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This Is Why Your Pipeline Isn’t Moving

Your pipeline is jammed because you’re still selling like it’s 2015.

For years I’ve told agency folks to price fairly and higher because you were over-delivering. The idea is that selling $4,000 instead of $3,500 isn’t harder when you prove the value and strip the risk. Same work, better margin.

But the times, as Dylan warned, are changing. The economy feels constipated: growth stalled, rates high, inflation sticky. Familiar, right? You’ve got great prospects, strong offers, solid plans and nothing is closing.

It’s not your talent or the competition or AI-powered cold outreach that has ruined everything. It’s just that your approach belongs to another era.

During The Good Old Days…2010-2023…

Growth was inevitable. The economy was going to grow, digital marketing was going to grow, consumer spending was going to grow, B2B spending was going to grow, the stock market only went in one direction (still mostly true, which is its own ominous signal).

Businesses planned for upside because that’s what capitalism does—it hates leaving gains on the table. Agencies thrived in that climate:

• Service prices climbed.

• Projects got bigger.

• Performance was so reliable that some shops even offered 24-hour cancellation clauses—confident results would keep happening.

It was an era when stability made long-term bets feel safe. It was a grand time, them olden days.

I know I keep on recommending things, but Masters in Marketing is a really good newsletter too. Sorry if I'm jamming up your inbox with great things to help you learn and grow, but you know it's kind of my thing.

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Today’s Climate Is Different

Let's be honest, the world is markedly more chaotic today than it has been in years. I mean, I don't really know that that's true; we just might be more aware of it. But things seem super chaotic. The most recent polling data shows that younger generations are significantly less sure that their economic future is certain.

If we want to take that generational malaise and apply it to businesses, because people might think in sort of like 1-5 or 10-year cycles (like they want to know what they're doing), businesses think in quarterly cycles or monthly cycles. So a business that during the boom times might have been comfortable forecasting the world out explicitly for 12 months, now doesn't have confidence in their 12-week go-forward projections. Businesses that were hiring and building infrastructure for anticipated growth (sort of 13-24 months from now) are laying people off left and right. So the prove it to me window is much shorter.

As a marketing agency, you might have had 6 months of a honeymoon period where your client was getting to know you, you were getting to know your clients. By month 5 or 6, things were going really well. Today, nobody is waiting until month 6 for you to prove it.

Your proprietary process that made success “inevitable” was powerful because we all had this unspoken understanding that the environment wasn't going to change. But in today's world, technology, politics, economics are driving in a matter of weeks rather than months or years.

Nobody believes in your future ability. Even if your machine still works, buyers don’t believe in steady-state success anymore. They believe in adaptability (that is a code work for “our budgets could change at ANY MINUTE”).

You might wonder why an agency-focused newsletter advertises folks like SynthFlow because it's about security and all that sort of stuff, and it's not sort of on point. We advertise it because it's going to be on point because all of us are going to be involved in various modalities of interaction. I want you to know about all of the pieces that make sense for you to be conversant in. So I don't care if you ever buy anything from SynthFlow, but you ought to know about the changing world of voice interaction and security.

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In A Chaotic World….

(Read that in the movie-trailer voice.)

Your clients can’t think in 1–5 year chunks anymore. Their prove-it windows are monthly or quarterly, not annual. Even if they want to commit long-term, they can’t.

Marketers who used to chase monthly recurring revenue—the agency gold standard—now hesitate. Why? Because TikTok could vanish overnight, or Zuck could wake up and nuke half your ads on a whim. The environment feels capricious, volatile, and unpredictable.

And we’re actually seeing it in the numbers. Promethean’s 2025 report shows the fastest-growing agencies are doing more project work, less recurring work. Does that mean MRR is dead? No. It means what looked like a 12-month retainer is now a stack of 2–4 month SOWs that renew and reshape every quarter.

So stop selling like you’re in a stable world. Even in the best of times, marketing is chaotic. In times like these, it’s chaos cubed. And your prospects can’t chew on those long, steady, predictable engagements anymore…no matter how delicious they look on your P&L.

So What Do We Do Now?

If the way you’ve been told to sell no longer works, what’s next?

Rule one of selling: sell what clients will actually buy. You can have the better product, process, or outcome…but if the market can’t see how to engage with it, you’re stuck.

That means adapting how you frame and structure engagements… smaller, bite-sized units with clear outcomes. Instead of 6 months, sell 3. Instead of 3, sell 1. Build each in a way that naturally renews or triggers the next phase.

You may not be able to sell a 12-month contract anymore, but you can sell 6×2-month modules. Hit the milestone, flip the switch, keep moving. You get the stability of recurring revenue; your client gets the flexibility they need in a volatile market.

One of the exacerbating factors in the chaos cubed of marketing is AI. So you really ought to be thinking about it, reading about it, getting smart about it, so that you can help your clients understand its impact. So read The AI Report. It's really good.

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What’s My Next Step?

It's easier than you think. I know that I've outlined scary words like stagflation here and loss of MRR, but what you can do is this: you can look at your offers and your engagements from a prospect and client risk perspective. Is there a way where is there an unfair risk to your clients or prospects because of the way that your contract is structured? (By the way, completely fair to look at it the other way around.) Is there an unfair risk to you as well? But for the moment, let's just give the market the focus. If you know it's going to take you 9 months to build a complex site on top of Magnolia or Optimizely, can you actually structure that so that instead of one giant 9-month project, it's actually:

• Month 1: Feasibility and scoping

• Month 2: Prep

• Month 3: Platform migration and module testing

• Month 4: Something else

That again can all be triggered by the completion of a previous chunk, but it gives your clients the option to talk to their boss or their board to say, "Yeah, we're going to go down this path, but we've got these natural occurring break points where we can either reduce or eliminate our future risk or we have the opportunity to course correct." What has been missing during this growth-at-all-costs time is the fact that agencies have tooled themselves to grow and grow, because that's what they've been selling to their clients. You need to now take on a much more risk-mitigated approach. So you were staffing for projects, you were staffing for likely events. You can partner to backfill any talent holes you have, but you have to be more pragmatic in your approach. This is really hard, sophisticated management stuff, because it is really easy to create a healthy business when everything is getting better all the time. If you were running an agency from say 2010 through 2022, you probably got an over-inflated sense of how easy it was. Now that we are likely going to be in a choppy, volatile, chaotic situation for at least another couple of years, the degree of difficulty in running an effective, profitable business is much higher. So I really want you to be proactive in thinking about how you can mitigate risk for your clients and for yourself by thinking about projects that create a partnership rather than long-term relationships that are obligations. I want you to start thinking about how can I staff for what I know but have options to augment what I don't know? How can I create a more flexible relationship with my client or prospect that is mutually beneficial? And so I want you to really start to rethink all of these tried-and-true tenets of "Raise your prices" and "Monthly Recurring Revenue is the only thing that matters."

Got questions? Get at me.

Tim’s Tool Of The Week

WisprFlow: I know this might be cheating a little bit because I feel like I just featured it a few weeks ago, but can I tell you how much I love WisprFlow? Like, really. Maybe it's a function of being really busy or just getting really tired of the fact that my typing sucks ass, but I feel like Wispr Flow has changed my creative life. I can get ideas out of my head and into your inbox so much more quickly than I used to, and I love it. I really do. I'm sure there are other tools out there that do exactly this very thing, so you should probably go get one of them. But I love Wispr Flow really, I do.

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