Greg Hickman

Helping agencies, consultants and freelancers take back control of their business , create wild profits, and grow with certainty without sacrificing time with family.

🕬 ATTN: Agency Owners, Freelancers & Service Providers

Do You Know the Reason You Cannot lift the ceiling on your client capacity while removing yourself from day-to-day fulfillment ...?

You have not yet had a true SYSTEM to take the best of what you have to offer and transform it into your unique solution, rather than being viewed as a commoditized service provider.

Here's a few things we do that nobody else does:

✅ Create (or makeover your existing service menu into) your productized service suite

✅ Create and build a systematic sales experience so you only sell to the right people while optimizing your time

✅ Structure and deploy a new client on-boarding experience and client fulfillment process that sets clients up for success without your 1:1 involvement

✅ Identify and build the right team of people and processes to free your time as the owner and escape the day-to-day

✅ Scale your team and your systems around each of the critical areas of your business: Sales, Marketing, Fulfillment and Operations

✅ Deliver an operating and communication cadence for you to continually meet the goals of your strategic plan.

If you meet the following criteria we need to talk:

-You're sick and tired of not knowing how to scale your client capacity without getting buried in fulfillment.

-Perhaps you know that you need mentoring to take it to the next level.

-Or maybe you've 'already bought a Guru’s course on scaling’...and it didn't work.

Time and time again, we speak with burnt-out agency owners who know they need to change things in order to scale...

They just need a proven system to do it.

----------------------------------

Now imagine if you had that system...

A systematized process that helped you to design your 100% unique service offering (so that your clients get great results and delivering it is easy and fun for you and your team) 

Imagine discovering how to deliver your service (and what format to deliver it in, so that you maximize profits and time without sacrificing client results)

What if you KNEW that you had a dream team that helps roll out the systems and process to run the business without you involved in the day-to-day.

And...

🎯 How would you like to scale the business up with the latest strategies and systems to build a business that runs without you? 🎯

You can.

That's what we help you do: ► https://altagency.com/mw-watch-li

✉ Email me directly with your questions ☛ hello@altagency.com


Owner and Founder AltAgency

We help agency owners, freelancers and service providers grow and scale without working nights and weekends. 

Less Done-For-You. More Leverage. Better Results. It's a Win-Win.

I founded Sales Schema in 2014 as a business development consultancy for marketing agencies.  


We help increase agency dealflow by: 

1) ATTRACTING IDEAL CLIENTS (targeted lead generation)
2) KEEPING YOUR PIPELINE CONSISTENTLY FULL so you know where tomorrow's business will come from
3) GIVING YOU A SCALABLE AND REPEATABLE NEW BUSINESS CHANNEL so you can grow steadily and reach new buyers and markets


I increase 4 KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS:

✓ Number of “ideal” qualified prospects in your pipeline
✓ Revenue per client
✓ Sales conversion rate
✓ Overall revenue, Profit Margins and ROI

CLIENTS we seek to partner with: 

✓ Marketing service companies w/ $500k-50M in revenue
✓ Ad agencies
✓ Branding agencies
✓ Creative services
✓ PR and communications agencies 
✓ Design and development 
✓ Market research 
✓ Direct marketing agencies 

CONTACT ME:

Link and message me, or email Dan@SalesSchema.com. 

Specialties: lead generation, targeted email campaigns, LinkedIn lead generation, outbound lead generation, sales training, account management training, marketing automation.

Dan Englander

Agency owners: 

We're building something with a few clients right now that I want to share because the process itself is worth stealing.

In one working session, got the owner and two of his team leads on a call and started going through their networks together. Just scrolling through LinkedIn connections and rattling off names. 

Within 20 minutes they had 20+ names: former clients, industry contacts, partners they hadn't talked to in years. People they'd completely forgotten about. 

And the best part was watching them trigger each other's memories. One person would say a name and someone else would go "oh yeah, what about so-and-so?" and suddenly there's a whole branch of warm connections nobody had thought about in months.

Here's what makes this powerful:

Your partners and accounts people often have deeper and different day-to-day relationships than you do. 

They're the ones who remember the client from two years ago who loved working with you, the marketing director moved on to a VP role at a different company in the same industry. Or that business partner who was in touch with five competing agencies six months ago. Or the data vendor who's hyper-connected in your space and shows up at every conference. That knowledge is just sitting there.

This exercise alone can expand your warm network to all sorts of places you didn't realize you had trust and access, as opposed to going cold and burning hours on outreach that probably won't land.

So what does this actually look like?

Get your team in a room (or on a call). Look through your first-degree networks together. Find the people you'd actually feel comfortable asking for a referral or re-engaging with to catch up casually. 

Then make sure one person owns this. Not "everybody kind of does it when they have time." One person leads the charge on outreach, follow-up, and making sure intros actually happen. If a particular team member is the one with the relationship, the point person goes to them and says "hey, remember you said you could help me reach so-and-so? Here's a template you can use to make the intro. Let's get it done this week." 

Without that ownership it stays on everyone's back burner forever. 


🚀P.S. We're helping agency teams run exactly this process through our Referral Engine program. 

👇 If want to learn more (and we're connected), go to the link in the comments to schedule time with me.

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Referral Engine landing page: https://hey.salesschema.com/referral-engine-lp

RSAS

The book: https://hey.salesschema.com/rsas-v1

Referral Engine

Full episode: https://salesschema.com/storytelling-trust-and-the-long-game-of-agency-growth-with-alex-marshall/

RSAS v2

nick p

episode: https://salesschema.com/the-big-themes-from-2025/

book v2

Referral Engine - mar 2026

I help agencies scale through systematic referrals and strategic partnerships.

Agency owners: 

Here's a good rule - if you didn't help write the RFP it's probably NOT worth answering. 

I just sat down with Chris Rose, who's led new business at shops like Movers and Shakers and now Cylndr, landing Hilton, Planet Fitness, NBC Universal.

His take on RFPs is something every BizDev leader is one you might agree with:

They're almost always written by someone who doesn't fully understand the work. Key information is missing, the brief is vague, and you're spending non-billable hours shooting in the dark. 

So Chris built a different process, which we covers in today's episode. 

👇 Link the comments

Executive Director of Growth | 3x Chief of Staff | Former Account Lead | Building the Growth Engine for a Creative-First Production Studio

Agency owners:

One of my favorite questions to ask agency leaders and their teams is "what do you enjoy doing most?"

Not what are you good at, or what's your role, but what do you actually enjoy?

I was on a call recently with a new biz dev hire at an agency. When I asked him this, he lit up. He talked about meeting people, building relationships, getting introductions, pitching the work. It wasn't just what he said, it was the energy shift. He perked up and everyone couldn't help but smile as he was talking. 

That told me more about whether this person would succeed in the role than any resume or track record could.

I bring this up because a common failure mode with sales hires is bringing on somebody who doesn't actually want to be in sales. Either they've been conscripted into it because that's where the agency needs help and they're hiring internally, or they've settled into a sales role when they'd really rather be leading accounts or doing something else entirely.

These people can be talented. They can even produce results for a while. But the work will always feel like friction to them, and eventually that friction wins.

An 80/20 way to figure this out: ask "what's the work you enjoy doing most?" and then shut up. Let the silence hang and watch what happens.

This question works beyond hiring too. Ask it to prospects and you'll learn what they actually care about versus what they think they should care about. Ask it to clients and you'll find out where the real enthusiasm lives on their team. Ask it to yourself and you might learn something uncomfortable about how you're spending your time.


🚀 P.S. I write about this and other hiring and biz dev pitfalls in Relationship Sales at Scale. Link in the comments if you want to check it out.

Agency owners: 

What biz dev tasks are still worth doing by hand?

Sure, automation is great. Depending on your situation, maybe that means ads, outreach sequences, scheduled broadcasts to your list, or LinkedIn posts queued up for the month.

But somewhere in there, you're also putting in manual time. A few hours per week, maybe more, on prospecting and pipeline. The question is whether that time is well-invested.

I used to spend manual time researching prospects and writing custom emails. I'd find something specific about their situation and reference it. It worked for a while. Now, AI has made it possible for everyone to do a version of this at scale, which means the custom email that took me 15 minutes reads the same as the one a bot wrote in milliseconds. Even when mine is genuinely researched, it hits a wall of skepticism.

I also used to spend time on one-to-one follow-ups with prospects who didn't buy weeks or months ago. I still do some of this, but less, because automated nurture sequences and broadcast emails do most of that heavy lifting now.
So what's left?

If it's NOT automated it should be high-leverage.

And if you sell complex, high-value services to skeptical buyers, the high-leverage opportunity is probably nurturing partnerships.

Think former clients who moved to new companies, non-competing agencies that serve your same buyers, re-sellers, software companies, private equity, venture capital.

Why this is hard to automate: relationships are complicated and often fragile. The cost of sending a templated message to a close business contact, someone who could refer you business for years, is higher than most people realize. It doesn't just fail to work, it can actively erode trust.

But sitting down and writing that person a real message, asking how you can help, following up on something specific from your last conversation — that still moves mountains.

The re-allocation I've seen work:

Take that hour or two per week you used to spend on cold prospecting and redirect it toward developing tomorrow's high-leverage opportunities. Partners who can get you in front of their audiences, connectors who can introduce you to several ideal prospects over time, relationships that compound instead of expiring.

This means having a system, not automation. A defined process for identifying who in your network A. would help you and vice versa, B. from that group, who has access to your prospects, and C. 1-3 ways to collaborate. Systematized, not automated.

The irony is this is less total work than cold outreach. Fewer messages, fewer people, and far better odds. As skepticism keeps rising, the manual stuff that's worth doing gets narrower, but more valuable.

🚀 The Referral Engine is our 90-day program where I work one-on-one with agency owners to set up a referral and partnership-based new business system. I'm looking to work with two new agencies in March. 

👇 If you're interested, I've included the landing page in the comments...

Agency owners:

Imagine you're walking down the shampoo aisle at the grocery store.

Beautiful bottles everywhere. Leaves, flowers, fruit, luxurious packaging, gorgeous design. All of it catches your eye.

But at some point, the manufacturer has to put either "shampoo" or "lotion" on the bottle. Otherwise you're just standing there in a daze, unable to make the purchase you came for.

Same goes for agencies, software companies, consultancies, and everything in between.

I bring this up because I had a call last week with a data and software company that had just rebranded as an agency. They were ambivalent about it, which makes sense - a lot of people hate the word agency, a lot of people have bad experiences with agencies, and the market feels oversupplied.

But they made the decision because it was a better description of what they were actually doing, which involved proprietary software, data, a service element, and some training. 

But they can't just rattle off that description constantly because at some point people need to see shampoo or lotion on the bottle.

What's interesting is the rebrand usually goes the other way:

Up until recently, agencies were more likely to get shiny object syndrome and rebrand as software companies. And with vibe coding and AI, I do think there's massive opportunity for agencies to build proprietary tools and products around what they do.

But I don't think the rebrand I saw last week call was a one-off. I think it might be a trend as software companies introduce more training and accountability so they can defend themselves from AI-driven competition. 

The line between software, data, training, digital products, and services continues to get blurrier. It's becoming less about the category you fit into and more about solving a particular problem for a particular audience using some combination of tactics. Some things pre-built, some things proprietary, some things custom, some things in between.

But we all have to decide on which box to jump into - agency, software company, consultancy - at least for the window of time when our customers are strolling through the shampoo aisle. 


🚀 P.S. We did a workshop recently on how to position and prospect in a market that's getting noisier and more blurry by the day. DM me "workshop" if you want the replay link.

Agency owners: 

When it comes to business development, there's a psychological catch-22 that no one talks about. 

Implementing an reliable new business system always feels important but it doesn't ALWAYS feel urgent.

Here's the catch-22:

By the time improving pipeline feels urgent, it's too late to do anything but fall back on tasks that won't solve the root cause. 

You're not going to build an effective lead gen system when you're scrambling. When the problem feels urgent, you will need to do the things that produce revenue as fast as possible - manual outreach to old clients, pursuing follow-on work, calling late-stage prospects. Eating your vegetables. It's necessary work, but none of it changes the status quo.

And when pipeline feels important but NOT urgent? 

Here's what that looks like: 

You just closed a big deal or two through an inbound lead or referral. You're NOT going to feel like building the new thing. You're going to feel like the old thing is working fine. 

So there's no natural window where the timing feels right. That's the trap. 

So what do you do? 

The answer is talking to your future self.

Visualize the version of you when the chips are down again. Pipeline is empty, it's too late to do anything meaningful about it, and you're back to the same stress you've felt before. You know exactly what that feels like.

Now go the other direction...

Picture yourself as the owner who solved this. The one with enough leads and enough of a system to hire for biz dev and get out of the sales seat. The one who can politely turn down bad-fit clients instead of being forced to take them, who can ignore lengthy RFP processes that eat up the team's time. The one with new freedom and new options.

Live in that space - have a hell to run from and a heaven to run to.

Then, right now, while pipeline feels important but not urgent, start building the system. (or decide you're ok with the status quo - there's no shame in that).

Agency owners: 

If you haven't had success building partnerships, or you've felt awkward about asking for help, the answer might be an old cliche. 

Play positive-sum games and be abundant.

It's a cliché for a reason, and it's easier said than done. Here's how I've seen it work well for partnerships: 

1/ Start by deciding who you're willing to play positive-sum games with.

Everything else - their level of access to your prospects, the size of the opportunity, the potential commission - doesn't matter if this isn't someone you'd want to go to bat for, and vice versa. Relationships are complicated, and not enough sales tactics take that into consideration. You can waste enormous time and energy if you skip this step. That's why, in our process with clients, we start by assigning a comfort level before going any further. Not everyone will pass step #1, and that's ok.

2/ Be genuinely curious about what that person actually wants.

This isn't unlike any other sales conversation. You're not going to persuade someone to want something different than what they want. Having the awareness to ask the right questions, the patience to listen, and the willingness to act on what you hear - or be upfront that you can't help right now and move on - is what separates a real partnership from an awkward coffee chat.

3/ Reframe the things your head trash is telling you are zero-sum. 

The best partnerships I've built work in both directions - the person making the intro benefits too because it puts them top of mind with prospects and other potential partners. There are no withdrawals, only deposits. 

4/ Many genuine negative-sum issues can be improved with process optimizations. 

A lot of the time, the reason asking for help feels like an imposition is because your process is making it hard for the other person to help you. You're giving them work. Asking someone to "keep an ear to the ground" and make a referral is genuinely hard work for them.

But this is a process problem, not a relationship problem. Instead of "Do you know anyone," give them a short list of specific people you'd like to meet. Let them know exactly how you'll handle the conversation. Give them templates they can edit and send. Reduce the friction.

The common thread across all of this: most partnership discomfort comes from a lack of clarity, not a lack of generosity. Get clear on who you trust, what they want, and how to make it easy, and the abundance follows. 

--
🚀P.S. The Referral Engine is our 90-day program where I work one-on-one with agency owners to set up a referral and partnership-based new business system. I'm looking to work with two new agencies in March. 

👇 If you're interested, I've included the landing page in the comments...

Agency owners: 

What's the right time frame for planning your biz dev work? 

Not a day, not a quarter, it's one week...

Let me explain, because I think this is one of those things that doesn't get talked about enough. 

A mistake I see agency leaders make is planning their prospecting inputs in either too short or too long of a time frame.

Too short looks like: 

I'm going to write a custom cold email to this CMO about all the problems we can solve, and then expect an RFP to land in my inbox. Or I'm going to a trade show next week, I'll shake a bunch of hands and collect business cards, and expect business to come from it right away.

Too long looks like: 

I'm going to spend months building a complex outbound system with webhooks, warming up domains, building clay tables, layering in sequences, and then finally start reaching people. It's fragile, it's complicated, and when something breaks (which it will), the whole thing stalls.

Both of these miss the sweet spot.

The sweet spot is the week.

From one week to the next, you should be able to answer a few simple questions:

How many people am I engaging this week? 

If you're running LinkedIn auto-connect campaigns, are you reaching 20-30 people per day over the next seven days? If you're doing referral or partnership outreach, do you have one to three connector conversations booked? And in terms of outputs, how many prospect calls are on the calendar for this week? 

Why does the weekly time frame matter so much?

Because that's how your prospects think.

Most people scheduling calls with vendors or potential partners are thinking about the next seven days, maybe 14. Once you get past that window, there's a real inverse relationship with urgency. The likelihood that a call gets rescheduled or quietly dropped goes way up.

So if you plan in weekly batches, you're slotting into the way your prospects are actually managing their time. You're staying in their near-term window where things actually happen.

The week also keeps you honest. You can't hide behind "we're building the system" for three months. And you can't kid yourself that one heroic email is going to land a whale. It's just: what did I do this week, and what am I doing next week? 


P.S. I think you can broad-frame the one-week mindset to marketing and content as well, at least for social - that's what I do, and in a period of rapid change, I'm finding this cadence to be the right fit. 


🚀P.P.S. We did a workshop on how to build a weekly biz dev rhythm that actually sticks, even when client work is pulling you in every direction. 

DM me "workshop" if you want the replay.

Agency owners:

One good partner can be a game changer for your agency. 

The kind of relationship that produces consistent intros and real pipeline activity for years.

But most partnership calls are a waste of time, and it's usually because we treat them like networking instead of what they actually are.

The most-common mistake:

We put up an iron wall between "sales conversations" and "everything else." Partnership calls get filed under "everything else," which means no structure, no goal, and no outcome.

You get on, exchange pleasantries, talk about yourself for 25 minutes, say "let's keep in touch," and then nothing happens. If pipeline is the most important problem to solve, this time and energy can go to better things.

The reframe: a partnership call IS a sales call, just with a different action at the end. Instead of "do you want to buy my thing," it's "is there a way we can help each other's businesses?"

Once you believe that, the structure follows naturally.

1/ Have a script. 

Not word-for-word, but a framework. Quick intro, get permission to ask questions, then get them talking. Surface questions (what kind of clients are you working on?), business questions (how have you handled X in the past?), personal questions (what would having the right partner actually solve for you?). Let them tell you where the opportunities are rather than guessing.

2/ Come in with 1-3 arrows in the quiver for next steps. 

This is where most partnership calls fall apart. People think, "there's no proposal to pitch, so there's nothing to do." Wrong - maybe it's a mutual lunch and learn, a joint email broadcast, a podcast appearance, or specific intros to specific people. A few minutes of prep and you'll have options ready.

3/ Get them talking early. 

I recently reviewed a call that played out like a typical networking exchange, and 25 minutes in one party casually mentioned they were pivoting into a space where my client had deep experience and connections. That should have surfaced at minute 10, not minute 25, buried in tangents. Questions surface opportunities faster.

The usual objection: "Doesn't this make partnerships feel transactional?"

No, it makes them respect time. Having a process makes you more likely to unearth real opportunities to collaborate, versus hoping you stumble upon something.

--
🚀P.S. The Referral Engine is our 90-day program where I work one-on-one with agency owners to build a referral and partnership-based new business system. I'm looking to work with two new agencies in March. 

If you're interested (and we're connected), DM me "Referral Engine" and we'll explore further.

The fitness industry didn't exist a few decades ago. 

It started simple, with just a few weights, and then it got complicated... 

By the 80s and 90s, gyms were filled with giant machines, elaborate programs, and equipment that promised to do the work for you. The entire industry was using technology for the sake of using technology. If you've ever spent five minutes just trying to make a treadmill move normally, you know the feeling.

I sometimes wonder where are we in that same life cycle when it comes to the tools we use to find prospects, get their attention, nurture them, and convert them into clients. 

I think we're near the end of the complexity phase (but AI will bring a very loud "last gasp"). 

We've all made this way more complicated than it needs to be. We've added more tools, data enrichment, automations, dashboards, and integrations that don't quite work the way they're supposed to. And most of us can't fully explain what half of it is actually doing for us.

It had to reach this point - high complexity and massive amounts of data were probably necessary to get to the place where we could simplify again.

And that's exactly what happened in fitness. The fastest-growing training methods are focused on minimalism - a barbell, 3-5 compound exercises, mixed up through the week. Simple progressions with fewer moving parts, and better results for most people than the complicated stuff ever produced.

I think the same correction is coming for sales and biz dev, especially for agencies.

What if the answer is fewer relationships, but better ones? A handful of key partnerships with people who already trust you, serve your buyers, and would happily make intros if you made it easy for them?

What if instead of another CRM integration, data enrichment tool, or outbound sequence that feels murky, it was something you're already doing a version of, just without a system behind it?

What if the most effective pipeline motion for your agency looked less like a Stair Master machine and more like a barbell? A few key exercises practiced consistently with weight added over time. 


🚀 P.S. If you want help getting ripped from lifting the barbell, specifically by setting up and running a system based on partners, warm intros, and trust, I have something that can help. 👇Details in the comments.

taplio

The Battle

Greg Hickman

Dan Englander

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The Battle

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Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Dan Englander's LinkedIn Performance

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