The 2026 Promethean Research Industry Report estimates 71K agencies in North America. That does mean that there are a lot of “competitors” out there. But before you decide you are cooked, check out this chart that we compiled from The Agency Field Guide last month:

In AIC#204, we talked about “walkin’ in friends” and finding the best fit clients for you. Today, we are jumping into a little bit scarier pond in talking about our ecosystem friends that can absolutely help create new right-fit opportunities for you. As you can see in the chart above that there are 21 different services listed, and nobody offers all of them. In a real way: somebody who does not offer your primary service isn't a competitor, even though they might be a marketing agency. The number Of competitors gets even smaller when we talk about agencies with specific domain experience. We haven't run the whole study on our entire agency set yet, but only about 6.5% of agencies work with healthcare clients. So, if you are a performance agency that works with healthcare clients, your competitive set is actually really small. It just seems unmanageable because you have awareness of a lot of other agencies and agency owners, even if they are not competitors.

You can have thousands of people following your work and still need an algorithm’s permission to reach them. Creators know the drill: you post, you pray, you check the numbers, you try again tomorrow.

A newsletter changes that relationship. On beehiiv, you can build a subscriber list you own, reach readers directly, and turn their attention into a sustainable business with subscriptions, sponsors, a global ad network, and more.

Get started for free.

Let’s imagine that you are that performance media shop that works with healthcare companies. You handle Google, Meta, & TikTok for your clients. There are an enormous number of valuable partners that you can hang out with:

Let’s run down the kinds of other healthcare focused agencies that you might want to partner with:

All of those agencies can help your client. There might be some overlap where one of your ecosystem partners also offers some version of paid media management, but unless it's an agency's primary strength, you should be pretty comfortable recommending another agency as a resource to your client. When you do that, and your client hires your recommendation. You have just increased your value to both of those people!

A client of mine had four other agencies that served similar clients but were not directly competitive, and they formed a partnership group. every month, they would meet, go through their client lists, and ask if somebody had a particular opportunity for one of their clients. They would try to create an introduction. What what I really liked about this arrangement was that the meeting was mandatory. If you missed two in a row, you were out of the group, and you were expected to bring at least two opportunities to every meeting. If you were a taker (meaning you got lots of opportunities but did not give many), you were out.

There are terrific tech partners TripleWhale or Databox or data partners like SEMRush that have relationships with potential clients directly. If you are part of their agency partner program, they can introduce you to potential clients. Typically these smaller software partners don't get quite as many leads directly as perhaps a tech platform might, but it is such an incredible community where you can meet other agency owners and gain expertise that can help you attract clients. These are places where you absolutely should be investing someone on your team's time to create a presence there, because, again, if you are a partner with a trusted platform, that is a cup of credibility that you are borrowing.

These are a step up from software partners, they are closer to platforms themselves. Think about the tools that help you do the stuff that you do. Platforms like Optmyzr, Skai and similar might be places to create partnerships where referrals might come to you. Other platforms, like HubSpot, CopperCRM, Monday, Klaviyo, Active Campaign, Brevo all have partner programs where the platform itself can be a source of leads for you. Typically, these come from an account manager, and you need to have driven or managed a certain amount of revenue in order to start receiving leads. But investing yourself into the community of people that use these products and trying to find out and create a relationship with whomever is your program rep absolutely creates value that you can't get anywhere else. People tend to grumble about changes in commissions and that sort of thing in partner programs, but when a platform refers a client to you, that is coming with an extraordinary amount of credibility. Join as many of the tech platforms' partner programs as you can, and spend time in those communities to create opportunities. You can usually find partner programs on the platforms themselves or apply through places like Dub or PartnerStack. this part of the ecosystem demands that you invest some time and personal attention to it to create a real relationship whenever and wherever you can. Often, there are events that you can go to to create primary relationships with the platform, and those can create an extraordinary amount of business.

Sponsored

I want to break in here for a minute - Perspective sponsored Agency Inner Circle last issue, and, like I do with all of our solo sponsors, I spend a lot of time making sure that the folks that get lots of visibility here are high-quality.

The gang at Perspective were really thoughtful and kind and showed me some of the stuff that they are releasing on Nov 24. It’s cool. You should register for the keynote and take a look for yourself.

What I really wanted to share today Isn't that cool, nifty stuff? Rather, why they are building some of the stuff that they are releasing. Over the last few years, they've helped agencies and their clients capture 8 million leads. During that time, they've learned a ton about the way agencies work and the way that clients think. They've sort of turned themselves inside out to compensate for some of the issues that they see.

One of the big issues that they saw over and over again were that there was so much prep for launch day of the campaign or product or service or whatever it is. The agencies were working overtime to get the creative right, to get copy right. They saw plenty of terrific funnels not live up to their promise because getting the funnel itself up and running was such an ordeal that there were no resources (or energy) left for optimization, A/B testing, and all that sort of stuff. The original version of Perspective was pretty slick. You started with a basic template or element, and it was perfectly adjustable and malleable and had all the right break points. Launching something that could show across a bazillion surfaces was not hard anymore. but that wasn't quite enough because there are elements that work better together than others. There are paradigms, I guess, that are more suitable for one industry or another. They found that agencies often got stymied by their clients, who would get attached to one part of the funnel, one element of it, and not want to move away from there (even if it wasn't working with the funnel as a whole).

Then post-launch, Perspective understood that once something was out in the world, clients were concerned about changing it. Somehow, they thought maybe it would hurt their brand, or their clients would get confused, or if they made a change, it actually made things worse instead of better.

Agencies were fighting a battle to get something out the door, and then they were fighting a battle to make it better once it was out the door. This isn't an agency problem or a client problem. It's mostly a fear of change problem.

So Perspective proactively went out to solve that fear of change problem. The platform now sucks in the client brand standards flawlessly, and now you prompt your funnel into existence rather than build it from assembled parts. Every piece of the funnel matches your intent, and so there is no "should we pick this or that?" back-and-forth with the client. This is the thing that works in this environment. It is built to solve your particular problem. It doesn't take judgment out of the equation, but it does take the idea of wrong choices out of the equation.

Finally, and this is a big one, I just mentioned that when something has been published, clients are concerned about changing it because it triggers some sort of concern about control and brand and all of that stuff.

Perspective has done something enormously cool and created what you can only call a self-optimizing funnel. Essentially, by looking at behavioral data and performance data, the funnel makes choices without needing approval to improve performance.

What this does is it takes away that decision-making process where you have to drag your client into allowing you to adjust the size of this headline that their CEO came up with, or whatever. It just makes the adjustments it needs to make in order to help your client generate more leads and make more money.

Is it magic? I don't know, but it was designed very specifically to make the post-launch optimization portion easier, and I think they've done a marvelous job. Register for the keynote - I promise you won’t be disappointed.

You already know these - and if you aren’t part of them, you ought to be: Google Partners, Meta Partners, Microsoft Partners, TikTok Partners. Are they are going to be an enormous source of leads? Absolutely not, but they are an enormous source of information, events, and credibility. If you can create relationships with people at the platforms, even if they are not on the partner team, simply because any visibility inside of a place that has that much data and that many clients is really, really enticing.

This is a little bit less direct, but if you serve dentists, which I know at least a dozen of AIC readers do, there's an entire world of businesses that also serve dentists. Software, equipment, uniforms, insurance, financing companies, payroll & accounting forms, exit consultants and more. if you can find other businesses that serve your client and create relationships with them, suddenly you have both enriched your audience size. It's a really beneficial opportunity. And to use the dentist example, one of my clients serves dentists exclusively, and they are terrific at it. One of their best referral sources is a company that brokers dental agencies when the dentist wants to sell. It's a really terrific partnership because the exit consultant gets to see the opportunity and refers to the dental agency to make the dental practice ready for sale. The agency gets business, and when it is time to sell the practice, the exit consultant gets a bigger piece.

One of my clients worked really closely with a software company that serviced their target audience. The software was a very, very narrow, industry-specific ERP that really didn't engage with marketing at all. But the agency and the ERP company created a partnership where they could refer one another, because the agency would have the opportunity to know if the ERP was old or outdated (because the client would talk about it), and the ERP company would hear if the client complained about sales. Those two businesses have each grown at least 30% directly due to this kind of ecosystem partnership.

Whatever industry you serve: there are trade associations and industry publications. It might be hard to get in, but most of these associations are desperate to provide services & information to their membership. Another client of mine was super focused on the propane industry. they joined the Propane Dealers Association and started going to the Propane Dealers Association meetings. Then they started speaking at those conferences, and they were invited to write an article every month in the print magazine that was sent to propane dealers all over the country. Then they ended up doing a podcast specifically focused on the propane industry. All of this is because they invested the time in the association, and that is incredibly powerful because associations and service groups desperately want to give great information and opportunities to their members.

if you are a big giant company like Microsoft, you are probably not going to hire a three-person paid search agency from Omaha. There’s too much risk in putting all of that responsibility on a small agency. There is huge competition at the very top. There are only a handful of big, giant clients, and there are only a handful of agencies that have the scale to serve them. (If you want to see CEOs of giant agency holding companies having a spat about competition, read all about WPP and Publicis - it’s pretty fun.) At that tier, typically, a client is choosing from a very small selection of agencies that compete on every deal of this size.

But for the vast majority of other businesses, however, they don't have a regular sense of competitive set when it comes to agencies. They don't know who works with Sally Beauty or Ulta Beauty (unless they check out Brands on Agency Field Guide) so they don’t limit their choices to a narrow range. If a business’ website development partner said that they’ve worked with your agency before, you bet you are making the short list. If a client isn’t happy with something and they ask their attribution solution provider, “Hey who is good?”, you know that name is going on the short list. If your client goes to an executive dinner hosted by their 3PL provider and an agency’s name in mentioned, that is definitely gonna get dropped into every VP’s Notes app. And when that agency is also listed as a premiere partner on a platform the client uses, it just adds to the credibility stack.

As much as we like to think that prospects choose agencies on rational things like performance, team certifications, and attention to process. They don't.

Typically prospects choose agencies based on who they like, who seems to understand them, and who gets a thumbs-up from the other people in their world. Joining an ecosystem and being active in the ecosystem allows you to borrow small bits of visibility & credibility that will tip you over the edge from "never heard of them" to “oh, I will check them out” to “they sound great…can you make an intro…”

For the first time, see the system that runs GTM at Attio, the #1 fastest-growing CRM on Brex and Ramp.

Attio’s Rev Ops and Solutions leads have written up all of it, including how it spots at-risk accounts early and surfaces upsell opportunities while they’re still warm.

Read the playbook.

Our sponsorships are ads (obviously - duh). But some of the companies or services linked in our content may pay us a minimal commission if you buy something from them. Potential payment is never a factor in what we link to, and we have direct experience with every company or service where you can buy something that we mention in our content.