Chloe Woodhouse, Director of Growth at Curious Nation.
Thomas Barta, one of the world’s preeminent experts on marketing leadership, business growth and CEO of the Marketing Leadership Institute made a simple but confronting point at a recent conference. Companies don’t grow, people grow companies. More specifically, growth comes from ‘growth rebels’, those rare individuals who can think big, challenge convention, and still land ideas that are effective.
While his point was anchored around marketing brand growth, the broader thesis is a useful lens for agencies wanting to drive their own new business growth. Because if you strip away the noise, and let's face it there’s a lot of that from agencies proclaiming their latest successes, winning new business has never felt more active, while at the same time equally more ineffective.
Pipelines are full, outreach is constant, tools are smarter than ever, and yet, conversion feels harder, slower and more fragile. However, the issue isn’t a pipeline problem for agencies, it’s a sameness problem.
The AI illusion of productivity
Of course it wouldn't be the marketing industry unless AI reared its inevitable head. While AI has supercharged agency business development, it’s also created a sea of indistinguishable noise.
Research a new client prospect in seconds, map their competitors, identify their marketing gaps and generate outreach at scale. Check, check, check and check. On paper, that’s a growth unlock. But when every agency has access to the same insights, the same prompts and the same automation, the output starts to blur. Marketers are now flooded with messages that look personalised but feel generic and it’s not hard to spot them.
For those working in business development, the temptation is to do more. More emails, more touchpoints, more volume, but the problem is that growth isn’t a volume game anymore, it’s a relevance game.
The agencies cutting through are ones using it selectively, as a thinking tool, not a replacement for thinking. AI should inform the strategy, not become the strategy because ultimately, people still buy from people and people can tell the difference.
More agencies, less pie
At the same time, the market has fundamentally shifted. Marketing budgets are flattening and in some cases shrinking. One of the key reasons is brands are spreading spend across more channels than ever: social, digital, experiential, retail media, out of home, performance, and sponsorships. The result is fragmentation with marketers being forced to do more with less.
On the flip side we have more agencies than ever trying to claim a piece of the pie. While exact data is hard to find, it’s estimated there are 10,000 agencies across the marketing, creative and media services sector in Australia. That’s a lot of new business competition which is creating a dangerous dynamic for marketers wanting to drive brand growth. Agencies chase more opportunities, stretch their positioning and true capabilities and start saying yes to work that doesn’t quite fit with their core competency.
The successful agencies are doing the opposite. They know exactly who they’re for, what problem they solve and where they add disproportionate value and most importantly, they’re willing to walk away from opportunities when they don't fit.
It's important to stay true to your ideal client profile, and have a strategy that reinforces that approach. This discipline is far from restrictive, it’s liberating and sharpens an agency's proposition while strengthening the conversations with clients that ultimately improves conversion. Spray and pray is dead in our industry when it comes to new business and intentional growth is what replaces it.
Playing the long game
New business has always been a long game, but today, it’s also a fragile one. Getting a client and agency partnership, be it retainer or project work, can take months and prospects can disappear overnight due to a shift in marketing priorities, restructures and marketer redundancies. One key contact you’ve been working with leaves, and the entire opportunity resets.
That reality is forcing a shift in how agencies go about building relationships. Single-threaded connections aren’t enough now. Growth now depends on building networks inside organisations across marketing, procurement, brand and leadership. It’s about depth, not just access to decision makers.
It also reinforces the importance of referrals. In a risk-averse market, a warm introduction cuts through faster than any outbound strategy ever will. It remains the most effective, and most underleveraged, growth channel agencies have.
Solve less, win more
There’s another subtle, but critical shift, happening in how the best agencies approach briefs.
Too often, clients present a list of objectives: build awareness, drive sales, shift perception, increase loyalty. It’s a catch-all of ambition and too often, agencies accept it at face value.
The smarter agency move is to challenge it. Growth comes from focus and the most effective agencies work with clients to identify the single most important problem to solve and build everything around that.
It requires confidence, can sometimes require pushback, but it transforms both the work and the outcome because trying to solve everything usually results in solving nothing.
Enter the growth rebel
Which brings us back to Barta’s growth rebel. None of this happens by accident. It requires people inside agencies who are willing to challenge the default, who resist the urge to follow the new business playbook. Those who combine creativity with commercial thinking and aren’t afraid to rethink how growth actually happens. They are not big dreamers disconnected from reality, or process-driven executors stuck in the system, but a hybrid of both.
Agencies don’t need more activity right now, they need better thinking and that starts with empowering business growth rebels, the ones who cut through the noise, focus on what matters and build growth strategies that actually work. We’re in an environment of new business sameness, but being different isn’t just valuable, it’s the only thing that converts.
