TL;DR

• Leaders are kicking off 2026 with an aggressive push for new business, with many looking to systemize and streamline their revgen strategy and ops.
• If you’d like a leg up on improving your revgen strategy this year, check out our Agency Revgen Review.
• Alongside the rush for new clients, agencies are turning inward to streamline operations, with a considerable number of responses focused on improving internal processes and tools.
• Finally, there's a strong push for productization as leaders look for solutions to the boom-bust cycle of traditional agency revgen life.
• ​Our 1Q26 Agency Pulse Survey is live! Sign up for Delphi, take the survey, and find out what's going on in the agency world!

1Q26 Agency Pulse Survey

Delphi’s live with this quarter’s agency pulse survey!

• How’d agencies do last quarter?
• Are pipelines improving?
• What’s selling well and to who?

Join Delphi, take the survey, and get the answers to these questions and more!

First Quarter Initiatives

Hope everyone got some restorative time off over the holidays.

Before we left for break, I asked our Delphi network what they'd like included in the 1Q26 Agency Pulse Survey. The network had some great ideas and we included a few at the end of the survey.

One that stuck out was:

I love this because rather than asking about pain points, or "what keeps you up at night," we can ask directly about the actions leaders are taking. You can tell a lot more about where the industry is at when you understand where leaders are actively investing.

Even though the survey's still running, I'd like to share some of the early themes we're seeing.

Here are some of the main initiatives agency leaders are investing in this quarter:

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Revgen Revgen Revgen

Leaders are kicking off 2026 with an aggressive push for new business. Many respondents are implementing revamped business development initiatives and doubling down on filling their sales pipelines. Several also mentioned rolling out new offerings they tested in 4Q25.

In-person networking is back in play, with agency teams attending events and conferences to generate leads and build partnerships. The overall sentiment is captured by one leader’s quip: “Pipeline, baby.” In short, generating new business is the dominant theme as the new year begins.

Even on the referral front, the emphasis is on proactive, targeted outreach rather than waiting for referrals to trickle in. Something we wrote about extensively in our Referral Playbook.

Leaders are interested in building as much momentum in Q1 as possible to set the stage for a strong Q2. I think too many saw what happened the last few years, and they want to make sure 2026 has a better revgen trajectory.

There’s an overall underlying focus on sustainable growth across the responses.

If you’d like a leg up on improving your revgen strategy this year, check out our Agency Revgen Review. It’s a shortcut for agency leaders to understand exactly which levers to pull to drive the growth they’re looking for.

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Ops. Improvements

Alongside the rush for new clients, agencies are turning inward to streamline operations, with a considerable number of responses focused on improving internal processes and tools.

One common theme is investing in better infrastructure, like integrating powerful CRM platforms (one shop cited a major Salesforce integration effort) to create a single source of truth for sales and client data.

Respondents described general process improvements and establishing standard operating procedures across both sales and service delivery.

Others are building out internal project templates and checklists to make delivery more consistent.

By upgrading tech stacks and refining/documenting workflows, leaders are reducing agency fragility in order to make future growth easier.

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AI, SaaS & the Push to Productize

It’s clear from the early results that leaders aren’t content with traditional service models. They’ve been burned by the roller coaster of doom too many times, and they’re looking to other operating models for solutions.

AI and productization initiatives are in full swing across a bunch of shops.

Many leaders cited investing in developing proprietary products or standardized offerings to create more scalable revenue streams. In some cases, agencies are literally becoming software companies on the side: multiple respondents mentioned working on SaaS products.

These moves indicate a general desire to diversify beyond pure client services, potentially unlocking recurring subscription revenue and intellectual property value.

This is a tricky spot for shops since an agency isn’t the best vehicle for a SaaS play, but productized/SaaS components (plugins were the big one) can be incredibly helpful if done correctly.

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Revgen, Ops. & Products

So those are the early results for the key initiatives agencies are working on this quarter.

Revgen’s almost always on top, but seeing productization creep up there this year is pretty interesting. I think it has a lot to do with a desire to even out revenue and get more control over costs. While we’ve seen plenty of evidence that a project-focused shop will grow faster than a retainer-focused one, it can come with more leadership challenges. When the first week of January feels like mid-March, it’s easy to see why many leaders are happy to trade a few points of growth for simpler, more reliable operations.

Luckily, the industry already has the tools and research in place to make informed revgen decisions. I see this reflected in the better strategies and tactics at agency clients. They've improved dramatically over the last five-ish years.

Until next time!