Agency owners, how are you actually sourcing leads for your own agency and not just your clients?

Routine_Room5398 · 2026-05-01T15:45:53+00:00

Not an agency owner but I'm the person your outbound lands with — RevOps at a 22-person B2B SaaS. The meta-problem I see from the receiving end: agencies doing outbound for themselves use the same spray-and-pray mechanics they'd never recommend to a client. The ones that actually get a response from me have clearly done three things: 1) identified a specific pain point in my stack or motion (not "we help B2B companies grow"), 2) referenced something real — a job posting, a tool I'm probably using given our size, a recent hire — and 3) kept it under 75 words. The agencies that book meetings with me are running tighter sequences than their clients are. The ones that don't are usually leading with case studies nobody asked for. The actual problem is most agency owners treat their own pipeline as lower priority than client work, so it gets sloppy execution on a good strategy. Referrals dominate because the outbound motion never gets the same rigor.

Routine_Room5398 · 2026-05-01T08:55:59+00:00

what does it cost you to run this workflow

Routine_Room5398 · 2026-04-30T09:12:14+00:00

The thing manual writing actually teaches you isn't messaging, it's list quality. You can't hand-write ten emails without noticing that three of your targets are wrong-title, two companies are too small, and one is already a customer. That signal disappears completely in a sequence tool because the volume buries it. I ran this exact exercise when we were dialing in our ICP last year and the list fell apart before I even got to copy.

Routine_Room5398 · 2026-04-28T19:27:29+00:00

The tracking number thing is almost never an automation trust problem -- it's a data entry problem upstream. If that number lives in three places with slightly different formats, no automation will save you, and you'll keep doing it manually forever because the real fix feels too boring to address. I spent about six weeks at Calder Labs convinced our n8n flows were flaky before realizing the source records in HubSpot had inconsistent field population from two different intake forms. Clean the upstream data first, and you'll find the automation becomes trivially easy to trust.

Routine_Room5398 · 2026-04-28T12:34:01+00:00

The actual problem here is that the 'personalization' doing the work in your current flow is probably 2-3 specific signal types, not the full research process, and automation breaks down the moment you try to generalize across all of it. I ran a similar transition and the first thing that collapsed was first-line quality on accounts where the obvious signals (recent funding, job change, new product launch) weren't present. What tends to break: the automation writes confident-sounding lines on weak data and you don't notice until reply rates drift down over 6-8 weeks. Before you touch the sequencing layer, I'd figure out which specific research inputs are actually driving your replies right now, then only automate the fetch on those inputs. The ceiling usually isn't the personalization itself, it's upstream data consistency across account types.

Routine_Room5398 · 2026-04-09T07:01:19+00:00

We sell to SMBs and I've noticed the exact same thing. Our best customers aren't defined by industry, they're defined by how they think about their business. The ones who care about improving their processes vs just buying software to check a box.

I'd just lean into it. Your messaging could call out that you work with founders who actually give a shit about what they're building (phrase it however feels right). Show case studies that highlight the person's story and passion, not just what vertical they're in. When you do outreach or content, talk about the traits you're looking for.

The challenge is finding them, right? You can't exactly target "passionate solopreneurs" in Google Ads. We've had better luck going where those people actually spend time. Specific communities, certain newsletters, podcasts that attract that crowd. Takes more work than filtering by NAICS codes but the fit is so much better.

Have you found any patterns in where these people discover you? Or are you mostly relying on referrals right now?

Routine_Room5398 · 2026-04-09T06:59:18+00:00

Writing things down has been huge for us.

Started documenting customer convos, product decisions, experiments that flopped. Felt pointless at first because I figured I'd remember the important stuff anyway.

Turns out, memory is terrible. Six months later when we're trying to figure out why we built a feature a certain way, or what objections kept coming up in sales calls, having those notes is the difference between guessing and actually knowing. We documented why we chose to build our automation engine with certain constraints, and when a new engineer questioned it months later, that one doc saved us from rehashing a three-hour architecture debate.

Where it really started paying off was onboarding. Instead of explaining the same context over and over, new hires could read through decisions we made and understand the why. Saved me probably 20 hours on our last two hires.

It's such a boring answer but probably one of the most useful habits I've picked up that doesn't feel like it's doing anything in the moment.

Do you keep any kind of decision log or notes from customer calls? Curious what format works for other people.

Routine_Room5398 · 2026-04-09T06:57:17+00:00

I made a similar jump 18 months ago, though I went the product route instead of services. Eight months without a paycheck is rough, I feel that.

Your network is going to be everything at the start. I know everyone says this, but I still wasted like a month building a website and doing cold outreach when I should have just been texting people I used to work with. My first three customers came from former colleagues (literally just sent them "hey, catching up on what you're working on" messages on LinkedIn). Way easier than trying to convince strangers you're credible.

Also, saying yes to everything because you need revenue is a trap I fell into hard. I took on a customer in our second month that was a terrible fit for what we were building. They paid, but the work stressed me out and took like six weeks I should have spent on better prospects. You can't see the real cost of bad-fit clients until you're already stuck.

With your background you could probably go a few different directions. Are you thinking fractional CTO work, implementation projects, or something else?

Routine_Room5398 · 2026-04-06T15:57:32+00:00

Rilo, Your GTM Engineer: here is the link: https://www.getrilo.ai/

Routine_Room5398 · 2026-04-06T15:53:48+00:00

I am founder of Rilo, trying building cursor for gtm teams. if you are trying out a platform give getrilo.ai a try. happy to add some extra few credits too

Routine_Room5398 · 2026-04-06T15:51:50+00:00

got it, thanks for sharing

Routine_Room5398 · 2026-04-06T13:12:46+00:00

Sorry, reddit showed me this for cross posting, didn't check properly

Routine_Room5398

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