I started surveying agency leaders in 2022. Since my first survey, there’s been one intractable challenge for marketing agencies — one cited by a majority of agency leaders and beating all other challenges by a significant margin: Pipeline. This year, more than 1,200 respondents later, pipeline is cited as a severe challenge by 67% of leaders in the 2026 Agency Core study.
So that’s the bad news. Here’s the better news.
When we looked at which agencies say finding clients has gotten harder, the answer turned out to depend almost entirely on what kind of agency you’ve decided to be.
Among the leaders we’re calling Confident Differentiators — the 35% of the industry that has actually committed to a niche position and built a reputation around specific expertise — only 16% agree that finding clients is harder than ever. Across all agency leaders, that number jumps to 42%. Among the most pressured segment, it climbs to 67%.
All of these agencies are facing the same economy, the same AI scramble, the same decline in trust that plagues agencies today. But some are pessimistic about new business opportunities at four times the rate of those who are struggling the least.
Which isn’t to suggest that pipeline isn’t a problem for almost everyone. Even among Confident Differentiators, 57% say maintaining a robust pipeline is one of their most significant challenges. But what our 2026 data shows is that pipeline isn’t really the problem — it’s the symptom. The actual problem lives one layer down — and it’s something that many agencies have been aware of but failing to address for at least five years.
Here’s why that should encourage agency leaders rather than depress us: if pipeline pain is downstream of something else, then we don’t have to win the impossible war for attention to fix it. We have to win a much more winnable battle — with ourselves.
The Two Numbers That Blew My Mind
In 2022, 36% of agency leaders said differentiation was a severe challenge. By 2026, that number had surged to 50% — a near-40% jump in concern.
And here’s what hasn’t changed in those four years: niche commitment. The share of agencies that have actually committed to a niche position sits at 46%. In 2022 it was 44%. In 2025 it was 47%. The line is flat.
So the pressure to differentiate is going through the roof, and our industry’s response, more or less, has been to put it on the agenda for next quarter’s planning meeting.
This isn’t an isolated finding. The 2025 Promethean Research Digital Agency Industry Report found that average agency growth stabilized at just 4.6% in 2024, with medium and large agencies posting their first recorded contractions. AgencyAnalytics research keeps flagging the same drumbeat: clients are migrating away from generalists and toward specialists. The market is repricing “we do it all” downward.
And if your agency isn’t proudly claiming a niche, building a reputation in it, and marketing that reputation, your agency is being repriced downward as well.
The Confession That Revealed The Real Problem
This year we tried something new in our survey. We asked agency leaders struggling with three common problems to tell us, in plain English, what they believe is the strategy that would solve those problems.
What do you think is the best strategy for growing revenue with existing clients? For building pipeline? For building your reputation as a thought leader?
The answers came back clear, specific, and thoughtful. Most leaders know exactly what their best strategy is.
Then we asked the follow-up:
To what extent is your agency actually doing it?
Across all three strategy areas, the answer was the same. Only about 14% of leaders said “Completely.” Roughly six in ten admitted they’re pursuing their own best strategy “to some degree” — or less.
Read that sentence again, because it is the entire study in a single breath: most agency leaders can name the play they should be running. They’re just not running it.
This isn’t a knowledge problem. It’s an execution problem.
And it’s not because agency leaders are lazy or unmotivated. When we asked why in the verbatims, the answers were heartbreakingly familiar:
“Owner busy with client work.”
“Time. Straight up. Not enough of it.”
“Putting out fires rather than building new infrastructure.”
“One more hat to wear; easy to put it off because we’re ‘busy doing ___.'”
The Basis Technologies 2025 report puts a number on this: 56% of agency professionals say inefficient internal processes are their top organizational challenge. Which means the agencies most worried about losing pipeline are too busy doing client work to fix the thing that’s costing them pipeline.
It is the most human and most fixable problem in our industry. And it’s dressed up as a pipeline problem because the revenue that didn’t come in is more visible and painful than the agency positioning work that we didn’t get done.
What Your Clients Are Quietly Telling You
Since 2014, I’ve also been conducting an annual survey of agency clients — The Agency Edge study with Drew McLellan of Agency Management Institute. In our 2026 study, the expectations clients have set for agency performance have measurably risen. 89% of clients now say agencies must remain fully accountable for their recommendations even when AI is involved. 87% want accountability for the thinking behind the work. 74% want agencies to act as strategic advisors, not just executors. 82% want agencies that help them anticipate change.
Clients aren’t shopping for a vendor with a fancier tech stack. They’re looking for an agency that has done the work of figuring out who it serves, what it knows, and what it is willing to stand behind. They want an agency with strategic chops to help them navigate their industry, and their challenges, into the future.
And here is the genuinely encouraging part: 91% of clients say working with an agency increases their likelihood of achieving their goals. 75% call their agency a “critical partner” — up from 60% in just one year. 83% say long-term agency relationships matter.
The market hasn’t abandoned agencies. It has raised the bar.
The Inconvenient Good News
If you came to this article hoping the answer was a bigger AI investment, a shinier lead-gen channel, or a clever new sales sequence — the data points somewhere far less glamorous and far more impactful.
The agencies winning right now aren’t the ones with the most sophisticated AI prompts or the most robust stack of AI agents. They’re the ones who decided what they were going to be, told everyone, and then actually behaved that way.
- 74% of Confident Differentiators strongly agree their agency has a niche that sets them apart (compared to 30% of other agencies).
- 70% strongly agree that they have committed to marketing that niche (compared to about 35% of others).
- 48% say their ideal prospects are “absolutely” aware of the agency’s niche (compared to only 13% of others).
- 44% say their agency is “excellent” at building a reputation as a thought leader in their niche (compared to 7% of others).
- 91% say they have a positive reputation among the people their prospects trust (vs. about half of other segments).
- 48% strongly agree they are successfully building trust with prospects before the first contact (vs. 10% of others).
These agencies aren’t magic. They aren’t bigger or smaller than yours or mine. They aren’t better funded. They aren’t running some secret play the rest of us haven’t read. They committed to the fundamentals and then followed through.
Which is the part that should actually fire us up. Because none of this requires a windfall or a hire or a new platform. It requires picking the niche we keep almost picking. It requires naming the strategy we keep almost running. It requires one hour on the calendar this week, every week, that client work isn’t allowed to eat.
You already know what your best strategy is. Hundreds of leaders told us what it is, and that it’s the one they believe will work to solve their agency’s most difficult problems. The strategy you believe in is waiting for you to commit to it.
You can see and explore all of the results from our 2026 Agency Core research here.
And check out what agency clients are saying in this year’s Agency Edge research here.
