Line-up
Fixing Founder-Led Sales (Without Hiring a BDM)
You’re doing £1.5m. You’re knackered. Sales is still mostly you. So you hire a business development manager and wait for the pipeline to fill up. It doesn’t!
Ryan Hall has watched this movie play out in agency after agency, and he’s pretty blunt about why it ends the same way every time. The hire was never going to fix it. “Hiring a business development manager isn’t going to fix it,” he says. The problem is twofold: the quality of professional sales talent in the UK is, in his words, often not good enough, and even when you do find someone good, founders rarely set them up to succeed.
What usually happens is you ask one person to run top of funnel origination, middle of funnel nurture and bottom of funnel close. “No one can do all of those things well enough apart from a founder to a certain level of scale.” Then a big inbound opportunity lands, that person quite reasonably throws everything at it, and the top of the funnel falls off a cliff. Ryan calls it kangaroo patrol. On, off, on, off. “There’s no consistency, which always catches every business out.”
In this session Ryan will show what actually moves the needle for founder-led agencies between £1m and £2m: the system and process that has to sit behind the person, the order you build it in, and the moves you can make right now before you spend a penny on a senior sales hire.
At Pipeline, Ryan will show agency founders how to take themselves out of the middle of the sales engine without dropping a BDM into a broken system and hoping for the best.
Stop Getting Ghosted: A Sales Process That Keeps Prospects Talking
The second time most agencies speak to a prospect, it’s to hand them a 90-page document. Then they wonder why they got ghosted!
Stephen Kenwright has spent the last 10 years coaching agency BDMs and founders through the daily reality of new business, including as a sales leader at Rise at Seven. His take: ghosting isn’t bad luck, and it isn’t entirely the client’s fault. It’s the predictable result of a sales process that skips the awkward questions early on and overloads the prospect later.
At Pipeline he’ll walk through three stages where deals quietly die. The first call, where most agencies forget to check whether the project actually has internal green light or any budget assigned. The middle stretch, where weeks of silence get filled by a giant proposal instead of small, frequent check-ins. And the pitch itself, which Stephen reckons should have far fewer slides and far more clarity on what happens next. “Let’s start with none and we’ll negotiate and end up with 20.”
At Pipeline, Stephen will share a practical three-stage sales process that keeps prospects talking and stops deals dying in inboxes. Bring the deal you’re currently chasing. You’ll leave knowing exactly where it’s leaking.
How Do Top-Performing Agencies Actually Drive Profit?
Agencies aren’t short on ambition. They’re short on alignment, between what they think drives growth, and what actually does.
“There are actually only around a dozen ways to grow your agency. So, if you want to grow, it makes sense to pick one and have a clear plan,” Peter Czapp says.
But not just any plan – one that’s integrated across sales, marketing, resourcing and finance. The agencies that do this properly (and communicate it effectively) don’t just grow faster, they make more money doing it.
Then there’s the uncomfortable truth about investment. There’s a sweet spot for sales and marketing spend that drives growth and profitability.
“62%… are actually below the sweet spot.”
Most agencies are underinvesting in sales and marketing, and it’s quietly holding them back.
From why “bigger clients lead to bigger profits,” to the trade-off between retainers and growth, to the surprising impact of simply keeping clients longer, Peter connects the dots between strategy and outcome.
In this session, Peter Czapp will be unpacking the findings from The Wow Company’s latest research into agency growth and profit, including the four key levers that will drive your growth this year.
How Positioning Impacts Pipeline
Today, buyers want to know what problem do you solve, and how you solve it better than anyone else. And most agencies don’t have a clean answer.
What happens next is what Nikki Fraser who runs Curious calls the word soup: “transformation”, “ambition”, “growth”, “future”.
Nikki is in the middle of repositioning Curious towards scale-up and startup tech, an audience that mostly doesn’t get the value of brand and would rather spend the budget on product engineers.
At 💰 Pipeline June 2026, Nikki will share how Curious is repositioning itself in real time, and what agency owners can steal from the process. A live case study in getting out of the word soup.
Should Your Agency Own and Operate Its Own Community?
Anyone can build a product now. But almost no one can build an audience. That’s why professional communities have become one of the most valuable assets a business can own.
Over the last (nearly) ten years, Agency Hackers has grown into the biggest community of agency owners and the new business and marketing people who work inside them. We didn’t do it with a big budget or a clever growth hack. We did it with a mix of storytelling, showing up consistently, and a stubborn focus on getting the right people in the same room.
In this talk I’ll share what we’ve actually learned: the tools we use, the things we do (and the things we’ve quietly stopped doing), how we turned attention into a real community, and why that community became our most defensible advantage. If you’re trying to reach a B2B audience, this one’s for you.
Live Surgery: Why Your Marketing Isn’t Driving Pipeline
You’re posting. You’re podcasting. You might even be doing TikTok. So why isn’t any of it turning into actual pipeline?
Most agencies are busier than ever with marketing – and quietly frustrated that it isn’t translating into real sales opportunities. The problem usually isn’t effort. It’s that visibility, engagement and pipeline are three different things, and a lot of marketing stops at the first one.
In this panel we’ll get honest about what’s actually working. Why launching a podcast or chasing views isn’t a strategy on its own. What content is really for, and the role it needs to play in building top-of-funnel trust and awareness. Where distribution falls down – especially on LinkedIn and with guest-led content. And how to make your marketing more useful and commercially focused without turning it into bland sales fluff that nobody wants to read.
If you’re pouring time into marketing and waiting for the phone to ring, this one’s for you.
