The Great Mismatch: Why Most Agency Sales Advice Doesn’t Apply to You

12 snips

Nov 5, 2025

Discover the concept of 'The Great Mismatch' as outdated marketing advice is challenged for boutique agencies. Explore the importance of understanding market size and building trust in a skeptical climate. Learn about balancing direct outreach with systematic referrals to create a reliable growth engine. Dan shares insights on leveraging LinkedIn for mapping connections and boosting referrals without awkwardness. Tune in for a systematic approach to transforming relationships into predictable pipelines!

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Books

Transcript

Episode notes

ANECDOTE

Englander’s Agency Background

Dan Englander describes his background leading new business and founding Sales Schema after agency experience.
He moved from lead-gen outreach to training agencies on in-house systems.

INSIGHT

Trust Recession And Market Crowding

The agency market grew 54% from 2018–2023, increasing boutique competition.
This 'trust recession' lengthens sales cycles and raises the need for specialized credibility.

INSIGHT

The Great Mismatch

Most agency growth playbooks assume you have a sales team, a simple offer, and a huge market.
Boutique agencies with complex offers and small teams need a different operating system.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

In this solo episode, Dan Englander breaks down a truth most agency owners quietly suspect: the majority of sales and marketing advice out there was never written for firms like yours.

Most “agency growth” tactics are built for high-volume, productized services with large addressable markets—not for boutique, complex-service agencies selling trust, nuance, and strategy to a few hundred ideal clients.

Dan calls this dynamic “The Great Mismatch.”

He unpacks why the standard playbooks fail, what constraints actually define upmarket agencies, and how to replace random referrals with a systematic, high-trust growth engine.

In this episode
• The Great Mismatch: How agency sales advice got optimized for SaaS and high-volume lead-gen firms, not for complex, relationship-driven work.
• The Three Constraints Framework: Why your resources, offer, and market size determine your best-fit growth strategy.
• The Trust Recession: Why decision-makers are slower to move, and how to build credibility in smaller, skeptical markets.
• High School Gym vs. NFL Stadium: How to visualize your true total addressable market and stop over-optimizing for scale.
• The Two-Pronged Framework: How to balance direct outreach with systematic referrals and partnerships.
• The Referral Engine Playbook: Step-by-step—identifying “Referral-Ready Connectors,” mapping your market in LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and running collaborative intro calls that produce real pipeline.
• Partnerships Without the Awkwardness: Why commission-based partner pitches don’t work and how to build trust-first collaboration loops.

Key Idea
“Most of what’s being sold as ‘agency growth’ advice assumes you have a sales team, a simple offer, and a massive market. But if your service is complex, your team is lean, and your clients are few, you need a different operating system entirely.” — Dan Englander

Resources Mentioned
Relationship Sales at Scale → salesschema.com/book
Referral Network Diagnostic Workshop → salesschema.com/diagnostic

Takeaway
For boutique agencies, growth doesn’t come from chasing more leads—it comes from getting more leverage out of the relationships you already have.

The sooner you recognize The Great Mismatch, the sooner you can build a system that actually fits your market, your team, and your offer.