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You Aren’t Closing Enough Deals - Let’s Fix That
The reason you aren’t closing enough deals has nothing to do with lead volume. Most agencies I talk to actually have enough volume.
What they are lacking is quality. Before you start saying, "Well, cold email is terrible, or SEO doesn't work anymore…” or whatever excuse immediately jumps into your brain, I want to introduce you to the things you are doing that feel like they are making poopy pipeline disease better, but are actually making things a lot worse:
1. You Are Creating Interest In The Wrong Arena
It's tempting to confuse engagement and interest in your social posts.
If you are posting lead magnets on LinkedIn with the old "Comment WTF to get the doc" bit & 50 randos drop a “WTF”, you feel like a genius.
Now go look at the list of commenters - it's littered with competitors, colleagues, and consultants who service the same industry you do. You will see a vendor or two who plans to pitch you later. Almost none of them are buyers.
Dopamine is not pipeline. (Sorry).
2. You Are Boring AF
Lead quality is low because you are afraid to be you. You say safe things, you talk about tactics and process and case studies and stuff that is about you and what you do. Trust me, I've been in this game a long fucking time, that is not why anyone hires an agency.
Clients hire you to solve their problems. If you talk about your fantastic outcomes (6.7 ROAS or conversion rates up 37%), and you've done none of the work to contextualize those result sets with the problems, industry, and potential of your target market, you are just spouting off numbers and feeling clever. You've got to fully articulate the problem and prove that you have a solution, because the goal of your marketing outreach and engagement with your market is to let the people who most identify and resonate with the problems that you solve see themselves in the stories that you tell.
It probably feels safer to talk about new, enhanced data delivery through Facebook Cappy or to talk about the intricacies of AEO or GEO (or whatever the fuck we're going to end up calling getting found inside of an LLM). Those things feel safe because they are abstract and they show that you are on top of things, and that's super important. It doesn't show anybody that you understand their problem, their business, their particular set of constraints, their levers of opportunity. It also doesn't give anybody any sense of what it is like to work with you, so you are really freaking beige.
That's why everybody hates MBA speak or corporate jargon, because it doesn't really mean anything. It lives in this abstract world that is arguably interesting and thought-provoking, but none of it says, "Oh shit, we've got that problem, and this person or this company might help us find the right solution."
A $200M+ DTC brand has 44 people messaging Viktor every day.
Their ops team built inventory command centers and reorder dashboards through Viktor. Supply chain gets daily stockout alerts before they happen. Marketing tracks ROAS and runs content calendars. CS has CSAT scores and support tickets triaged and briefed every morning in Slack, before the first support call. No dashboard digging.
48 internal apps, built through conversation. No code. No developer queue. Command centers, inventory dashboards, sales trackers, reorder systems.
That's one company. Across the platform, teams have built 2,000+ apps the same way: message Viktor in Slack, describe what you need, get a working tool deployed. No code. No six-week dev queue.
Your team doesn't wait for a product roadmap. They message a colleague.
5,700+ teams. SOC 2 certified.
"It was almost instantly adopted by the bulk of my team." — Boris Wexler, CEO, Space Dinosaurs
3. You Are Treating Interest As Transactional
There is a sales trope that says you should celebrate every "no" because each one gets you closer to a yes. A version of that is true, but is a wild oversimplification that plays really well when it comes from overpriced sales trainers standing on a stage. It's supposed to be inspirational, like that Successories-type poster saying "Hang in there baby!”. But in reality, the way it shows up in most agency processes is the seller saying something like “you aren’t going to close in the next 3 weeks, moving on."
That kind of short-term and immediate thinking only values buyers who are already in market, which is a tiny sliver of the people you actually meet. Most humans who engage with you cold have no idea who you are. The odds that a couple of phone calls can deliver the right mix of price, trust, authenticity, and understanding to get them to sign are basically zero.
A process that runs from lead to call to offer to decision inside a single week is not a sales process. It’s a scratch-off lottery ticket…
Here’s how the world really works - I meet someone through traditional lead gen, networking, visibility, a random seat assignment on a Delta shuttle (true story), or whatever else. My job on that first interaction is not to sell, but to understand their needs and their business. If the fit is real, I tell them I understand their problem, I likely have a solution, and it might be worth exploring whether we should work together.
That’s not a discovery call. That is a conversation that might eventually lead to one, and those are very different things.
4. The Filter Trap
There is a related failure that rides shotgun with the transactional mindset, which is making your sales process all about you.
You spend every interaction filtering, and you ask questions so you can check attributes off a list.
The list in your head looks a shopping list you might bring with you to Trader Joe's:
Right amount of revenue?
Right amount of margin?
Right astrological sogn?
Right lighting on the Zoom call?
At some point the criteria stop being real and start being whatever makes you feel safe, but the effect on the prospect is the same either way.
If you are treating pipeline conversations as an attribute audit, then you are doing the job backwards. You have turned the process into something that serves your needs instead of an opportunity for you and the prospect to decide cooperatively whether working together would actually solve their problem.
Filtering is not discovery. Filtering is you protecting you from thinking critically, being creative, and finding solutions.
How Jennifer Aniston’s LolaVie brand grew sales 40% with CTV ads
The DTC beauty category is crowded. To break through, Jennifer Aniston’s brand LolaVie, worked with Roku Ads Manager to easily set up, test, and optimize CTV ad creatives. The campaign helped drive a big lift in sales and customer growth, helping LolaVie break through in the crowded beauty category.
Poopy Pipeline Cure (Finally, Tim, We Thought You Were NEVER Gonna Get Here)
There are three things you can do today.
Look at the role of content in your business development efforts.. If your content is engagement-focused and you are getting all sorts of engagement from people who aren't going to buy from you, just fucking stop it. Change it up. Change the way that you talk about the problems you solve. Focus on the person you want to talk to rather than the person who is going to click that little heart and give your brain a little squirt of dopamine.
On your next discovery call, kill the filter script. Ask one real question about their business and then shut up. If they don't have an answer to your insightful question, ask another one. See what you can learn, because this person might never be a client, but they could be somebody who refers you business in the future. They could be somebody who mentions you offhand to someone else. They could be someone who engages with your content and gives the algorithms a signal that people in your target market, rather than competitors, should be shown your content. Want great discovery questions? \ is your friend - and it’s free & fully personalized!
Stop compressing timelines. Not every conversation has to end in a proposal, because some of them need to end with "It sounds like this isn't the right time. Is it okay if I follow up next quarter?" Your best clients a year from now are being planted in conversations you are having this week, so treat them like seeds instead of ATMs.
Poopy Pipeline Disease is not a volume problem, it’s a quality problem. Quality is a behavior problem, and when you fix the behavior the pipeline will follow.
Start focusing on quality, and I can guarantee that you are going to generate:
More Revenue. More Profit. More Happy.
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