TL;DR

• Our research sponsorship page is live! If you have any SaaS/PaaS friends who want to fund some fantastic agency research, I'd really appreciate it if you could share this with them.
• We launched a free Digital Agency Growth Diagnostic to help agency leaders understand where to focus their team's efforts by scoring their revgen system.
• The standard agency's revgen system can be mapped to six core areas: strategy & positioning, marketing, sales, bizdev, account management, and alignment.
• Strategy & positioning deals with the agency's market view and the problem it solves.
• Marketing is essentially how the agency communicates its value to prospects, leads, clients, partners, and employees.
• Sales' job is to convert leads into signed engagements.
• Bizdev builds strategic partnerships that create opportunities for the rest of the system rather than closing individual leads.
• Account management owns the post-sale relationship and the revenue generated by retaining and growing it: retention, upselling, cross-selling, and referrals.
• Alignment is the connective layer that turns the other revgen functions into one revgen operation with a single goal.

Our Research Sponsorship Page is Live

Reach out if you'd like to sponsor some fantastic industry research!

Customizing Industry Insights

We allocate a ton of resources to our reports, playbooks, and benchmarks to help agency leaders build better agencies.

A major portion of that work is designed to help leaders understand what legitimately moves the needle. We’re seeking an answer to:

“What are the best agencies doing?”

Then we factor in the various nuances that arise, and hopefully we’re able to publish something helpful to the vast majority of our audience.

But our audience is pretty diverse.

We have a whole group of solo-preneurs who are doing great work and are interested in learning how to grow their practice into something larger. On the other end, we have entire leadership teams subscribed to this newsletter who run massive multi-agency holding companies.

There’s a world of difference between those two archetypes.

To solve this, we have begun building more customized tools that agency leaders can use to help better understand their specific position.

The first is a free growth diagnostic that we soft-launched a few weeks ago.

How We Map Revgen Systems

We wanted to start with a concrete map of an agency’s revgen system. Something that would allow everyone to speak the same language and easily understand how the various revgen components work together.

We mapped the standard agency revgen system by segmenting it into six core areas:

1. Strategy & Positioning
2. Marketing
3. Sales
4. Bizdev
5. Account Management
6. Alignment

Strategy & Positioning

This area deals with the agency's market view and the problem it solves. Four practices define the work: anchoring identity in a core commercial insight rather than accumulated client requests, framing offers around the buyer's problem space rather than the deliverable, choosing a clear specialization stance, and pruning the service mix to fit that problem. Positioning is a living stance, tested against sales calls, renewals, and lost deals rather than fixed once at an offsite.

The CEO or managing partner owns this work, joined by a Head of Growth or CRO at larger agencies. Ideally, they draw on what front-line sales, senior delivery, and account managers hear from prospects and clients, and distill it into a central thesis that the entire agency can get behind.

Marketing

Marketing communicates the agency's value to prospects, leads, clients, partners, and employees. Two practices anchor it in the current market: leading with strategic-judgment content that carries a point of view rather than execution capability, and matching the tactic mix to client size and sales complexity rather than to trends. Marketing owns how positioning is expressed and the sales assets, case studies most of all, that keep the agency's communication consistent.

Smaller agencies run marketing through a single coordinator or fractional help, with the founder owning much of the process. As the agency grows past roughly 50 FTE, a marketing director or CMO takes a seat at the revgen table, with budget authority and accountability for revenue rather than output alone.

Sales

Sales converts qualified leads into signed engagements and, at strong shops, sources its own leads alongside closing the ones marketing brings in. Effective sales motions open with a diagnosis of the buyer's problem and strategic context, not a capability pitch. Beyond that, successful agencies build sales capacity beyond the founder and have formal processes for handing off the reason the client bought to account management after close.

Early on, the founder is the only closer, which is why many agencies stall at 30-50 FTEs. Maturing agencies deliberately build non-founder capacity: a dedicated seller, a documented process, and qualified handoffs that are overseen by a sales director as the team grows. Even at the most mature firms, it’s rare to find one that has a founder who’s completely removed from the sales process.

Bizdev

Bizdev builds strategic partnerships that create opportunities for the rest of the system rather than closing individual leads. A partnership might fill a service gap through white-labeling, expand the agency's audience, or shift its market position through a joint venture. For growing agencies, the most productive practice is active membership in SaaS and PaaS partner programs run by platform vendors that serve the same ICP.

Below 50 FTE, partnership work is a leadership or owner responsibility, because bizdev. is a less-reliable revgen function and rarely justifies dedicated headcount early. Agencies tend to bring on a partnership leader when they have more than 50 FTEs and begin to codify their partner strategies.

Account Management

Account management owns the post-sale relationship and the revenue generated by retaining and growing it: retention, upselling, cross-selling, and referrals. Five practices define a strong AM function: elevating AM to peer status rather than burying it under sales, a documented onboarding process, formal quarterly business reviews, reporting on business outcomes rather than deliverables shipped, and an active referral engine built on deliberate asks. These activities produce more revenue per unit of effort than any acquisition channel in our research.

Account managers own the client relationship, whereas project managers own delivery. The first AMs usually appear at the Small stage (10-24 FTEs) wearing both hats, then split into a dedicated function around the Medium stage (25-49 FTEs) under an AM or client-services lead. At mature firms, AM should report to the Head of Growth, CRO, or owner, not to sales or ops. leads.

Alignment

Alignment is the connective layer that turns the other revgen functions into one revgen operation with a single goal. Two practices are common at agencies that get this right: running revgen as one integrated function whose parts cooperate fully, and naming a single owner who holds revgen as an integrated responsibility. Around those sit shared objectives, cross-functional collaboration as the default working pattern, and a common dashboard so each function can see the others' metrics.

Life becomes easier when a single named owner leads this layer: a Head of growth at the Medium stage, a CRO at Large, and the founder or owner at Studio and Small agencies. Leadership, delivery, and support functions all take part in this as well, since their input is necessary.

More to Come

Hopefully, this helps you better understand how successful shops structure their revgen systems. It isn't complicated, but it does take some effort, especially when there are more pressing fires to put out. I'd really advise prioritizing these systems, though, because they make growth infinitely easier when they're in place.

Check out the free growth diagnostic to score your agency's revgen system.

We have a few other tools and research studies we're working on, but they'll have to wait until the World Cup's over.

Have a great week!

-Nick