u/contralai

Something I keep noticing with small agencies:

everyone assumes the next stage of growth is getting more clients.

Sometimes it is.

But if you’re already making $1k, $3k, $5k+ a month, there’s a decent chance the easier growth is sitting inside the clients and offer you already have.

You might be charging $800 for something that could become a $2k retainer if it was packaged around a bigger outcome.

You might be selling content creation when the client actually needs content + distribution + lead capture + follow-up.

Or you’re landing clients for one service, doing good work, and then basically waiting for them to cancel instead of having an obvious expansion path.

So I want to try something with agency owners who are already past the “how do I get my first client?” stage.

Drop:

1. what your agency does
2. roughly what you make per month
3. average client contract / retainer
4. who you sell to
5. where clients come from right now
6. what feels stuck

And I’ll tell you what I’d change first.

Could be acquisition.
Could be pricing.
Could be the offer.
Could be retention.
Could be an upsell that increases a $1k client into a $2k-$3k account without doubling delivery.

I’ll also tell you what I’d look for when prospecting.

Because “restaurant owner” or “coach with 10k followers” isn’t enough of a reason to contact somebody.

I’d rather know that they just opened a second location, hired salespeople, launched a new offer, started running ads, increased content output, raised prices, hired a marketing person, or clearly have more capacity than pipeline.

Those are actual reasons they might need an agency now.

If you give enough context I’ll map what I’d run for the next 30 days too.

Main thing I’m curious about:

are you actually stuck because you need more clients, or because every client is worth too little?

Not asking people who are still watching “how to start an SMMA” videos.

I’m curious about the agencies that already got past that part.

You have 2, 4, maybe 10 clients. People are actually paying you. Delivery works.

But the business still feels way more random than it should.

Maybe referrals are still your main source of clients.

Maybe you’re charging $700–$1,000/mo for social media management and have no idea how to turn that relationship into $2k+.

Maybe every new client means another Notion board, WhatsApp group, spreadsheet, invoice reminder, content calendar and 20 messages asking “is this approved yet?”

Or maybe delivery is fine and you simply cannot generate sales consistently.

If you run a social media marketing/content agency doing at least ~$1k/mo, drop:

What you sell:
Monthly revenue:
Average client value:
Active clients:
How you currently get clients:
The thing that feels most broken right now:

I’ll look at it and reply with what I’d change first.

Could be your niche. Could be the offer. Could be who you’re targeting. Could be outbound. Could be upsells. Could be the actual way the agency is being operated.

And I don’t mean “post more” or “send 500 cold emails.”

For the interesting ones I’ll try to map:

• who I’d go after
• what signals would tell me they need an agency now
• how I’d approach them
• how I’d increase the contract value
• what I’d automate
• what the sales pipeline should look like
• and what I’d fix operationally before adding more clients

I’m building Sumora Agency OS around this exact problem, so yes, I have a horse in the race.

But you don’t need to buy anything. I genuinely want to see where SMMAs between “I finally have clients” and “this is actually a proper company” are getting stuck.

Drop yours below. The messier the better lol.

Specifically asking people who run a social media marketing agency here. Not web design, SEO, dev agencies, etc.

If you’re already making at least ~$1k/mo from the agency but growth has started feeling messy, I’m curious where it’s actually breaking.

I keep seeing some version of the same problems:

you can deliver for clients but getting new ones is inconsistent

you’re still relying heavily on referrals

clients are paying $500–$1k when you feel like the relationship should be worth a lot more

you’re doing content + reporting + communication + followups manually and every new client adds more chaos

or you’ve got leads but no real sales process behind them

If you run an SMMA, drop:

what you sell:
monthly revenue range:
average client value:
number of active clients:
where clients come from:
the one thing that feels stuck right now:

I’ll reply with what I’d focus on first if I were running that agency.

Not looking for people who are still deciding whether to start an SMMA. More interested in agencies that have already proven someone will pay them and are now trying to make the thing predictable.

I think there’s a weird stage with agencies where you’ve already proved somebody will pay you, but you still don’t really have a system.

One month referrals are good. Next month nothing happens. You sign a client, lose another one, try cold outreach for a week, post content, maybe run ads, then go back to referrals lol.

And sometimes the problem isn’t even getting more clients. It’s that the clients are worth $800 when they could probably be worth $2k–$3k if the offer was packaged differently, or you’re selling one service when there are obvious things you could upsell around it.

So I want to try something.

If your agency is doing at least ~$1k/mo already, drop this below:

- what your agency actually does

- roughly what you make per month (a range is fine)

- what an average client pays you

- where most of your clients come from right now

- what feels stuck: leads, closing, pricing, retention, upsells, delivery, whatever

I’ll go through them and tell you what I’d do if it was my agency.

Not just “post more content” or “do cold email.”

I mean who I’d target first, what would make those companies worth contacting right now, how I’d package the offer, what I’d change about the sales process, where I think you could increase contract value, and what I’d spend the next 30 days doing.

If there’s enough info, I’ll map the actual system too.

Full disclosure: I’m building Sumora and we’ve been working on an Agency OS around this exact problem, so obviously I have a horse in the race.

Drop yours. I’ll do as many as I can.

Been talking to a bunch of agency owners recently and I keep noticing the same thing.

People usually know how to do outreach. They can buy Apollo, send cold emails, hire an SDR, whatever.

The part that seems way harder is deciding who is actually worth contacting.

A motion design agency selling $500 projects shouldn't prospect the same way as a VR training company selling $20k projects. A social media agency charging $700/month shouldn't be targeting the same companies as an automation agency selling $8k implementations.

The economics completely change who you should go after and what has to be happening inside that company for the outreach to make sense.

I've been making little outbound maps for agencies based on this.

If you run one, give me:

1. what you sell
2. roughly what a client/project is worth
3. who you normally sell to, if you already know

I'll reply with the first ICP I'd test, a few buying signals I'd look for, and the angle I'd use to contact them.

Not selling a lead list btw. I'm one of the founders of Sumora, which is what we're building around this problem, so obviously there's some bias here.

If the strategy I give you actually makes sense and you want help setting the campaign up, we can jump on a call after. But I'm happy to just map a few of these out in the comments first.

Curious what kinds of agencies are in here.

I’ve been doing this with a few service business owners recently and it’s been way more interesting than I expected.

Most people tell me they need more clients, and the first instinct is usually to find a bigger lead list or send more cold emails.

I think that’s backwards.

A video editor selling $1,000 projects, an automation consultant selling $5k implementations, and someone selling $20k corporate training should have completely different outbound strategies. The deal size changes who you should target, how much research is worth doing, which person inside the company matters, and what needs to be happening in that business for them to actually care right now.

So if you’re a solopreneur, consultant, freelancer or small agency, comment:

what you sell
average deal/project size
who you usually sell to

I’ll map the first segment I’d test, the decision-maker I’d go after, and 3–5 buying signals I’d look for before contacting anyone.

I’m building Sumora around this exact problem, so disclosure there. The idea is basically to make outbound less “here are 5,000 people matching some filters” and more “here are the 40 companies where something is happening that gives you an actual reason to reach out.”

If one of the strategies I map looks useful, I’m happy to build the full outbound plan for you too.

Been talking to a bunch of agency owners recently and I keep noticing the same thing.

People usually know how to do outreach. They can buy Apollo, send cold emails, hire an SDR, whatever.

The part that seems way harder is deciding who is actually worth contacting.

A motion design agency selling $500 projects shouldn't prospect the same way as a VR training company selling $20k projects. A social media agency charging $700/month shouldn't be targeting the same companies as an automation agency selling $8k implementations.

The economics completely change who you should go after and what has to be happening inside that company for the outreach to make sense.

I've been making little outbound maps for agencies based on this.

If you run one, give me:

1. what you sell
2. roughly what a client/project is worth
3. who you normally sell to, if you already know

I'll reply with the first ICP I'd test, a few buying signals I'd look for, and the angle I'd use to contact them.

Not selling a lead list btw. I'm one of the founders of Sumora, which is what we're building around this problem, so obviously there's some bias here.

If the strategy I give you actually makes sense and you want help setting the campaign up, we can jump on a call after. But I'm happy to just map a few of these out in the comments first.

Curious what kinds of agencies are in here.

I’ve been talking to a lot of business owners lately and noticed the same pattern: most don’t need “more leads.” They need to get much more specific about who is actually worth contacting.

So I’m picking 5 established businesses and doing the strategy work with them directly.

I’ll go through your offer, ICP, buying signals, what I’d use as a lead magnet, who I’d prospect first, and how I’d structure the first campaign.

For selected businesses I’m also including **2 months of LinkedIn Sales Navigator access**, because giving someone a prospecting strategy without the tools to execute it is kind of pointless.

I’m doing this through Sumora because I want more real businesses using what we’re building, so there’s obviously something in it for me too.

Best fit is probably:
already making money, $2k+ customer value, and actually has capacity for more customers.

If you want me to look at yours, comment **what you sell + average customer value + who buys it.**

No need to book anything first. I’ll tell you whether I think outbound even makes sense for your business.

me and my co-founder built something before this. real traction, actual users, hit #1 product of the week on product hunt at one point. we still walked away from it. wasn't an easy call. but the thing we learned building it mattered more than the thing itself, generic help is noisy, it only gets useful once it actually understands the specific person or business it's dealing with.

took that and pointed it at outbound instead. most cold outreach doesn't fail because the writing is bad, it fails because it's aimed at people with no real reason to care right now. spent most of a year testing that on actual client accounts before we built anything close to a real product around it.

one client went from around $3k/mo to $12k/mo while we rebuilt their outbound. wasn't the messaging that changed. it was who we were even contacting and why, actual triggers like hiring or a new launch instead of just a list that technically matched their target customer.

still bootstrapped. no funding. from a place which is not exactly where people expect outbound software to come from. not saying that for sympathy, just context for why this one feels heavier than a normal update post.

it's called Sumora if it comes up. happy to get into the actual mechanics of what changed for that client if anyone wants more than the highlight version.

I keep seeing the same thing with agency owners.

They’re not bad at delivery. They can get results. Clients are happy. But growth still feels random because new business mostly comes from referrals, random inbound, or a burst of cold outreach every time pipeline gets quiet.

That’s the problem we’re building Sumora around.

It helps you figure out who you should actually be reaching out to, researches those prospects, looks for reasons they might care now, and helps run the LinkedIn and Instagram outreach and follow-ups.

The idea is basically to make outbound feel less like blasting a list and more like having a proper system behind it.

If your agency is struggling to get clients consistently, drop what you sell and roughly what you charge per client.

I’ll tell you whether I think outbound is actually a good fit for your business and what I’d probably test first.

If it makes sense, we can get on a call and map it out properly.

I’ve been talking to a lot of business owners lately and noticed the same pattern: most don’t need “more leads.” They need to get much more specific about who is actually worth contacting.

So I’m picking 5 established businesses and doing the strategy work with them directly.

I’ll go through your offer, ICP, buying signals, what I’d use as a lead magnet, who I’d prospect first, and how I’d structure the first campaign.

For selected businesses I’m also including 2 months of LinkedIn Sales Navigator access, because giving someone a prospecting strategy without the tools to execute it is kind of pointless.

I’m doing this through Sumora because I want more real businesses using what we’re building, so there’s obviously something in it for me too.

Best fit is probably:
already making money, $2k+ customer value, and actually has capacity for more customers.

If you want me to look at yours, comment what you sell + average customer value + who buys it.

No need to book anything first. I’ll tell you whether I think outbound even makes sense for your business.

This sounds stupid considering the whole category is obsessed with sending more messages, but this has probably been the biggest change in how I think about outbound.

When we first started doing this manually, the process was basically what everyone does. Define an ICP, pull a big list, research enough to make the message look personalized, send, follow up.

The problem was that an ICP is a terrible reason to contact someone.

A 50-person agency might technically be perfect for what you sell, but if they’re happy with referrals, fully booked for the next six months and not trying to grow, why are you in their inbox?

So now the first question our agent tries to answer isn’t what should I say to this person. It’s should I bother this person at all.

If there’s no decent reason, it skips them.

If they just hired three account managers, opened another location, launched a new offer, raised money, started hiring salespeople, entered a new market, etc., then there’s at least something happening that might make the conversation relevant.

We worked with one client who grew from roughly $3k to $12k while we were rebuilding their outbound this way. I’m not claiming our system magically 4x’d them because obviously it didn’t. But that project was what made this click for me. We spent way less time obsessing over clever copy and way more time asking why this company, why this person, why now.

I ended up building that logic into Sumora, which is what I’m working on now. The agent finds people on LinkedIn/Instagram, researches them, scores them and can basically say nope, not worth a message.

I genuinely think that’s more useful than another tool proudly telling me it can send 10,000 personalized emails.

I was going through some of our outbound stuff today and realized this is probably a much more useful question than asking what someone’s ICP is.

Think about your last few genuinely good clients. What was happening in their business right before they hired you?

Maybe they had just hired more people and suddenly needed leads. Maybe they launched something. Maybe referrals slowed down. Maybe they fired another agency. Maybe the founder finally had enough money to stop doing marketing themselves.

There’s usually some event before the purchase.

We started paying a lot more attention to that with outbound and it changed how I look at prospecting. Instead of finding 2,000 companies that technically fit the ICP, I’d rather find 40 where something has happened that gives us an actual reason to talk to them.

We worked with one client who grew from around $3k to $12k while we were rebuilding this part of their outbound. Obviously I’m not claiming prospecting alone caused the growth, but it made me realize how much easier sales gets when the timing is right.

That eventually became a big part of what we’re building with Sumora. It searches LinkedIn/Instagram, researches prospects and tries to find these signals before outreach instead of just generating another personalized cold DM.

I’m curious whether this holds up across different types of agencies.

If you own one, drop what you sell + roughly what a client is worth + who normally buys from you. I’ll tell you the first few signals I’d personally look for before contacting anyone

so i keep seeing posts on here (and everywhere tbh) saying the fix for bad cold outbound is better personalization. mention their name, their company, something from their linkedin, and reply rates go up. my co-founder and i believed this for a while too. we spent basically the last year rebuilding outbound for a bunch of agencies and b2b founders and the pattern that kept showing up was different from what we expected.

personalization wasn't really the problem, hadn't been for a while honestly. every tool writes a "personalized" message now, nobody's replying just because a message correctly guessed their job title.

what actually got replies was showing up with a reason that was true right now instead of a reason that's just generally true about the company. like the difference between "saw you run an agency, we help agencies get more clients" (dead on arrival, every time) and something closer to "saw you just hired two account managers, is referral flow enough to keep them busy or are you building an outbound channel around the new capacity." second one isn't more flattering or more clever, it's just accurate to a moment instead of accurate in general, and that's apparently enough to get a reply.

one client we worked with went from around $3k/mo to $12k/mo while we were rebuilding their outbound. not gonna sit here and say that's 100% us, running a business has too many moving parts to honestly claim that. but outbound was the specific thing we touched, and almost none of what changed was the actual messages. it was more upstream than that, better filtering on who was even worth contacting in the first place, building the whole thing around actual triggers like hiring or expansion instead of just working a list that technically matched the icp. messages got simpler once targeting got better, not smarter.

(also, disclosure, we turned this into an actual product afterward. it's called sumora, does this kind of outbound on linkedin + instagram mostly for agencies and b2b service companies. figured i'd say that upfront instead of someone finding out later and feeling weird about it.)

if your dms feel like they should be converting and just aren't, i'd look at who you're contacting and why before i touched the copy again. happy to get into the weeds if anyone's stuck on their own setup.

been testing something pretty wild.

you can connect Claude to Sumora and basically tell it:

“find people who match my ICP, research them, write the DM, follow up, and surface the people worth talking to.”

and it actually runs the workflow across Instagram + LinkedIn.

not just “here’s a cold DM template.”

actual prospecting + research + outreach + follow-ups.

still keeping humans in control because fully autonomous spam sounds terrible lol.

curious if anyone here would actually let Claude handle part of their outbound?

this feels slightly ridiculous lol.

we connected claude directly to instagram.

now i can literally tell it: find agency owners that match this ICP, research them, figure out why they might need us, send a personalized DM and follow up until there’s a response.

and it actually does it.

so instead of:
finding accounts manually
→ opening 30 profiles
→ researching each one
→ writing DMs
→ remembering who replied
→ following up
→ trying to get them on a call

i can manage the whole thing through claude.

the interesting part isn’t really the AI-written DMs.

those have existed forever and most of them suck.

the interesting part is giving claude the actual ability to use instagram as a tool.

it can search for prospects, understand their profile/business, decide who is worth contacting, personalize the outreach and continue the conversation workflow.

basically: Claude + Instagram = an autonomous outbound agent

we built it using Sumora’s MCP because i wanted to see how far we could push the “just tell claude what outcome you want” idea.

still keeping humans in control because i absolutely do not want an AI randomly nuking 500 accounts with “hey {{first_name}}” lol.

curious what people doing instagram lead gen think. (got me 12 meetings in the last 24h pretty solid) -> 140 DMs from 5 Insta accounts

would you actually let claude handle your prospecting + DMs if you could review/limit what it does?

i’ve been looking through a lot of founder-led linkedin campaigns lately.

most of the messages aren’t terrible.

they explain the product.
they mention the prospect’s company.
they ask for a call.

but they completely miss one thing:

why should this person care today?

“we help agencies generate more leads” is relevant to thousands of agencies.

but there’s no reason for any of them to reply this week.

now compare that with:

“saw you’ve hired two account managers and launched a new service recently. are referrals still filling the pipeline or are you building a proper outbound channel for the new offer?”

same service.

completely different conversation.

the second message works because it starts with a change inside the business.

the framework i now use is:

signal → business hypothesis → easy question

signal:

something publicly changed.

they started hiring.
launched a service.
entered a new market.
raised money.
opened another location.
posted about a bottleneck.

business hypothesis:

what might that change mean for revenue, workload or growth?

easy question:

something they can answer without booking a demo or reading a paragraph.

another example:

bad:

“we help saas companies automate their customer support.”

better:

“saw you launched the team plan and are hiring your first support rep. are you still managing support through forwarding rules or have you moved it into a shared inbox?”

no fake compliment.

no massive pitch.

no calendar link three seconds after connecting.

just an actual reason for the message to exist.

this is the workflow we built sumora around.

you enter your website and ideal customer. it finds relevant linkedin and instagram prospects, looks for public signals, researches the business and drafts the outreach around what is happening right now.

everything stays human-reviewed before it sends.

i want to test the “why now?” framework publicly on 15 live b2b businesses.

drop:

website:
average customer value:
ideal customer:
what you currently sell:

i’ll reply with:

1. the first micro-segment i’d target
2. the public signal i’d look for
3. the exact linkedin opener i’d test
4. the follow-up i’d send if they ignored it

i’ll keep the answers public so everyone can steal the useful parts.

full disclosure: i’m one of the founders of sumora.