Skip to content 
For many agency owners, delivering great work isn’t the problem. Creating a steady stream of new opportunities is.
One month, referrals are rolling in and the pipeline looks healthy. The next, those conversations slow down and everyone starts wondering where the next deal will come from. That feast-or-famine cycle makes growth difficult to predict—and even harder to scale.
In this Mastermind Speaker Series session, Jesse, founder of Niche in Control and architect of the Leverage for Growth Method, shared a practical approach to building a client attraction system for agencies around three complementary sources of opportunity: referrals, inbound marketing, and outbound outreach.
His central point is refreshingly simple: sustainable agency growth rarely comes from finding one magical lead-generation channel. It comes from building the right systems in the right order, learning what the market responds to, and connecting those systems so each one strengthens the others.
If you prefer to watch the full conversation, the video below covers Jesse’s presentation, examples, and live agency-growth discussion.
Stop Relying on Passive Referrals
Referrals are valuable. For many agencies, they produce some of the warmest and easiest-to-close opportunities.
The problem isn’t referrals themselves. The problem is passive referrals.
When an agency simply waits for happy clients to send someone its way, growth becomes unpredictable. Great work may generate recommendations, but there is no reliable way to know when those introductions will happen.
Jesse challenged agency owners to think differently:
“What has relying upon passive referrals cost you in time, energy, and profit?”
Instead of hoping that good work eventually produces new business, agencies can intentionally build systems that create more conversations with the kinds of clients they actually want.
That shift—from waiting for demand to building systems that create demand—is the foundation of a scalable pipeline.
Start With Proof of Concept, Not Perfection
Before worrying about sophisticated funnels, paid advertising, newsletters, podcasts, or elaborate content strategies, early-stage agencies need proof that the market actually wants what they sell.
Jesse recommends a straightforward goal:
Get your first five real, paying clients.
Not free projects. Not favors. Not heavily discounted work designed simply to add a logo to the website.
Paying clients provide something far more valuable: real-world information.
Those first engagements help an agency understand:
- Which messages resonate with buyers
- What problems clients are actually trying to solve
- How prospects make purchasing decisions
- What the delivery experience needs to look like
- Which clients get the strongest results
- What language customers use to describe their problems
- Which results can become future case studies
At this stage, perfect branding is far less important than evidence.
An agency needs to prove that it can solve a meaningful problem, deliver the promised experience, and create results worth talking about.
Turn Client Conversations Into Better Marketing
Once you have clients, don’t just collect revenue. Collect insight.
Jesse recommends two interviews that can become powerful sources of messaging and sales intelligence.
The “Why Did You Purchase?” Interview
Around 30 to 45 days after onboarding, ask the client about the decision that brought them to your agency.
The conversation should uncover questions such as:
- Why did you choose us instead of another option?
- What problem were you trying to solve?
- What did your decision-making process look like?
- What made you confident enough to move forward?
- What outcome were you ultimately trying to achieve?
The objective isn’t to fish for compliments.
It’s to understand how buyers think.
Clients will often describe their frustrations, desired outcomes, and buying criteria differently than an agency’s marketing team would. Those words can become valuable raw material for website copy, sales conversations, outbound messaging, and positioning.
The Case Study Interview
Once a client has achieved meaningful results, Jesse recommends another conversation built around a simple narrative:
Before. During. After.
Ask what the client’s situation looked like before working together, what happened during the engagement, and what changed afterward.
Then ask one particularly useful question:
What would you say to somebody who’s on the fence about working with us?
A strong answer can do more than provide a testimonial. It can reveal the exact concerns future prospects may have—and show how an existing client overcame them.
Message Resonance Comes Before Scale
A campaign can’t fix messaging that doesn’t connect with the market.
Jesse describes messaging as an experiment. Start with a hypothesis about what your ideal clients care about, put that message in front of real prospects, gather feedback, and adjust based on what actually happens.
He recommends testing a message across roughly 30 pitches before making major conclusions from the results.
That discipline matters because agencies can fall into a familiar trap: changing the audience, offer, CTA, platform, and messaging at the same time.
If the campaign succeeds, you don’t know why.
If it fails, you don’t know why either.
Instead, change variables deliberately and allow the market to tell you what resonates.
One of Jesse’s own clients repeatedly described herself as “spinning her wheels.” After hearing the phrase again and again in an interview, Jesse incorporated that same language into outbound messaging aimed at similar prospects.
It worked because the message wasn’t invented in a brainstorming session. It came from the customer.
Your clients are often writing some of your best marketing copy for you. You just have to listen closely enough to capture it.
The Three-Legged Client Attraction System for Agencies
Once an agency has validated its offer and messaging, the next objective is creating a more dependable acquisition engine.
Jesse compares that engine to a three-legged stool:
- Referrals
- Inbound
- Outbound
Each leg serves a different purpose.
Referrals can create highly qualified, warm opportunities. Inbound builds awareness and trust over time. Outbound lets an agency proactively reach prospects and receive fast market feedback.
Depend too heavily on one, and the pipeline becomes vulnerable.
Combine all three, and the agency has multiple ways to create and nurture opportunities.
Leg One: Turn Referrals Into an Active System
An active referral strategy begins with results worth sharing.
From there, agencies should deliberately capture proof throughout the client relationship rather than waiting until the end of an engagement.
Jesse organizes this concept around four types of proof: reviews, results, referrals, and resells.
Reviews can be as simple as capturing a positive comment after a client reaches a milestone.
Results can include measurable improvements, screenshots, campaign performance, or other concrete outcomes.
Referrals can be encouraged through structured programs, client conversations, or even internal incentives.
Resells include renewals, upsells, and expansions. These deepen the relationship while potentially creating additional proof and advocacy.
The important point is that proof shouldn’t be an afterthought.
Build opportunities to capture it into the client journey.
That might happen during onboarding, after an early win, during a quarterly review, at renewal, or even through an exit interview when a successful engagement comes to a natural end.
When agencies systematically capture proof, they create assets that support far more than referrals. Those same stories can strengthen outbound campaigns, websites, presentations, ads, and sales conversations.
Leg Two: Use Outbound to Learn Faster
Outbound gets a bad reputation because rejection is part of the process.
But from Jesse’s perspective, that’s also what makes it useful.
Outbound provides direct market feedback quickly. Instead of publishing content and waiting months to determine whether a message resonates, an agency can put a message in front of a prospect and potentially receive a response within days.
That makes outbound useful for:
- Testing positioning
- Validating messaging
- Discovering objections
- Starting early sales conversations
- Learning which prospects respond
- Booking calls before inbound demand has matured
For agencies just beginning outbound, Jesse recommends starting with LinkedIn before moving into more technically complicated cold email campaigns.
The larger lesson, however, isn’t about a particular platform.
It’s about conversations.
Early-stage agencies need enough real conversations to understand the market, and outbound provides a direct way to create them.
Match Your Outbound Strategy to Your Personality
There isn’t one correct way to conduct outbound.
For more extroverted agency owners, Jesse suggests approaches such as live workshops, webinars, free training, or Q&A sessions. These formats let personality, expertise, and conviction do part of the selling.
Someone who prefers written communication might instead lean into thoughtful LinkedIn engagement, direct messages, or personalized video outreach.
The common thread is specificity.
“I noticed you’re working on X—would another set of eyes be helpful?” is fundamentally different from a generic pitch sent to hundreds of people.
Good outreach shows the prospect there is a reason for the conversation.
Build Pre-Selling Assets Before Asking Cold Leads to Buy
A referral arrives with borrowed trust.
A cold prospect doesn’t.
That difference matters.
Agencies shouldn’t expect cold opportunities to convert exactly like referrals without doing additional work to establish credibility.
Jesse recommends creating pre-selling assets that educate prospects and demonstrate proof before the sales conversation gets too far.
These might include:
- Case study videos
- A video sales letter (VSSL)
- Process walkthroughs
- Before-and-after stories
- Client results and screenshots
- A centralized collection of proof
These assets help bridge the gap between “I don’t know this agency” and “These people clearly understand my problem.”
A good VSSL, for example, can explain the prospect’s desired outcome, identify the barriers preventing that outcome, walk through the agency’s approach, provide supporting case studies, and finish with a clear next step.
Jesse also recommends that agency owners who are closest to their clients take an active role in developing these assets rather than outsourcing the thinking too early.
That proximity to the customer is an advantage. Use it.
Leg Three: Build Inbound Marketing in Stages
Inbound has enormous potential, but it can also become a shiny-object factory.
SEO. YouTube. Podcasts. Newsletters. Webinars. Short-form video. Paid ads. Social media.
There are plenty of options—and trying all of them at once is rarely the answer.
Jesse recommends building inbound progressively.
Stage 1: Build the Foundation
An early-stage agency needs surprisingly little:
- A credible website
- A clear transformation statement
- Strong proof as it becomes available
- A logical call to action
At this stage, outbound should still do much of the heavy lifting because the agency needs conversations and market feedback.
Stage 2: Add the Pre-Selling Engine
Once the agency has proof and a better understanding of its ideal client, it can add assets such as case studies and VSSLs.
Those assets can also become part of the sales process.
Instead of spending an entire sales call educating a prospect, for example, the agency can send a video beforehand that explains its approach and answers common questions.
The next conversation can then focus on the prospect’s situation rather than repeating the same educational material every time.
Stage 3: Scale Authority and Demand
Only after the foundation and pre-selling system are working does Jesse recommend expanding aggressively into channels such as:
- Webinars
- Long-form content
- YouTube
- SEO
- Podcasts
- Short-form content
- Strategic partnerships
- Paid advertising
The sequence matters.
Going viral doesn’t help much if there is nowhere effective to send the attention.
More traffic doesn’t solve a weak offer. More leads don’t solve a broken sales process. Paid ads don’t solve messaging that hasn’t been validated.
Build the staircase from the bottom up.
Connect Referrals, Outbound, and Inbound Into One Flywheel
The most valuable part of Jesse’s framework may be how the three systems reinforce one another.
Imagine a client achieves an excellent result.
You interview that client and capture the story.
That interview becomes a case study.
The client’s language helps improve your outbound messaging.
The case study becomes part of your website and pre-selling assets.
The story gets repurposed into content.
That content generates inbound attention.
Prospects encounter the proof before speaking with sales.
More of the right clients sign.
Those clients generate new results and new proof.
And the cycle starts again.
That’s a much stronger growth model than treating referrals, SEO, paid media, content, and outbound as disconnected tactics.
Scale What Works Before Reinventing It
During the Q&A, Jesse reviewed the acquisition strategy of an agency owner already using cold email successfully and beginning to experiment with Facebook advertising.
His advice was straightforward: don’t unnecessarily reinvent the message just because the channel changed.
If a message is already producing conversations through one channel, use what you’ve learned when testing another.
This reflects a broader principle Jesse called the “science of business.”
When you change too many variables simultaneously, learning becomes difficult.
Suppose you switch the offer, CTA, audience, messaging, and platform all at once. If performance changes, which variable caused it?
Instead, preserve what has already been validated and test new variables deliberately.
It’s less exciting than chasing the latest tactic.
It’s also a much better way to learn what actually grows the business.
Know What Your Agency Needs Next
Not every agency should be implementing the same marketing strategy.
Your next move depends on your current stage.
If you have zero or one client, focus on proof of concept and getting real paying customers.
If you have two to five clients, improve message resonance and develop outbound discipline.
If you already have strong client results, turn those wins into proof assets.
If you have validated messaging, proof, and a reliable offer, begin connecting referrals, inbound, and outbound into a scalable client attraction system.
The question isn’t, “What marketing tactic should we try next?”
A better question is:
“What is the weakest part of our current client attraction system?”
Fix that before adding another layer.
Key Takeaways for Building a Predictable Agency Pipeline
A predictable pipeline isn’t created by doing everything.
It’s created by doing the right things in the right order.
Start by proving that people will pay for the solution. Talk to those customers and learn why they bought. Capture their results and their language. Test that messaging through outbound conversations. Turn successful client experiences into proof. Build those proof assets into your inbound presence. Then expand into additional channels as the foundation becomes stronger.
Most importantly, don’t leave agency growth dependent on a single source of leads.
Referrals, inbound, and outbound each have strengths and weaknesses. When they’re connected, they can create a client attraction system that becomes stronger as the agency grows.
And when increased demand begins putting pressure on fulfillment, there’s another important question to consider: Does winning another client create more freedom—or simply more work for the agency owner?
That’s where the right fulfillment model can make a major difference. Our White Label Digital Marketing solutions are designed to help agencies expand their capabilities without having to build every department internally. We can support the sales process and communicate directly with clients under the agency’s brand, giving agency owners more room to work on their businesses instead of spending all their time working in them.
Because filling the pipeline matters.
Building an agency that can confidently handle what’s coming through it matters just as much.
