The Agency Marketing & New Biz Summit
The British Library, London
• New biz got you down? You’ve come to the right place.
• This is your chance to suss out how other agencies like yours are sourcing leads, growing their reputation, and keeping their pipelines steady.
It’s not a fun time to work in new business right now.
> “The landscape is scary – a lot of clients are really struggling.”
> “We’ve been chasing our tails for six months.”
> “We’re still not out of the danger zone. Every month we’re having to replace the revenue. There’s
just no commitment to long-term money.”
Last year’s economic turmoil still lingers, and 2025 has brought its own set of nightmares:
tinier budgets, client-side musical chairs, and the rise of ‘in-house AI specialist teams’ (🥱).
The competition is brutal – 20 agencies all vying for one project, and it still takes around
six months to seal the deal.
It seems agencies have been left with only a few options:
- UPSELLING – focus on getting more from existing clients.
- REPOSITIONING – redefine who you serve best and how you add value.
- TEAMING UP – partner with other agencies to form a stronger service offering.
- INNOVATE – find new ways to get clients to come to you without resorting to spam tactics.
Each of those comes with a fair bit of elbow grease. So where should you be focussing your time?
👉 At Pipeline, we’ll be spotlighting agency leaders who are getting innovative with lead generation, growing existing revenue, and becoming masters of their own marketing. If your new biz strategy is in need of a facelift, join us for a full-day of interactive sessions and candid conversations – you might just find the inspiration you’ve been looking for.
Meet Your Speakers … 🎤
Quit Your Ghosting with Lumpy Mail
Who knew posting a clock would cause a bomb threat?
“It didn’t even have batteries!” Louis Sandford justifies. His company, The Lumpy Mail Shop, sends a whole host of wacky, attention-grabbing items to top level CEOs in the hopes to secure a deal with them as clients.
Louis got his start from being inspired by direct-marketing legends like Gary Halbert who pasted fake dollar bills onto letters to secure responses from clients. With this in mind, he developed his own spin on things.
Things quickly escalated. Louis posted lottery tickets and birthday cards to prospects. One day, he tried sending clients coconuts with a note: “Is getting new customers your toughest nut to crack? You’d be cocoNUTS not to give me a call.”
It worked! One coconut secured him a £40,000 deal.
Louis didn’t stop there. He’s since sent mannequin arms, ransom notes, piñatas, vinyl records, even cucumbers and vaseline all to secure his place in meeting rooms with prospective brands.
In 2023, he set up The Lumpy Mail Shop as a platform to help other businesses cut the ghosting and secure spots in meetings with brands they actually want to work with.
🚀 At Pipeline, Louis will reveal how thinking outside the inbox can grab attention, spark conversations and win new business. “The riskiest thing you can do is blend in,” he says – come and find out why.
The Power of People-Centred Marketing
Street Agency was born out of resilience.
A few weeks after getting married to her husband, Katie Street’s front door was being knocked down by 16 armed police. They swarmed in and raided her family home, taking her husband to prison for 12 years.
With her house getting seized, and losing her job as Account Manager at a drinks company from bad press, Katie was left in a tough position.
Katie was left down on her luck, before starting up Street Agency in 2019: “I’d got to a point where I just didn’t wanna work for anyone any more,” she admits.
And she’s showing no signs of stopping, Street is focussed on human-centred strategies to strengthen their pipeline: “EGC (Employee-Generated Content) is quite a new phrase being coined, but I think it’s not just about the founders at the top, it should be everyone within the business too.
“People don’t want to engage with boring, branded decks and reports, they want to learn from people.” Katie urges. “Short form video’s on the rise, so we should all tap into that.”
🚀 Keen to hear more from Katie on this? Come join her at Pipeline where she’ll share advice for making your marketing more human-centred to secure new and exciting clients.
How to Inspire Your Sales Team
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The Dos and Don’ts of Marketing
“Look guys, there’s no way we’re ever working with Peppa fucking Pig World,” Mike Maynard told his team at Napier one day.
This was when the team learnt the vital lesson that, even though the office is a stone’s throw away from Boris Johnson’s favourite amusement park, it doesn’t mean they’re right for that client.
But when you’ve been in the agency game for as long as Napier has, they’re bound to have made some mistakes to learn from. Whether it’s the idea to pitch to the cartoon pig character’s empire or otherwise, the Napier team have learnt that going too broad with pitches can sometimes be unrealistic.
It’s moments like this that have informed Napier of their next steps.
“I see mistake-making in two different categories,” Hannah Wehrly, Napier’s director of Biz Dev and Marketing, explains. “Naturally, we’ve made inadvertent mistakes in the past, but there’s also been intentional ones – mistakes where we’ve trialled something and analysed why they went wrong in order to go ‘right’ all of the next times.”
“We trial and test our methods a lot.” Mike adds. “I think not being afraid to fall on your face is so important.”
🚀 At Pipeline, Mike will be joined by Nesbert Musuwo where they’ll open the floodgates to discuss Napier’s triumphs and trip ups – from underpreparing pitches, to mispricing your agency – all in the efforts to help you learn and grow!
Pitch Perfection: The Therapy-Led Outreach Strategy
The thud of a Yellow pages on a desk is enough to make any salesperson shudder. But to Jack Frimston and Zac Thompson, it was a sign that made them realise that something had to change.
As long-standing childhood friends, they were hired in a local call centre as sixteen-year-olds in Blackpool: “It was one of those jobs where they put a Yellow pages on your desk and say ‘start at the front or the back and just call through’.” Jack says.
When they were setting up their own company, A Sales Consultancy, they knew they wanted to do things differently. “We wanted to offer people a good job,” Zac continues, “Where you’re not ashamed to say ‘I work in sales’ and can tell Nana at the family barbecue.”
But how did their own method differ from the traditional sales scripts?
“What we found was that a lot of what is taught to therapists is useful in sales.” Zac explains. “Getting someone to open up and tell you about their problems, their motivations, what’s holding them back.”
As a result, Jack and Zac implemented these therapy-based tactics into their cold-outreach strategies and found incredible results. “It’s a win-win.” Jack says. “It makes everyone in the team feel like they’re being much more ethical, and it makes the prospect feel much safer through this process, rather than being force fed a proposition.”
🚀 Want to hear how they’re flipping the script? Join Jack and Zac at Pipeline for an in-depth session on how they’re making cold calls feel human again.
How to Build a Community
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The Importance of Ensemble Thinking in Leadership/Agency Structure
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Finding the Funny in Marketing
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New Business Surgery
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Driving Sales With The Bowtie Funnel Model
Have you ever thought that your finance team speaks a completely different language to your sales and marketing team?
You’re not alone. Mitch Richards knows the feeling all too well.
On his way to being Managing Director of Future Perform and Future Social, he was in a budgeting meeting when the finance team hit him with a curveball: “Where’s the money?” closely followed by “The sales team says all the leads you’re sending them are garbage.”
Yikes.
“I went away and I designed something to help – I read up about this thing called Bowtie Funnel Methodology.” Mitch explains. “It turned into a holistic system of measurement to understand how to take people from knowing absolutely nothing about you, all the way to being your biggest and best customer.”
🚀 Come along to Pipeline, where he’ll explain the Bowtie Operating Funnel, and show you how to align your teams, sharpen your pipeline, and scale with confidence.
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Meet people who are interested in your story
Pipeline is a day that will help you get inspired, and meet other people you can learn from. We blend interactive talks and group discussion.
- We dot you around the venue so you can interact – and we mix up the groups so you meet different people.
- We poll you before the event to see what you want to talk about.
- We make sure all the talks are original and interesting. We facilitate questions and reflections throughout.
Pipeline – FAQs 💬
Q: What actually happens on the day?
We start the event at 9.30am, so try to arrive by 9.15am.
The day’s format is pretty simple: you will spend some time hearing from guests with interesting stories that you can learn from, and you will also spend some time in small groups discussing your journey with like-minded agency leaders.
The breakouts are hosted by an Agency Hackers facilitator who makes sure that everybody with something interesting to say gets heard. (We poll attendees before the event, so we know who to ‘pick on’ on the day.)
We will serve tea, coffee and sweet things to keep you going, but please eat a sandwich before you arrive.
Q: Who will I hear from? Who are the speakers?
The people you’ll hear from all have interesting stories about marketing and new biz, and tactics you can adopt in your own agency.
We also decide who to spotlight based on the information we capture in the weeks before. (Look out for our emails!)
We will publish the line-up a few weeks before, but mostly we hope that you will trust us to select interesting folk from our audience. We find that the people who choose to attend our events are overwhelmingly on fascinating journeys that will resonate with you.
Also, the ‘talks’ aren’t really linear presentations. They’re more like structured case studies, with lots of questions and reflections from the audience.
You could potentially call them ‘fireside chats’, but these are not rambling cosy conversations. They are planned and structured. We put a lot of work into researching our guests, out of respect for your time.
Q: Who can attend?
This event is for anybody in your agency who cares about their marketing and new biz function.
That might be the person in charge of this area, the founder or owner, or it might be somebody else.
