Lack of ICP Clarity Is Breaking Your Agency's Growth
And Where BD & Sales Leaders Should Start Fixing It
Most of the agency growth leaders I’ve spoken with lately are finding that their new business strategies — especially outbound — just aren’t delivering like they used to.
There’s been plenty said about how hard it is to stand out in a sea of noise. But for independent agencies selling strategic services across multiple offerings, there’s another layer to this: outbound often needs to generate demand and create discovery moments — not just catch and convert people already in market.
The old approach — “Let’s just get them on a call and we’ll tailor it from there” — doesn’t work like it used to.
Today, clients form an opinion long before they’re willing to commit to a meeting, so generic touchpoints and misaligned execution fall flat.
And that’s what today’s post is about:
How misaligned ICPs quietly derail growth — and how to bring your team back into focus.
Let’s dive in!
Your Outbound Isn’t Failing Because of Bad Emails
It’s failing because execution drifts away from strategy.
You want your BD team to spend time on companies that actually benefit from your agency’s USPs, appreciate your positioning, and can be engaged with trust-building messaging.
Instead, hours are wasted on accounts that were never going to be able to afford your expertise — while true target accounts receive generic messages.
Not because your team is incapable — far from it.
The issue I see in most agencies I work with is poor alignment between strategy and execution — especially around ICP and positioning. Strategy never makes it into daily workflows, particularly in multi-service-line agencies.
This problem isn’t new — but its consequences have gotten worse recently.
Two reasons why:
Clients now ignore generic outreach that doesn’t map to their pain. They don’t go to your site to figure out what you do — they just delete the email.
It’s easier than ever to scale noise. Tools like Apollo, sequencers, and AI SDRs don’t solve the problem — they amplify it, enabling you to reach more irrelevant people, faster.
The old mantra: “It’s a numbers game.”
The new mindset: Deliver relevant, trust-building touchpoints at scale — and that starts with strategic clarity.
Why ICP Clarity Drives Everything
Agencies sell complex services.
Trust is earned through specificity — service-line relevance, category nuance, credible proof.
When your ICP is fuzzy, everything downstream suffers:
Targeting
Research
Prioritisation
Messaging
Why Drift Happens — and How to Fix It
1. Strategy lives in heads, not workflows
A slide might say: “consumer brands with content needs.”
But what does that mean in real life?
Do they outsource creative or have an internal team?
What are their core GTM channels?
What triggers suggest they’re about to need your services?
Without a clear company-level definition, it’s unrealistic to expect individual BDs to draw the same conclusions — or stay aligned with leadership’s vision.
2. Qualification happens too late
You only discover an account isn’t a fit when they push back on price — because they were never properly qualified to begin with.
3. Messaging becomes generic
And that’s not enough to spark interest — especially when cold outreach is also your demand gen channel.
Let’s say your strategy is to target consumer brands for content production.
If every BD is interpreting that differently, you’re guaranteed to dilute the opportunity.
So What Can You Actually Do?
Start by solving two critical bottlenecks:
Clarity and alignment on company strategy
Begin with ICP and positioning before layering in more advanced elements like:
Ideal buyer journeys (how clients want to be sold to)
Buying triggers
Where clients see your agency in the value chain
Build a bridge from strategy to execution
If BDs don’t understand — or trust — the strategy, you’ll only ever capture a fraction of its value.
Quick Wins This Week
Here are simple moves I use at the start of a growth consultancy engagement to test and improve alignment:
Narrative Check
Ask 3 BDs to summarise your pitch for one service line in 3 bullets.
→ Are you telling one story or five? Standardise the best version.
Trigger Shortlist
Define 5 real-world signals that indicate buyer readiness.
→ E.g., brand refresh, content/VFX hires, shift from AOR to project model.
No-Go Rules
Write 3 exclusion filters (e.g. too small, no budget, wrong stage).
→ Removing bad-fit accounts is the fastest way to raise conversion rates.
20-Touch Audit
Review 20 recent outbound touches from across your BD team (for the same service line).
→ How many clearly map to your ICP?
If it’s under 70%, you have drift.
Longer-Term: Bridging Strategy to Execution
There’s no plug-and-play fix for this. But one approach that consistently works for agencies I partner with is building bespoke growth engines.
Some call it GTM engineering. Others say it’s combining AI with commercial ops. I, personally, stick to growth engines.
Whatever the label, here’s the idea:
A growth engine is a centralised, tech-enabled system that turns your strategy — positioning and ICP — into daily top-of-funnel execution.
The spine of a growth engine (not the full blueprint):
Operationalised ICP: Inclusion/exclusion rules — with service-line variants — used as filters, not just preferences.
One source of truth: Positioning, proof points, and case snippets your BD team actually uses.
Context-tied outputs: Emails, micro-decks, ABM assets — all generated from the same strategic spine (human-edited).
Learning loop: Wins, objections, and no-go reasons feed back into the system to improve targeting.
I’ll unpack the full workflow — from signals to research to messaging — in a future post.
Examples of This Approach in the Wild
Growthx.AI (Series A, $12M raised): Human + AI outbound for organic content
Workflows.io: Builds modular growth engines — content ops, AI RevOps, ABM workflows — tailored to B2B
What Are the Benefits?
Strategic growth: Target accounts receive messaging that highlights your expertise and why they’re a fit
Consistency: Everyone aligns on ICP and story
Efficiency: Less time wasted on poor-fit accounts
Relevance: Messages reflect real service-line pains and triggers
Less noise: Avoid the spammer perception
Execution-ready strategy: Not just a PDF once a year — strategy shows up in daily BD activity
Recap
Proactive growth fails when strategy doesn’t survive contact with the calendar — and modern tools only amplify the drift.
Reflection Question
If a new BD joined tomorrow, would they target and speak to the same accounts your strategy calls “ideal”?
→ If not, where’s the gap? ICP? Triggers? Narrative?
Then ask:
What can you do to ensure your strategy shows up where it actually matters — in the workflows and decisions of your BD team?
A growth engine fixes this by translating your strategy into how your team targets, researches, messages, and learns.
Start with clarity. Scale with discipline.
Next Up
📌 I’ll share real-world examples of growth engines by service line — and how they helped agencies close the gap between positioning and pipeline.