Why 99% of Agencies NEVER Get Clients From Ads

What if I told you a secret?

The reason that 99% of agency owners don’t get any clients from ads, content, or even outreach is not because of their ad creatives, landing pages, email flows, sales ability, or their industry.

I know this because I’ve consulted with over 550 agencies in the past 12 months, and less than 20 of them consistently book more than 40 calls per week.

What about me?

Well, I’ve done over $5 million in revenue from this YouTube channel over the past year and book about 600 calls per week through paid ads and outreach.

Today, I am going to tell you the problem and show you how to fix it in a few simple steps.

So let’s get started…

The reason that 99% of agencies and other businesses don’t get any clients from paid ads, content, and outreach is because they have absolutely no fucking idea who their average customer is, what their problems are, and what they want.

This is the first step of the marketing process.

It doesn’t matter what you do from steps 2–8 if you completely butcher step 1.

You are screwed.

You can put 1,000 hours into the rest and it won’t matter or work properly.

I think all of this is best explained through examples more than anything else.

Let’s use me as the example, and my consulting business called Lead Generation Academy.

I think this is a favorable example to illustrate the concept and is one of the best types of businesses to show you what to do and what not to do.

Who is my ICP?

If I’ve done my job right, you should instantly be able to see and tell me while looking at my channel.

Sadly, I probably have not, and it’s something that I’m working on.

I do a much better job of this in my paid ads and outreach.

I am just going to tell you, and I want you to note how specific it is:

My ICP is male agency owners between ages 25–35 who do between $500k and $5 million per year in revenue.

I want to stress that your ICP is a mix of:

When I launched my first ad or made my first video, I am by no means trying to claim I had “male agency owners between 25–35 who do $500k to $5 million per year” written down on a piece of paper thinking to myself:

“PERFECT.”

Yes, from day one my offer, ads, and content were targeting an ICP that was something like that.

But it evolved over time based on who chose me by becoming a client.

In my opinion, I define an ICP as:

The range or grouping of characteristics that make up around 80% of your client base.

For example, there is nothing stopping agency owners under 25 from buying from me, just like there isn’t anything stopping agency owners over 35 from buying from me.

In fact, there is nothing stopping you from buying from me even if you do not own or operate an agency at all.

There are many B2B businesses that are my current clients.

And of course, there is absolutely nothing stopping females from buying from me either.

I really like money and will take it from you if you will give it.

There is also nothing stopping you from buying if you are doing more than $5 million per year.

These are all perhaps what we may call “best result characteristics.”

In general, those under 25 years old do not have the required experience and success to be able to fully learn from me.

Of course, I work with many of these, and you always hear those stories about “the 20 year old doing $41.9 trillion per year.”

However, it is simply rarer and doesn’t fall into the 80% of my ICP.

Also, in general, those over the age of 35 came from a different era in marketing and simply aren’t as receptive or impressed by what I preach and the combination of marketing tactics I help them implement.

These are people who started their career before Facebook Ads, YouTube, most modern outreach tactics, etc.

And yes, tons of people over 35 buy from me, but again, it isn’t in my 80% ICP.

And yes, at least once per week, a business over $5 million will usually sign up to work with me.

But normally, many of those businesses do not need me to help them generate leads—whether literally speaking, or as a matter of their perception.

If you’re doing that kind of revenue, something is already working.

Last, let’s talk about the ladies.

Unfortunately, in about 550 consulting clients, I can think of just 6 women who have joined my program that were the primary business owner and not someone’s wife or employee, and quite honestly, I can’t think of any of those six that got a good result.

Why would that be?

Well, if you watch my content, tone of voice, and have interacted with me for more than eight seconds in your life, you could probably guess.

Add that up with the fact that there are simply far more male agency owners between $500k and $5 million per year, it sounds just about right.

So, in summary, these are maybe what we can call “best fit” qualifications.

They are patterns that we can identify when we get enough clients.

Our big, beautiful brains will surely be able to see who’s buying from us and who’s not, and we can act accordingly.

Again, we welcome these clients, no problem.

There is nothing stopping them.

However, when we are spending real money on something like paid ads and it HAS to work or we are losing all of our money, you can guarantee I am checking:

…when I launch my ad campaign.

So, nothing stopping you, but not the most common or best fit.

There is, however, something stopping you from buying from me if you’re under $500k per year.

Now we are getting into the “must have” requirements.

I’d say both the “best fit” and “must have” requirements are important to your success, but the “must have” are essential.

The “must haves” are what cause 99% of people to fail and not get any clients.

Let’s go over them now.

I am going to write down a list of why this is important so that I don’t forget anything.

The reasons this screws you up completely are:

Let’s go through these one at a time and use myself as an example.

This is very important.

Remember my niche.

I’ve repeated it a few times.

There were plenty of “best fits” in there, but the only true “must have” is that they do $500k per year in revenue.

Why is this?

Well, for a few reasons:

Someone who is doing $1 million per year is doing $83,333 per month (if spaced perfectly equally).

If they pay me $5k per month, that is 6% of their revenue.

If someone is doing $5k per month and they pay me $1k, that is 20% of their revenue.

Relatively speaking, the bigger business owner pays less and is going to be less annoying and lead to a great effective hourly rate for me and my team.

If you go even further than this into a B2C offer targeting true beginners who don’t even have an agency, anything you charge them will most likely be ALL their money.

Imagine how annoying they will be, and it’s understandable because it HAS to work.

Not my idea of a good time.

It is for these reasons and others that I always have a revenue minimum.

Depending on the offer I am selling, I will usually have a minimum contract length that is greater than anything they’d feel comfortable with.

Why is this?

Because I am not confident in my service and I want to scam people into paying and not being able to leave?

No, not at all, although some people use a minimum contract length for that purpose.

I use a minimum contract as a secondary tool to dissuade pain-in-the-ass, non-committed people from buying from me.

If they stop paying, am I going to literally hunt them down or sue them?

No, that seems excessive.

But those who hit the requirements and are willing to commit are the highest-quality buyers.

Not all revenue is equal.

If I am consulting for $4k per month, and I value my time at $2k per hour ($2,000 x 2,000 standard work hours per year is $4 million in revenue), then it has to take me two hours or less to serve that client.

There are definitely people who are so demanding that it will take 10 or 20 hours to serve them.

Then the hourly rate goes from a target of $2,000 per hour down to $200–$400 real fast and I can no longer hit my goal profit for the year.

On average, I kicked out 1.32 clients per week out of my consulting program in 2024 for being literally too annoying and not behaving in what I view as reasonable in the spirit of the consulting relationship.

For my high-level consulting service in 2025, I am charging $30k per month with a year-long commitment.

Fewer people buy this one than the normal $4,000/month one.

It’s about 3.6:1.

I’ve done over 550 clients in the $4,000/month one and eventually kicked 66 of them out.

I’ve done 152 clients in the $30,000/month one and guess how many I’ve kicked out?

…

None.

They are in fact far less demanding, nicer, and more likely to get a good result.

Not all, but many of them in fact pay $30,000/month instead of $4,000/month and take less actual hours for me to serve.

It is interesting.

And this same phenomenon happens all the time.

It is the same phenomenon that makes business-class and first-class people less demanding and toxic than economy-class on flights.

Interesting stuff.

Let’s try and bring it back to my point.

I was going over why I think it is important to have a minimum revenue requirement and never ever letting someone in who is beneath that.

This should be considered a “must have.”

Whenever you break your own rule here, it typically never ends well for all of the reasons listed above.

So, that is why you should have this in terms of your own income and your own sanity, but now we need to talk about HOW this impacts your ICP and try and bring this runaway train of a tangent back to its original purpose.

We need to have a “must have” requirement or set of requirements because when we do so, it will completely change how we do our marketing and client acquisition.

Going back to the example of me and my niche, with agency owners between $500,000 and $5 million per year vs. agency owners either doing $10k per month or even those who haven’t even started their agency yet, the paid ads, content, and outreach you will do are COMPLETELY different.

If you look through my YouTube channel, what do you see?

You will see many things, but nowhere on there will you see a video titled something along the lines of:

Why?

Because I don’t work with those people or have anything to offer them.

Any paid ad I create with that messaging, or YouTube video I publish, or cold email script I write will, in no way, ever resonate with my ICP or get them to respond.

Ever.

It’s not rocket science.

It is for a very simple reason:

They do not have that problem anymore.

They have already started their agency, and have already gotten their first client.

It would be like trying to sell a stroller to my mother.

I was a baby at one point, but at the time of this, I am 29 years old.

It would not matter how good of a price the stroller company could give, or how good of a reputation they have, or how good their product was.

My mother simply has no need for a stroller anymore for any reason, and even if it was free, likely would not take it.

Most people do the exact same thing (unintentionally) with their paid ads, content, and outreach, and that’s why it doesn’t work.

Almost all the time, people have messaging for the “right” target market but it is attracting too low-level of a client in the same market.

If I was doing this wrong, it would be talking about problems, circumstances, and outcomes for agencies from $0–$500k per year, instead of problems, circumstances, and outcomes for agencies $500k+.

Let’s do a few examples so we can see what’s right and what’s wrong in the context of my ICP and offer:

Wrong:

Right:

The messaging does the targeting, and going back to the overall point of this entire thing, you need to know your ICP because if you don’t, you’ll never be able to create the right messaging and will be attracting the wrong people.

It is the same thing with messaging.

Every industry has its own lingo and language they use, and it is common for different levels of business owners in the same industry to use different language to describe the same problems.

A good example is in ecommerce.

Low-level brands talk about things like profit margin, ROAS, and revenue.

High-level brands talk about things like contribution margin, incrementality, and GMV.

There are slight nuances between the things in this example, but they are largely talking about and referring to the same thing.

If you don’t know your ICP, you will not use the proper language you need to use to signal that you know what you’re talking about.

I personally think most of the high-level language is pretty lame and pretentious, but I also like making tons of money, so I suck it up and use it.

The next thing is something that I went in-depth on earlier so I won’t do that again here, but a super-specific ICP is a life-saver when avoiding nightmare clients who will damage your margins, demoralize your team, and make your life hell.

Without a dialed-in ICP, you will end up with 10x+ more nightmare clients.

Trust me on that.

The final reason for this has to do specifically with paid ads, and that is one of pixel conditioning.

This is kind of an infuriating subject to me just because in my consulting business, as well as my pay-per-lead business, I usually deal with people who do not understand this concept whatsoever and it ruins the performance of ad campaigns 24/7/365.

For the sake of time, let’s go through this as simply as possible.

Facebook (Meta) is worth around $2 trillion at the time of this.

Do companies get a $2 trillion market cap for no reason? Is it random?

No.

It’s not.

It signifies they are very valuable, and they are very valuable because they are the best at something.

Yes, yes, correct.

Facebook is the best at targeting and has the best algorithm if you want to generate leads and make money.

It has the best algorithm because it has the best machine learning and collects the most data.

The simple way this works is that every time there is a conversion, such as a call booked, Facebook takes the attributes of that profile, adds them to the attributes of other conversions, sees what they have in common, and then tries to put your ads in front of other Facebook users with similar attributes.

Facebook is the best at this.

Even if you get as little as 100 total conversions, the effectiveness of this learning and targeting becomes almost scary.

Facebook is always watching.

It knows all.

The problem happens when you don’t have a specific ICP and then you don’t use a qualifying form / application in your paid ad funnel to filter out anyone who does not meet your “must haves.”

In my case it’s $500,000 in annual revenue.

If I do this properly, I will filter out everyone under that with a Typeform or equivalent tool and 100% of the call booked conversions will be within my ICP, meaning people / agency owners doing $500k per year.

When this happens, Facebook will quickly get a clear picture of who I want to target and who I don’t.

It will begin serving my ads to rich agency owners at a pace that’s 100x better than it would be without this “must have” requirement.

The opposite is also true.

If I just say my ICP is “any agency owner,” then my pixel and targeting are going to be clogged up with complete beginners, and that data is going to be sent back to Facebook, and the targeting will actually get worse and worse over time.

Even if 51% of your data being sent to Facebook is unqualified, that 51% quickly becomes 55%, then 60%, then 70%, and so on.

Soon, ALL your booked calls will be unqualified.

This manifests with your consulting clients saying:

“My ads start out okay then just suddenly die.”

…over and over again while simultaneously ignoring your advice to filter all those people out.

So, what’s the point of this extremely long explanation?

The point is that you need to figure out your ICP based on data, past clients, and so on.

Not by just guessing or making it too broad.

Without doing this, you cannot hope to succeed.

The to-do list on your end is quite simple today:

It will never be 100% perfect.

There will always be extremes and outliers on each end, but look for that middle 80%.

What happens when you do this?

Oh, I’ll leave that to you to figure out, but I think you’ll like the result.

And as always, if you want me to tell you how bad your ICP is and how bad you’re screwing up, book a call with Lead Generation Academy and I’ll see if you qualify.

Book a call at https://leadgenerationacademy.ai