What does an agency do for the money?
An agency does outreach at volume for the fee: it builds a list, sends emails or messages in your name, handles the back and forth, and puts booked calls on your calendar. Some add a landing page or an ad campaign. The deliverable is almost always the same, and it's meetings.
That's a real service, and it's one slice of one system. Marketing brings the right people into your orbit. A sales system leads those people to a yes, and I teach the two separately for a reason. An agency touches the first one, at the top, in the coldest place it operates.
So the question worth asking is what the calls are worth when they arrive:
- Who did they reach? People who match the work you want, or people who match a job title on a list.
- What did they say you do? Their words for your expertise become the first impression, and you inherit it.
- What happens after the booking? They hand you the meeting and stop there.
Why don't the calls an agency books turn into clients?
A booked call and an interested person are two different things. Someone who agreed to a meeting from a cold email arrives with no context, no trust, and often no budget conversation behind them. You then spend the call doing the work the outreach was supposed to have started.
The people who already know you behave differently. They've seen your thinking, so they arrive believing you can help, and the conversation starts much further along.
That's why I point women at their existing contacts before anything else. I teach it as the Shoulder Tap, a short warm email to someone who already knows your work, and I'm straight about the numbers even there: send ten warm emails and you might get one or two responses. That's normal, and it's still a better return than a stranger list.
The part no volume of bookings can fix
A second reason sits underneath the first. A B2B consulting sale involves several people and several months. Even a perfect first conversation has to survive an internal approval you aren't in the room for, which no volume of bookings changes.
Is there a version of hiring an agency that works?
Yes, in one situation: when the rest of your system is already working and outreach is the only thing you're short of. If people who talk to you sign with you, and your own marketing brings in a steady trickle, then paying someone to widen the top can pay off.
Test yourself against all four before you sign anything:
- Your positioning is settled. You can say what you do and who it's for in a sentence, and it lands. If it doesn't, an agency will just broadcast the confusion to more people.
- Your conversations convert. Enough of the people who talk to you go on to hire you that you trust the process you run.
- You have somewhere warm to send attention. A place your name points to that does some work for you, which is the same reason your website earns its keep or doesn't.
- You can fund it long enough to learn something. A few weeks of cold outreach tells you nothing.
Fail any one of them and the money is buying activity around a gap you haven't fixed yet.
I already hired an agency. Did I waste my money?
No, hiring an agency isn't wasted money, and I'd tell you not to walk away from the contract in a hurry. Plenty of women reach me having already signed with someone, halfway through, and the sunk cost is real. Treat it as an experiment you're already funding.
Give it one question and a date:
| What to look at | The honest read |
|---|
| Who's showing up | Are these the people you want, or people who match a filter? |
| What happens on the call | Do you spend it explaining, or do they arrive halfway convinced? |
| What comes after | Any second conversations, or does it all stall politely? |
| What you're learning | Their outreach is a test of your message. What came back? |
These are the same questions worth asking about anyone you pay to help you grow. Answer them at a date you set now, then decide once. And whatever the agency is doing, keep sending your own warm emails alongside it.
Leah's take
Real talk: I hear from a lot of women who bought one piece of the answer. They aren't foolish for it. Somebody sold it to them. There's a whole industry built on convincing a smart, busy person that one thing, the website, the rebrand, the outreach, is what stands between her and a full business. Ask any of them point blank whether their one thing solves the whole problem end to end and they'd have to admit it doesn't.
Here's what I want you to hear: you're not missing a vendor. You have real ingredients already, the expertise, the results, the clients who love you. What's missing is the recipe, and a recipe isn't something you can buy by the piece.
I think about marketing kind of like medicine. Some of it is fast acting and some of it is slow release, and a business needs both. An agency sells you one dose of the fast kind and calls it a system. Meanwhile the slow release part, the writing, the relationships, your own voice, is what keeps working after the contract ends.
The Academy is where I teach both systems, with a room of women building the same thing.
