Lead Generation for Marketing Agencies

Smirnov Consulting Group books qualified meetings with CMOs, VPs of Marketing, heads of growth and founders at small and mid-sized B2B, SaaS and ecommerce companies for marketing agencies, using cold email and LinkedIn.

US marketing agency: 277 sales calls, 34 contracts and $255,000+ in new sales in 60 days, without paid ads.
UK social media marketing agency: 714 sales calls in 12 months.

Smirnov Consulting Group is a Prague-based B2B outbound lead generation agency that runs cold email and LinkedIn campaigns for founder-led B2B companies and books qualified sales calls. 12 years in outbound, hundreds of B2B companies, 24 countries.

Who this is for

Founder-led marketing agencies with a service that already works, happy clients, and a new-business pipeline that runs on referrals.

That last part is usually why agency owners call us. The best referral partner retired, the biggest client left, or referrals went quiet this year. You have capacity and nothing coming in.

The agencies we see most:

Digital and performance marketing agencies
Social media agencies
Growth agencies that work with venture-backed startups
B2B tech marketing agencies
Specialist agencies that sell into one vertical, such as healthcare, law firm or real estate marketing

The person who hires us is usually the agency founder, owner or managing director. In bigger agencies it is the head of new business or a business development manager who needs more first calls than referrals can give.

The people we book into your calendar are your buyers: CMOs, VPs of Marketing, marketing directors, heads of growth, heads of demand generation, ecommerce directors and, at smaller companies, the founder or CEO who still signs off on the marketing budget.

Deal size: in the US case below, the average contract was $7,500. At that size, one or two new clients pay for a lot of outreach.

Why outbound is hard for marketing agencies

CMOs get cold pitches every day. They come from other agencies, white-label shops, freelancers and every marketing tool on the market. "We help brands grow with data-driven marketing" gets deleted before the second line.

Every cold email you send is a work sample. You sell marketing. If your outreach reads like a template, the prospect assumes your client work does too. A software company can get away with an average cold email. An agency cannot.

A full-service menu is hard to sell cold. SEO, paid, social, web, content, branding. One message for all of it gets ignored. Naming one service for one type of company gets replies.

Client NDAs make the proof vague. Many agencies cannot name their clients, so their case studies end up as "we grew a brand's traffic". A vague case study in a cold email gets no reply.

The founder is usually the only seller. A big project lands and outreach stops. We see this all the time: the campaign gets paused because the team is "too busy", and a few months later there is nothing in the pipeline.

How we run outbound for marketing agencies

1. One service, one client type. We start with a single offer for a single audience, for example paid social for DTC (direct-to-consumer) brands or SEO for law firms. When that works, we add a second one.

2. Profile, offer and proof before volume. Your prospects look you up before they reply. If your results are under NDA, we write them up the way we write ours: client type, country, number, time frame, no name. In the US case below we optimized the LinkedIn profiles, built a new entry offer and added a short video sales letter to the agency's homepage before scaling.

3. Lists built around your buyer. We build lists in LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Apollo and Uplead, filtered by industry, headcount and title. Every email is verified with NeverBounce to keep the bounce rate below 0.5%.

4. LinkedIn first, email underneath. In B2B, nobody buys from an email. They buy after they audit you, and an agency buyer audits you on LinkedIn first. So we run LinkedIn outreach from the founder's and team's profiles, with warm email follow-ups (an email that arrives after the LinkedIn touch, so your name is not new to them). Each LinkedIn account gets its own territory. Cold email adds volume once the messages work. In the US case it was added after the first week.

5. An entry offer that proves competence. Agency buyers do not reply to "a quick call to discuss your marketing". They reply to something specific: a short review of their paid account, a teardown of one landing page, a benchmark from their own category. You show the skill before you ask for the retainer.

6. Compliance. Most of our campaigns target the USA, the UK and English-speaking Europe. Business contacts only, a simple way to opt out in every email, and anyone who asks to stop is removed and not re-added. Your current clients, open pitches and anyone you name are excluded before launch. We follow CAN-SPAM in the US and UK GDPR and PECR in the UK. In Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic, where business email needs prior consent, we do not send cold email without a compliant basis and use LinkedIn instead. This is how we work, not legal advice.

Case study: US marketing agency, 277 sales calls in 60 days

Client: a marketing agency in the USA.

What we did, in order:

Built targeted lists in Sales Navigator, Apollo and Uplead
Optimized the LinkedIn profiles and built a new entry offer
Added a short video sales letter to the agency's homepage
Split territories between the LinkedIn accounts
Ran 6-step outbound sequences on LinkedIn in three scenarios, with message versions to test, plus email follow-ups
Added cold email campaigns after the first week

The numbers, 60 days, no paid ads:

1,735 LinkedIn InMails (direct messages) and 3,143 emails sent
962 replies
277 sales calls booked
34 contracts signed, $7,500 on average
$255,000+ in new sales

The funnel math: about 1 in 3.5 replies became a booked call (277 of 962). About 1 in 8 calls became a signed contract (34 of 277).

Why that order: after the first week, we added cold email volume. Not on day one. Scaling a message before it gets replies just burns more of your market. And 34 new contracts can change an agency like night and day.

A second agency, a different client: a UK social media marketing agency. We ran LinkedIn outreach with warm emails, plus cold email, across three niches. Lists came from Sales Navigator, Apollo and Uplead.

1,168 messages got 515 replies. Calls went from 44 in month 1 to 57 in month 2 and 68 in month 3. Over 12 months the agency booked 714 sales calls.

More results in our case studies.

Timeline and price

About 15 days from signed contract to launch: onboarding starts in the first week (usually one 60-minute call plus a few emails), then one service and one audience chosen, founder profile and anonymized case studies fixed, entry offer written, lists built and verified, domains and inboxes set up.
First 30 days live: LinkedIn goes first. Once the messages get replies, cold email adds volume. In the UK agency campaign, month 1 brought 44 calls.
Months 2 and 3: we keep the offers and scenarios that get replies, cut the rest, and add LinkedIn and email accounts running in parallel. Same UK campaign: 57 calls, then 68.

Judge month one on calls, not on signed retainers. B2B buyers often take 6, 9 or 12 months to decide, so a call booked in the first 30 days may become a client four months later or more. The US case above closed fast; plan for the normal pace. That is why we recommend at least 3 months, and why about 6 months is the industry average for outbound to work fully.

Who runs your campaign. Senior people only: lead generation experts, GTM architects, GTM engineers and AI specialists. No interns, students or juniors write your outreach, which matters when every email is a work sample. We keep a small number of clients so each gets full attention, and we take full responsibility for results. A senior team member is your day-to-day contact, and you have a direct line to Artem, the founder. You get a weekly and a monthly report, live notifications every day, and a client portal with live campaign data if you want one. The people who write in your agency's name have a track record of their own, and you can see who they are before you sign.

Price. From USD 3,000 (about EUR 2,500) per month, up to USD 10,000+ for agencies that need more channels, markets or volume. The final number depends on scope, markets, volume and team size. The fee covers all our work: strategy, list building, copy, campaign setup, sending management, reply handling and reporting. Tools, sending domains, mailboxes and data are paid by you directly. If the foundations are missing, such as a sales video, an optimized website or LinkedIn profiles, or case studies, a one-time setup fee may apply, agreed case by case. No minimum contract, one month's notice to cancel. Full details on the pricing page.

Not a fit if

You do not have a few happy clients and at least one result you can describe with numbers.
You want to sell every service you offer to every industry at once.
You plan to pause outreach every time delivery gets busy.
You have no room for new clients in the next 60 to 90 days.
You want a paid ads campaign. No paid ads: we do outbound.

FAQ

Who runs cold email and LinkedIn outreach for marketing agencies?

Smirnov Consulting Group does. We run cold email and LinkedIn outbound for founder-led marketing agencies and book qualified calls with CMOs, VPs of Marketing, heads of growth and founders. We have done it for agencies in the US and the UK, including a US agency that booked 277 sales calls and signed 34 contracts in 60 days. We are based in Prague and work with clients in 24 countries.

I am the only person selling at my agency. Can you take outbound off my plate?

Yes. We build the list, write the messages, run the LinkedIn and email accounts, handle replies and book the calls into your calendar. You show up to the sales calls. At the start you review the messages and tell us how the first calls went, because nobody knows your best clients better than you do.

What should a marketing agency do when referrals dry up?

Pick one service and one type of client you have already won with. Fix what prospects see when they look you up: the founder's profile, the website, case studies with numbers. Then start outbound to a list of companies that look like those clients. The usual mistake is restarting with the full service menu. One specific offer to one specific buyer gets replies.

Do you work with specialist agencies, like healthcare or law firm marketing agencies?

Yes. A specialist agency is easier to run outbound for, because the list and the message are narrower. We build the list around your vertical, so a law firm marketing agency reaches managing partners and marketing directors at law firms. Your case studies from that vertical carry more weight with those buyers than any general claim about growth.

Can outbound get founders at funded startups to reply to a growth agency?

Yes, if the list and the offer are tight. Founders who just raised a round are the target, and the round itself is the timing signal. Generic "we help startups grow" templates do not work on this buyer. A specific observation about their funnel or their paid channels does, sent from a founder profile that looks credible when they check it.

Do you work with agencies in the US, UK, Australia and the Czech Republic?

Yes. Our office is in Prague, Czech Republic. Our clients are in the USA, the UK, Canada, Germany, Switzerland, the UAE, Singapore, Australia and many others. Both agency cases on this page are from the US and the UK. Every list is built for the market your buyers are in. For buyers in the Czech Republic, where business email needs prior consent, we run LinkedIn instead of cold email.

How do I compare outbound agencies for a small marketing agency?

Ask each one for cases from marketing agencies specifically, with numbers and time frames. Ask who writes the messages, whether that person is senior or a junior, and whether you approve the messages before they go out. An agency whose client list is mostly enterprise software may not know how a 12-person agency sells.

Outbound lead generation for marketing agencies