Creative agencies face unique challenges when building predictable revenue streams. Unlike product-based businesses with clear sales cycles, creative agencies must navigate subjective decision-making, longer procurement processes, and the constant need to prove creative value before securing work.
I’m Connor and I’ve sold millions in creative services in my agency, and I made the biggest sale of my life when I exited it just a few years back. Now I help other agency owners increase revenue or gain freedom in their business. Often both.
In this article, I’m sharing my systematic approach to building a sales pipeline that delivers consistent results and I’m going to give you a plan for the next 90 days to implement it.
The Creative Agency Pipeline: Why Traditional Sales Methods Don’t Work
Creative agencies operate differently from typical B2B businesses. Your prospects aren’t just buying a service, they’re investing in creativity, strategic thinking, and ultimately business transformation. The thing is, they don’t know what this means for their business.
This fundamental difference creates unique pipeline challenges that generic sales advice simply doesn’t address.
Understanding the Creative Buying Journey
Unlike software or consultancy sales, creative agency prospects often struggle to relate design to commercial or business value. They know they want “better creative” or “stronger branding,” but translating these desires into commercial value is where you’ll lose clients, they won’t value your service and they won’t respect your objectivity in the process.
The bigger problem is that many creative founders and their business development teams don’t understand this either and if they do, they fail to articulate this in a manner their prospective clients truly understand.
So, before we get into the process of building your sales pipeline, I want to address commercial value and how you can begin to introduce this into your sales process.
If you think about design, branding, web development, PR or comms, the creative output leads to a result or change for our clients’ business. This is the commercial value. Here’s the secret no one likes to talk about. Your clients don’t really care about your designs. They’ll love them of course, but the design doesn’t matter to them, the outcome does. And they only really want one thing: more profit.
Of course, they’ll talk about different areas of their business that the design will support, but this all leads back to more revenue and ultimately more profit.
And I tell you this with confidence. Because I am not a creative or technical founder. Firstly I’m an entrepreneur and I think like one first and foremost. We were able to enter and scale in a highly competitive industry because this approach first and foremost made us stand out from the incumbent agencies. I spoke the language of the people on the other side of the table.
Assuming you agree with me, let’s discuss how we’ll use this to build a predictable sales pipeline.
Stage 1: Strategic Prospecting – Identifying High-Value Creative Opportunities
Traditional prospecting focuses on volume, but creative agencies need to prioritise quality relationships with organisations that value creative excellence and high level strategic thinking. Because let’s face it, the corner shop isn’t going to see the return on your support, and nor will the majority of low value clients who are often more hassle than they’re worth.
Defining Your Ideal Creative Client Profile
The first thing we want to do is to define your ICP or ideal client persona because not all clients are created equal. The most profitable creative agency relationships come from organisations that understand the strategic value of creativity and are willing to invest accordingly. Sometimes we need to educate these clients and show them the opportunity. Others will be more knowledgeable and aware.
Where Creative Budgets Are Growing
We’re building our businesses in unprecedented times. I started my agency in 2009, smack bang in the middle of a financial crisis. Since then we’ve had Brexit, COVID and multiple worldwide factors that influence the sectors we operate in. Understanding which markets and company types are increasing their creative spend helps you focus your prospecting efforts on the highest-probability opportunities.
There is always opportunity out there. It’s your job to identify it.
Stage 2: Activity Beats Perfection, Every Time
There will never be a perfect time to reach out to your prospective clients and there’ll never be the perfect script or email that resonates with everyone. And yet, too many agency owners fear picking up the phone, sending a cold email or a message on LinkedIn out of fear of rejection.
I can tell you with honesty that even after tens of thousands of outbound calls and emails, I too feel nervous. Even today I paused before hitting dial on a call, only to be met with someone’s voicemail.
But I get it, we’re not used to rejection. As business owners, it’s usually our way and our timeline. I was working with one agency owner recently who was annoyed a potential client was slow to respond. I asked him to metaphorically take off his MD hat and put on his salesperson hat. Now this obviously annoyed him as an MD, but would it annoy a salesperson? No! They’d get out their prospect list and they’d contact the next person.
And that leads me to the main element of stage 2. Activity. When I started my business I made more than 100 calls to prospective clients every single day. No one is ever going to work as hard at your business as you will. While this number will be unachievable for many of you, I credit this foundation to our initial and long-term success. Many of those first clients were clients when I exited the business. We supported their businesses and as they grew, so did we.
So I want you to set aside time every day to prospect to your potential clients. Just like you focus on service delivery, this is mission-critical. Start small and increase this every week.
Stage 3: Data-Driven Pipeline
Think of your sales pipeline as a big funnel. It’s wide at the top and as your prospects flow down the funnel, it narrows, until they drop out the bottom as clients. A predictable pipeline requires an acute focus on the inputs, the outputs and the data you maintain throughout.
If you don’t have one, you need a CRM. Keeping all your client knowledge in your head is a recipe for disaster. It works until it doesn’t. Consider this. How will the person coming behind you understand third-hand notes, obscure email threads and hundreds if not thousands of Slack messages? The answer is, they won’t.
Your CRM captures all client data from conversations to quotes, and it manages all of this inside one ecosystem. Google Sheets is not a CRM.
Building a sales pipeline within your CRM, you can acutely forecast sales based on activity, you can highlight seasonality or the timeline from prospect to sale and you can test and refine your approach to improvement with every action.
Stage 4: Steps in Sales Pipeline
If you think about your sales pipeline, it must accurately reflect your sales process from initial enquiry or outbound prospecting through to sale (Closed Won).
Many agencies fall foul of having too many stages and considerations for every eventuality. When the best and most effective is usually the easiest to manage.
Below are the stages of my own current sales pipeline in Attio, the CRM I use today.
Some agencies will add all prospective clients into an additional column, but I like to keep this simple and so my sales pipeline begins when a potential client has put their hand up and said they might be interested in working with me. This usually happens with a discovery call. At this point, I add them as a contact to Attio and create a “Deal”, and add this to the Lead stage of the pipeline. When I send them a quote or follow up, they get moved to the In Progress stage. Some of my clients will be retained and others will be project based, so I have Won columns for both. Finally, I have a Lost stage for sales that don’t proceed.
I want you to think about your process, what stages make sense for your sales pipeline? Do you need to do a technical review, or is there a follow-up stage to your quotations?
Building Your 90-Day Pipeline Action Plan
There’s no point watching a video like this if you don’t take action. So here’s what I want you to do over the next 90 days.
Transforming pipeline theory into practical implementation requires a systematic approach with clear milestones and accountability measures.
Month 1: Foundation and Assessment
The first thing you need to do is choose a CRM. There’s Attio which I recommend, and there’s HubSpot which I’ve used previously a lot. But there’s a hundred others and here’s the secret. They all do the same thing. So pick whichever one you feel most comfortable with and commit to using it.
Load in all of your current customer data and begin using it to manage your current quotes. Look at the metrics you are going to monitor and spend time auditing your current sales pipeline health.
Define your ideal client persona and spend time building your prospecting list and marketing plan to directly target these prospective clients.
Month 2: Process Implementation and Team Training
Before you roll out your CRM and the new processes of managing your sales pipeline, you need to become the super user or the oracle of the CRM in your business. You also need to become its champion, because this cannot become “another tool” that’s used infrequently or for a little while and then discarded. Five years from now your business will be 10-100x better off because of it. The value of your business lies within your CRM.
Define the roles of each user who has access, build out your sales pipeline and any of the templates, emails or materials you want to store in here for company-wide use and begin training all team members on how to use this as efficiently and effectively as possible.
Month 3: Optimisation and Scale
I live within my CRM and Xero like a designer lives within the Adobe ecosystem. They are the tools I frequent most in business outside of service delivery. Knowing the tools of the trade we can refine our processes, address any challenges or bottlenecks the team faces and then focus our efforts where they make the most sense.
If your goal is to scale a successful agency and growth is on your mind, then maximising the return for your efforts is key and because of that, you need to master all stages of the sales funnel. Knowing where and how you lose business within the pipeline is as important as knowing why you won it. Question everything and use the learnings to better every sales process and interaction in your business.
From Feast-or-Famine to Predictable Growth
Taking sales and growth seriously starts with a predictable sales pipeline. Doing this right from the start, you’ll be in the position to transform your creative agency from reactive project-chasing to proactive business development. The strategies I’ve noted above are the exact ones I used to scale a multi-million pound agency and I’m using them again now within Move at Pace. They’re the exact strategies that have helped my clients double their revenue or build out a retainer business model that covers their costs before they start each month.
If you want to scale your agency and retain creative integrity as you do so, click here to set up a discovery call. We’ll spend 30 minutes discussing your current situation and I’ll share with you how I might be able to support your commercial ambitions.