TL;DR

• Beyond referrals, three strategies are driving agency growth today: thought leadership, programmatic M&A, and RFPs.
• Real thought leadership is the best way to build trust without a referral.
• The point of view has to come from leaders, and writing is how you develop it.
• Distribution is expensive, and underinvesting in it is what kills most thought leadership.
• You can buy trust. Programmatic M&A, a real market thesis executed through smaller deliberate bets, grows agencies, while old-school conglomerate building will destroy value.
• RFPs are a mixed bag. AI made responses free, but agencies that have named references, case studies with numbers, demos, and relationships formed before the RFP are seeing success.
• If I led an agency today: referrals and account expansion at 70-80% of growth, thought leadership through in-person speaking at 10-20%, and a small programmatic M&A program for the rest.
• With so many growth options, digital agencies need a structured way to focus their efforts. We designed our Growth Review Service to give teams that clarity. A way to identify gaps, prioritize the fixes, and design a solution with best practices from thousands of agencies. Reach out if you’d like additional clarity before planning for 2027.

Growing Beyond Agency Referrals

We’ve been researching and analyzing how agencies grow for over a decade in order to uncover the durable truths behind growing a professional services firm.

Time and time again, that work has shown just how powerful a proper account management function can be.

Whenever we ask: “How do agencies grow?”

The answer’s almost always some form of: “Referrals, account expansion, and more referrals.”

Referrals are so powerful in this space because they’re so good at building trust. There’s an information asymmetry in these relationships where the agency is a domain expert in something that the client is not, so the client needs to trust that you actually know what you’re doing without being an expert themselves.

Basically, anything an agency does requires the client to trust them in a way that simply isn’t there for something like self-service SaaS.

Agencies can limit the client’s downside risk by lowering prices or offering guarantees, but these don’t meaningfully change the trust equation.

So the answer is always referrals. But is there anything else? What’s left for the shops that are legitimately doing great work, cultivating referrals, and growing accounts?

We looked back at our survey data, interview transcripts, and findings from our Growth Review Engagements to identify what’s working beyond referrals and current account growth.

Here’s what we’re seeing work today.

Thought Leadership

We’re going to spend most of our time on Thought Leadership simply due to how important it is.

This was a dicey term even before AI ushered in the deluge of thoughtslop on LinkedIn, but real thought leadership is easily the best way to build trust with a stranger without a referral. It gives them the chance to interact with your thinking, with their only cost being time. When done right, they’re rewarded for that time investment by learning something new and helpful from you. This value exchange happens on their terms (they decide to read the article, attend the presentation, or read the book), which gives them an easy off-ramp from the relationship.

We can break thought leadership into three categories: ideation, creation, and distribution. Looking at it this way allows us to analyze the components and separate the strategy from the channel.

You can have industry-changing ideas and communicate them clearly, but if no one ever hears the message, then “thought leadership sucks,” and you move on to the next trendy growth hack. This is why it’s critical to plan out each component in concert with your ICP research findings.

Here’s how we think about thought leadership at digital agencies:

Ideation - This is where you develop a unique and valuable point of view within your area of expertise. Unfortunately, this needs to come from the leaders. Agency leaders are the only role who have a broad enough view of the clients, their industry, the agency industry, your operations, the unit economics, the constraints, what’s effective where, and what realistic ROI and implementation look like. It takes a lot to create real thought leadership because there simply isn’t much space at the top. It’s called leadership for a reason.

Writing is a fantastic way to develop your perspective. I’m with David C. Baker on this. It’s what I do personally, and it’s what I’ve seen work well for the agency leaders who’ll devote the time to it.

Beyond writing, conversations can work, but you need people in the conversation who will challenge one another. That means that subordinates are usually out. Conversations also tend to turn into writing anyway. Once the meeting is over, there are summaries, points that need further research or verification, and then you need a documented source of truth.

That’s a lot of writing.

It’s also important to do it yourself, and it should be hard. If you’re legitimately an expert on something, it’ll come easier, but it’ll never be easy. If it is, you aren’t pushing the boundary far enough. The reason that it’s hard is because when you’re creating real thought leadership, you’re teaching a stranger something valuable that they haven’t heard before. It doesn’t need to be a sentence that’s never been written, but it does need to be a novel application or new information that’s valuable due to changes in the market.

Your source of truth shouldn’t be static.

You’ll get to a point where you feel like you’ve written on everything. When that happens, revisit your old hypotheses. I’m doing this now with my thinking on productized agency services. These updates are valuable to your audience, especially if you’ve shown some rigor behind your work.

Creation - This is how you package and communicate your valuable idea. It can be a video, a research report, a presentation, a ton of LinkedIn posts, the sky’s the limit.

Be sure to match what you’re making to how your ICP consumes information. A ton of TikToks about software development might eventually get to a CTO, but speaking at the conference they’ve attended for the last 7 years is probably a faster path.

Here are our thoughts on various asset types:

Essays. The natural output of the writing you're already doing. Everything else on this list gets easier once the thinking exists in essay form, so we recommend starting here.

Original research. Surveys, benchmark data, analysis nobody else has done. This is the most expensive and strongest asset on the list.

A presentation or workshop. The same material works on a conference stage, in a webinar, or at a client roundtable, and a live audience watching you handle questions you didn't script can help build trust faster than anything you publish.

A book. The heaviest lift and the longest payoff. If your point of view can fill 200 pages, nothing positions you more thoroughly. Just know it takes time to do this well, and the marketing/promotion component is significant.

A podcast or video series. Best when your ideas develop through conversation, or when your ICP listens more than they read. Hosting one also gives you a credible reason to spend an hour with anyone you'd like to establish a relationship with.

Short posts. These can be complete points, or simply shorter derivatives of the deeper work above. A single post won’t build trust with a stranger, but a year of consistent, specific posts can.

Tools. Diagnostics, calculators, templates, scorecards. Everything else on this list tells your ICP something valuable, while a good tool lets them do something valuable.

Distribution - This is how your audience interacts with your message.

One thing to note before we jump in: distribution is expensive. Either in time or dollars, you’re going to need to allocate serious resources to this. Underinvestment here is what kills most agency (and SaaS/PaaS) thought leadership.

Here’s our list in order of most effective to least:

Your email list. The only audience you really own. No algorithm sits between you and the reader, and every new asset gets a guaranteed first audience. If you make one distribution investment, this is it. It’s so powerful that owned audience size, growth, and engagement are core factors we evaluate in our Growth Reviews.

Other people's audiences. Podcast guesting, contributed articles in trade publications, co-presenting with partners. You're borrowing trust someone else already built.

Communities. The Slack groups, associations, and partner ecosystems where your ICP asks peers for recommendations.

Industry conferences and events your ICP already attends. Organizers need speakers who can actually teach their audience something, so doing great work during ideation is even more important for this channel.

Organic search and AI answers. Deep-dive essays and proprietary data are the strongest signals users will find via search engines and AI assistants. It takes a serious commitment to build momentum, but once authority is established, maintenance is light and growth compounds until the algo gets updated.

Paid amplification. Ads can put a thought leadership piece in front of a defined list faster than anything organic, but they’re typically pretty expensive.

Social feeds. LinkedIn for most agency ICPs. This is where the short posts circulate, and consistency matters more than any single hit. Keep in mind that this audience is essentially rented, so use it to move people into your owned audience.

M&A

You can buy trust.

Purchasing another agency (for revenue) means buying a book of client relationships that someone else built the trust for. While I don’t always love the idea of buying revenue, programmatic M&A can be a fantastically effective way to grow an agency.

Programmatic is the key part of this. Old-school M&A, the big swings at random deals to build some kind of conglomerate, is a great way to destroy value. Programmatic M&A is when the buyer has developed a real market thesis and strategy that they execute in a deliberate way with smaller bets that grow over time. The programmatic version reduces the buyer’s risk while still allowing them to remain nimble.

The key here is to remember your goals and to make sure that what you’re buying furthers them. The average client tenure across all agency client types is about 2 years. You’ll get some attrition (both client and employee). There will be an integration period of lower utilization. The owners of the purchased agency will stick around until their contract ends (sometimes), but don’t expect to see owner- or leader-level impact from them during this time.

RFPs

RFPs are a mixed bag for now. I’ve heard great things from some agencies that have decided to “become good at procurement,” but even some of them have said there’s more noise for clients now that AI’s making it trivial to respond to RFPs. When responses cost nothing, buyers shift to what’s harder to generate: named references, case studies with numbers, demos, and relationships formed before the RFP existed. Meanwhile, buyers increasingly use machine screening, so answering exactly what was asked matters more. We’re seeing agencies use AI to automate most of the process while spending more human time on the parts that help them differentiate themselves.

What I’d Do

If I led an agency today, I’d systematize the hell out of my account management function to the point where referrals and account expansion covered 70-80% of our growth. 10-20% would come from thought leadership delivered via in-person speaking events for our ICPs. The rest would come via programmatic M&A.

The AM function and referrals would give us durable long-term relationships and plenty of ROI data for case studies.

The thought leadership would obviously generate new clients, but it would also force us to stay on top of our game. The moment this started to fall off, we’d know our perspective needs to be updated. Thought leadership can take a lot of resources to do right, so keeping this relatively small would be key.

The M&A portion would be purposefully small. I don’t want major integration headaches, nor do I want a ton of risk on any one deal. There’s also a lot of value in the due diligence portion and the conversations with other agency owners that, even if we didn’t do a deal, would help us understand the industry better.

RFPs wouldn’t make my list until we ran out of steam from the other three growth strategies.

Building an agency on this foundation would hopefully eliminate the boom-and-bust revenue roller coaster that plagues most agencies, the thought leadership would keep us top of mind and force us to stay current, and the M&A would allow us to add capabilities as needed.

With so many investment options, digital agencies need a structured way to focus their efforts. We designed our Growth Review Service to give teams that clarity. A way to identify gaps, prioritize the fixes, and design a solution with best practices from thousands of agencies. Reach out if you’d like some clarity before planning for 2027.