on the agency leadership podcasts wants to name. Hire one of the two before next quarter, or stop being surprised when neither job gets done.
- Events and speaking jumping to #4 is the move worth noticing. Founders who get on stage create demand that didn't exist before they showed up. Everyone else is waiting for the phone to ring.
# Industry Report · 2025
The Next Wave
WP Engine + Promethean Research
Survey of 214 digital agency professionals (primarily US and Canada) on how AI is reshaping the agency model. Covers internal AI adoption, new AI-driven service lines, and the emerging requirement to build websites for both human and machine audiences.
AI adoption AI services Optimizing for machines
Get the report from WP Engine → Key Findings
- 72% of agencies have changed how they build websites to serve machine consumers (AI tools, search algorithms, chatbots, voice assistants). 73% say optimizing for AI will be as pivotal for client success as the mobile-responsive shift was a decade ago.
- 26% of agencies self-identify as AI Leaders (advanced or expert), 15% as Laggards. Leaders are nearly 3x as likely to offer AI-based client services (49% vs 18%), almost 2x as likely to have formal AI guidelines (64% vs 36%), and 4x more likely to always initiate the AI conversation with clients.
- 99% of agencies have taken concrete steps on AI, including investing in tools (63%), training staff (60%), and developing internal AI policies (52%). Only 34% have actually built new AI offerings that clients can buy.
- The top "designing for machines" tactics are upfront content summaries and FAQ sections (37%), improving the data layer with schema and plain-language metadata (32%), and keeping business information consistent across platforms (31%).
- The top adaptation challenge is keeping up with the pace of change (41%), well ahead of skills gaps (15%), uncertain ROI (12%), and resource constraints (11%).
Recommendations · Tim's Take
- AI Leaders are running ahead on every metric that matters: 3x more AI-based services, 2x more formal AI policies, and 4x more likely to always initiate the AI conversation. "Intermediate" is the polite name for the group that gets quietly cut from RFPs over the next 18 months, and most agency owners are already there without knowing it.
- "Pace of change" being the top-cited problem at 41% is the most expensive lie agency owners tell themselves. The agencies blaming the speed of AI are the same ones without a written position on what it changes for their clients. Pick a thesis, ship something against it this quarter, and most of the noise sorts itself out.
- 99% of agencies took some action on AI, and only 34% built something a client can actually buy. The other two-thirds purchased tools, ran a training, called it a year, and watched the spend walk out the door without ever turning into invoiced revenue. If your AI investment isn't attached to a billable offer by next quarter, you're financing somebody else's R&D.
- Optimizing for AI consumption is the new SEO, and most agencies are quietly hoping their clients don't notice that nobody owns it yet. Content summaries, schema markup, plain-language metadata, and consistent business info across platforms are billable line items right now, and the agencies putting them on retainers in 2026 are the same ones raising fees while the rest debate whether it counts as real work.
# Industry Report · 2025
Agency Edge Research
Agency Management Institute (Drew McLellan)
Annual research from Drew McLellan's AMI surveying agency owners and their clients on growth, AI, new business, and the operator life. The most consistent agency-owner survey in the US market, now in its 13th year.
New business Client expectations AI adoption
See the AMI research → Key Findings
- Most clients want their agencies to use AI and to be transparent about it, actively expecting their agency to serve as a guide in the AI-driven shift.
- The 2025 research identified three distinct client mindsets on AI: Embracers, Skeptics, and Opportunists. What each group expects from agencies differs sharply.
- More than half of clients identify agencies through online search. About 40% ask for recommendations from colleagues, and one in three reviews direct outreach.
- Two in three clients expect a new agency search to take three months or fewer, which means agencies that are hard to find or slow to respond lose the deal before it starts.
Recommendations · Tim's Take
- Your clients want you to lead the AI conversation. If you can't articulate what AI changes for their business in plain English by next quarter, the agency that can will win the next RFP and you'll find out from a press release.
- Stop pitching AI the same way to every client. The Embracer wants you to push their roadmap forward, the Skeptic wants you to prove it won't break their brand, and the Opportunist wants you to find them an unfair advantage. One pitch to all three loses all three.
- More than half of buyers find their next agency through online search, and "good word of mouth" isn't a strategy when your name doesn't surface in the result they actually click. The page-one results are your storefront, and your homepage is just where buyers verify what they already decided about you.
- Two in three clients are running their agency search inside ninety days. If your sales team takes a week to respond, your homepage is unclear, or your case studies need a sales rep to decode them, the deal is over before you knew it started.
# Industry Report · 2025
Agency Core 2025
Agency Core (Audience Audit + White Label IQ)
Free, ungated research from 778 agency leaders on optimism, pipeline, AI, talent, and retention. Identifies five distinct leadership mindsets that explain why some agencies accelerate while others stall in the same market.
Pipeline Optimism Mindsets
Read the full research → Key Findings
- Strong optimism among agency leaders collapsed from 74% in 2023 to 47% in 2025, and the drop shows up across every segment, size, and specialty.
- Pipeline is the #1 severe challenge agencies face. 43% of leaders strongly agree finding new clients is harder than ever in 2025, nearly triple the 15% who said so in 2023.
- AI lands far down the severe-challenge list. Only 21% cite AI's impact on agency relevance as a severe challenge, well behind pipeline (61%), prioritizing agency marketing (44%), and getting paid appropriately (39%).
- 68% of agencies lost clients in 2024, up from 56% in 2023, and fewer than half have a formal program to prevent client defection.
- The five attitudinal segments held stable from 2023 to 2025. Loyalty Builders, the only segment that significantly grew, also report the highest optimism and the strongest ability to adapt to change.
Recommendations · Tim's Take
- Pipeline pain tripled in two years, and most agencies are still treating new business as a thing that happens to them. If demand generation isn't a real system inside your shop, you're rolling dice on payroll every quarter and waiting for the run that ends the business.
- Stop letting AI panic eat your strategic attention. Pipeline outranks AI three to one as a severe concern in this data, and the agencies that spent 2024 wringing their hands over ChatGPT are the same ones with empty calendars in Q2.
- The five mindsets in this study barely moved in two years. These aren't passing problems waiting to fade, they're how the industry is wired now. Loyalty Builders are the only segment that grew, and they grew because they built retention and expansion systems while everyone else was reacting.
- 68% of agencies lost clients last year and most don't have a written program to stop the bleed. If client retention isn't a named workstream with an owner and a quarterly review, you'll find out a logo left when the invoice doesn't get paid.
# Industry Report · 2024
Mind the Gap
Wpromote + Ascend2
A survey of 500+ decision-makers (272 brand-side marketing leaders and 238 agency professionals at US companies with 50 or more employees) on where brand and agency partnerships are breaking down. The rare study that puts agency confidence and brand satisfaction side by side, and the gap is brutal.
Confidence gap Brand satisfaction Retention
Read the full report (PDF) → Key Findings
- 76% of agencies report high confidence in their overall service delivery, but only 39% of brands are very satisfied with it. Agency confidence outpaces brand satisfaction across nearly every part of the relationship, from ROI to transparency to creative.
- Brands that are highly satisfied with their agency are 61% more likely to report substantial revenue growth, and 4x more likely to be very satisfied with the agency's ability to demonstrate ROI (61% vs 15%).
- Creativity is what brands value most from an agency partner (47%), ahead of ROI (39%) and performance against goals (33%). But only 33% of brands are highly satisfied with agency creative ideation, while 63% of agencies feel very confident in it.
- 94% of brands expect their agency to provide data privacy guidance and only 53% of agencies deliver it. 97% want proactive creative solutions when the market shifts, and only 63% of agencies provide them.
- Transparency is the multiplier. Brands highly satisfied with agency transparency are 3x more likely to be satisfied with the overall partnership (65% vs 21%), yet just 35% of brands are very satisfied with how transparent their agency is.
- Speed of delivery (37%) and budget overruns (36%) are the top collaboration challenges, followed closely by ineffective communication (33%) and misalignment of goals (32%).
- Over half of brands (54%) would start looking for a new agency over a lack of results. 49% would look because they need new perspectives, and 48% would look to cut costs.
Recommendations · Tim's Take
- This whole report is your buyer telling you where you're losing them, and the headline is a 37-point gap. 76% of agencies feel great about their delivery, 39% of brands feel great about receiving it. When you love the work and your client only tolerates it, the renewal is already gone. You just haven't gotten the email yet.
- Client satisfaction is a revenue forecast. Satisfied brands are 61% more likely to post substantial growth and 4x more likely to trust your ROI story. The agencies treating "are they happy" as a soft question are ignoring the most predictive growth lever in the building.
- Brands buy your creativity first and your ROI second, but only a third of them like your creative while two-thirds of you think it's excellent. Close that gap or it becomes your churn rate. Show the thinking behind the work instead of asking them to take your confidence on faith.
- 94% of brands want you to own data privacy and 97% want proactive creative when the market moves, and barely half of agencies do either. Both are table stakes now, and your competitor is already billing for them while you debate whether they count as real work. Pick one and build the offer this quarter.
- Transparency is the cheapest growth lever in this entire report. Brands who trust how open you are run 3x more likely to be happy with the whole relationship, and it costs you nothing but the discomfort of showing the messy middle. Polishing your reporting to look flawless is how you lose the account you assumed was safe.
- 54% of brands will walk over results and 48% will walk over price. The translation is simple: if you cannot prove the outcome, you are a line item, and line items get cut in the budget meeting nobody invited you to.
# Industry Report · 2024
Agency Transformation Report
Society of Digital Agencies (SoDA)
Annual global report from SoDA examining agency operations, client relationships, talent management, and the structural impact of AI on digital agency business models.
Global trends Client dynamics AI adoption
Read the SoDA report → Key Findings
- AI is reshaping agency pricing, processes, and ways of operating in ways most agencies haven't yet formalized into policy.
- Agencies are being asked to demonstrate transformation readiness, not just execution capability, as clients elevate the strategic bar for outside partners.
- The agencies navigating AI most effectively are integrating it across operations rather than treating it as a single-service add-on.
- Talent dynamics remain the persistent operational constraint, with retention harder to solve than acquisition even as hiring pressure has eased from its 2022-2023 peak.
Recommendations · Tim's Take
- If your retainer can't be defended with measurable outcomes, you're one budget meeting away from getting cut. List what you deliver, and then list what it's actually worth, and notice the gap.
- Hire for the agency you want to run in 2027, not the one you're running today. Every month you delay is a month your competitor builds the team that beats you.
- Write your AI point of view down before a client asks for it, because they're going to ask within twelve months. "We use AI tools" isn't a position. It's a confession that you don't have one.
- Stop bolting AI on as a new service line. The agencies winning with AI bake it into pricing, delivery, and how every account gets staffed, and the ones still selling it as a one-off offer are watching their margin walk out the door to faster competitors.
# Research · 2025
State of Marketing
HubSpot
Annual report on marketing trends, channel performance, and AI usage across thousands of marketers and marketing leaders.
Channel mix AI adoption Buyer journey
Get the report from HubSpot → Key Findings
- Short-form video is the top-reported ROI content format at 21%, ahead of images (19%) and live-streamed video (16%).
- Content creation is the leading AI use case for marketers at 35%, followed by data analysis (30%) and workflow automation (20%).
- 75% of marketing leaders who have invested in AI report a positive ROI from that investment.
- For B2B marketers, the top ROI channels in 2024 were website, blog, and SEO, followed by paid social and social media shopping tools.
Recommendations · Tim's Take
- If you can't deliver short-form video in-house or through a partner, you're not in the room when buyers shortlist. That isn't a content gap, it's a relevance gap, and the buyer doesn't owe you the conversation.
- Stop selling "AI services" as a line item. Bake AI into the work and charge for the outcome, because selling the tool is what consultants do when they don't trust the result.
- Your website, blog, and SEO are still the top ROI channels for B2B in 2024, and they outperform paid social. Every dollar you funnel into rented attention is a dollar you didn't put into the assets that keep paying you back for years.
# Research · 2024
B2B Buyer Experience Study
6sense
Research on how B2B buyers actually move through purchase decisions, including how often they shortlist before talking to sales.
Buyer behavior Sales cycles Vendor selection
Read the 6sense report → Key Findings
- B2B buyers are nearly 70% through their purchasing process before engaging with a vendor. Buyers initiate first contact more than 80% of the time.
- 81% of buyers already have a preferred vendor at the moment of first contact. 85% have largely set their requirements before ever talking to a seller.
- 95% of buyers purchase from a vendor on their Day One shortlist, a number that increased from 85% in the prior year's study.
- 84% of buyers who ranked their shortlist before seller contact went on to buy from the first vendor they spoke with. Among buyers who hadn't ranked their list, only about half did so.
Recommendations · Tim's Take
- Buyers are shortlisting your agency right now without ever talking to you. Your visibility is your pipeline, whether you built it on purpose or by accident, and the agencies pretending otherwise are the ones that go quiet in Q4.
- Build for first contact, because the vendor who shows up first with the most relevance wins the meeting that actually matters. Everyone else gets a courtesy interview that ends in a "we went a different direction" email.
- Treat every first call like the buyer has already evaluated you, because they have. If you spend the first 20 minutes "discovering" what they already decided, you've lost the deal and you're just waiting to find out.
# Thought Leadership · 2021
The 95-5 Rule
LinkedIn B2B Institute
The LinkedIn B2B Institute's research program on how B2B buying decisions get made, including the 95-5 Rule from Professor John Dawes at the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, mental availability, and the role of brand-building over time.
Brand building 95-5 rule Mental availability
Read the 95-5 research → Key Findings
- At any given time, only about 5% of buyers in a B2B category are actively in-market. The other 95% aren't buying now and won't be for months or years. (The 95-5 Rule, Professor John Dawes / Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, published with the LinkedIn B2B Institute.)
- Marketing that only targets in-market buyers reaches at most 5% of the addressable category. All spend on conversion media misses the 95%.
- Buyers tend to choose vendors who came to mind first when they entered the market, not vendors who pitched hardest after the search began.
Recommendations · Tim's Take
- Stop calling brand building a luxury. It's the only thing loading your pipeline twelve months from now, and skipping it is why you'll be sitting in 2027 wondering why nobody knows who you are.
- Show up for the 95% of buyers who aren't ready to talk yet. They're your future deals, and treating them like wasted impressions is exactly why your pipeline runs dry every fourth quarter.
- The vendor who comes to mind first is the vendor who wins, and nobody in your category comes to mind first by accident. If your name doesn't surface in your buyer's head before they open a browser tab, you're playing for second place against agencies that have been investing in mental availability for three years.
# Research · 2024
How B2B Buyers Actually Buy
Wynter
Buyer insight research on how B2B leaders evaluate, shortlist, and reject vendors based on their websites, messaging, and signals.
Messaging Website Buyer signals
Read the Wynter research → Key Findings
- Most B2B buyers form a vendor opinion within the first moments of landing on a homepage. The window is short enough that unclear messaging eliminates you before a human has read a full sentence.
- At the vendor evaluation stage, approximately 90% of buyers are evaluating roughly three vendors simultaneously, so differentiation at the message level is a deciding factor.
- Vague positioning is a primary reason buyers pass without booking a call. Specificity about who you serve and what changes for them matters more than polish.
- Buyers scan and screenshot, they don't read. The homepage functions as a visual shortcut to a yes or no decision.
Recommendations · Tim's Take
- If your homepage doesn't survive the 90-second scan, the rest of your sales motion doesn't matter, because buyers eliminate you before a human reads a full sentence.
- Get specific about who you serve and what changes for them. "Marketing for SaaS" isn't a position, it's a polite way of saying you'll work for anyone who pays.
- You're not selling against silence. 90% of buyers are weighing you against two other agencies at the same time, and the one who shows the sharpest reason to pick them in the first 60 seconds wins, regardless of who has the bigger team or the longer client list.
- Visibility Lab will tell you exactly what your homepage is doing in those 90 seconds. Try Visibility Lab →
# Research · 2025
Generative AI in Marketing Services
McKinsey
McKinsey's analysis of how generative AI is reshaping the marketing services industry, with implications for agency business models.
AI economics Service redesign Productivity
Read McKinsey's analysis → Key Findings
- McKinsey projects that agentic AI will power as much as two-thirds of current marketing activities, spanning content generation, audience testing, and media planning.
- Generative AI productivity gains in marketing are estimated to be worth roughly 5 to 15 percent of total marketing spend, or approximately $463 billion annually.
- Marketing and sales showed the biggest single-year adoption jump from 2023 to 2024, with reported AI adoption more than doubling.
- Strategic and consultative roles will grow in relative value as execution becomes faster and less labor-intensive. Agencies that reposition around strategic oversight are better insulated than those selling production volume.
Recommendations · Tim's Take
- Audit your service offering this quarter. Anything AI will do well in 18 months can't be the headline of your retainer, or your retainer is on a clock you can't see.
- Move up the value chain or get crushed at the bottom of it. Sell the thinking, not the deliverables, because the deliverables are about to cost a tenth of what they used to and your margin will go with them.
- Position AI as an efficiency unlock for the client, not a threat to their headcount. Buyers respond to the first framing and run from the second, and the agency that gets the framing right wins the next three years of their budget.
- Marketing and sales AI adoption more than doubled in twelve months. Every quarter you "wait and see" is a quarter the gap widens between you and the agencies already shipping with it, and the disadvantage shows up in the case studies you can't tell and the speed you can't match, long before it shows up on a dashboard.
# Whitepaper · 2025
Trust Barometer
Edelman
Annual global research on trust in institutions, brands, and leaders. Useful as a backdrop for how agencies should position credibility.
Trust Founder voice Credibility
Read the Trust Barometer → Key Findings
- 61% of people globally report a moderate or high sense of grievance, defined as believing that government and business serve narrow interests rather than theirs. This shapes how skeptically buyers evaluate any branded message.
- 7 in 10 people believe government officials, business leaders, and journalists deliberately mislead them. The trust gap between institutions and individual voices has never been wider in the study's 25-year history.
- "My employer" remains the most trusted institution in the study, but it dropped three points from 2024 to 76% in 2025. Managers are trusted more than senior leadership to tell the truth on major topics.
- Trust is moving from top-down institutional voice to peer-to-peer. For agencies, that means the founder's voice carries more weight than the agency's brand statement.
Recommendations · Tim's Take
- The founder voice is the single highest-trust asset your agency owns, and if it's silent, you're handing market trust to the louder competitor down the street for free.
- Stop hiding behind brand-speak. Buyers want a human point of view, and "we are passionate about driving results" isn't one. It's static, and they tune it out before the second sentence.
- Build the founder content engine before you scale the agency content engine, because the first one earns the trust that the second one will need to actually convert anything into revenue.
- Managers are trusted more than senior leadership to tell the truth on major topics, which means the people closest to the work are your most credible spokespeople, not just the founder. If your team isn't visible alongside the founder, you're handing the credibility advantage to the agencies whose people are out there doing the work in public.