What is the best lead source for a marketing agency?

It depends on your service. Paid media agencies do well with Google advertisers. Content and social agencies do well with companies hiring a marketing role. Brand and reputation work suits companies with slipping public reviews.

Is a company hiring a marketer a lead or a lost cause?

Often a lead. A company hiring one marketer usually needs more capacity than one person brings, and an agency can cover the gap while the role is filled or support the new hire afterwards.

Can I use Sluice to prospect for my clients as well?

Yes. The Agency plan allows unlimited customer profiles, one per client, so you can run lead generation as a service alongside your own new business.

Does Sluice report on campaigns or ad performance?

No. It finds, scores and helps you reach people. Campaign reporting, ad management and analytics stay in the tools you use now.

How marketing agencies can find new clients

New business is the job nobody at the agency has time for

Agencies sell marketing and are usually bad at marketing themselves. Client work always wins the calendar. New business arrives through referrals and the occasional pitch, and revenue swings with it.

A workable system has to run mostly on its own and produce a short list each week that a director can act on in an hour. This page sets one up.

Three buyer situations worth hunting

Rather than "businesses that need marketing", hunt specific situations. Each has a source in Sluice that fits it.

1. Spending on ads, possibly badly

A company bidding on Google has budget and believes in paid acquisition. Search Google advertisers by keyword and place: "solar panel installer Kent", "private dentist London". Then use "People there" to find the marketing lead or owner in the directory. Previews are free, and only people scoring 70 or more are revealed, at 5 cents each.

2. Hiring a marketer

A company advertising for a marketing manager, content lead or paid social specialist has decided to invest and has not yet got the people. Search companies hiring by role and place. The directory's "Hiring for" filter also finds people at companies hiring for a given role, so you can reach the founder or head of growth directly.

3. Customers complaining in public

Companies whose Trustpilot reviews are sliding, or whose social posts collect angry comments, have a reputation or communication problem. Paste their Trustpilot page and the reviewers become leads; more usefully for an agency, the pattern of complaints tells you what to pitch the company itself.

Signals to watch on LinkedIn and Reddit

Phrases of three or more words that tend to come from people who might hire an agency:

"our agency isn't delivering"
"looking for a marketing agency"
"ads stopped converting"
"need help with content"
"first marketing hire"

Each signal records searches opened, people found and how many cleared 70, so you can drop the ones that mostly attract freelancers looking for work.

Example: a month on the Agency plan

The following is a worked example to show how credits are used, not a prediction. A 12-person agency picks Agency at $149 a month: 20,000 credits in the first month (a credit is one cent), lookups at supplier cost plus 40%, and unlimited customer profiles.

Week	Activity	Credits budgeted
1	Profile for own new business. Four Google advertiser searches in two sectors	3,000 (price shown before each run)
2	Two companies-hiring searches for marketing roles; "People there" previews free; 60 reveals at 5 credits	2,000 + 300
3	Signals on LinkedIn and Reddit, run by Autopilot under a daily ceiling	3,000
4	Two client profiles set up for lead generation as a service	8,000
Reserve	Reruns and email lookups (misses are not billed)	about 3,700

Two connected sending accounts (say a director's LinkedIn and the new-business inbox) add $21.60 a month. From month two, the plan carries 14,900 credits.

The first message: show your work

Agencies get pitched by other agencies constantly, so the bar is high.

Make one specific observation from what you found: the ad, the job post, the review pattern.
Say what you would test first, in a sentence.
Ask whether it is worth a short conversation.

Example: "Your ads for 'emergency boiler repair' send people to the home page, which leads with your company history. We would test a page that leads with the callout time. Worth a look at a mock-up?"

Sluice drafts several versions from what it found and scores each, with a reason, before it can be queued. Sequences stop on any reply, a "no", a bounce or the do-not-contact list, and HubSpot customers and open deals are never cold-pitched. See stop pitching your own customers.

Honest gaps for marketing agencies

No ad spend estimates or creative libraries. You see who advertises, not how much they spend.
HubSpot is the only CRM integration; agencies on Salesforce or Pipedrive will need to export.
Event signals such as "raised money" are not available yet.
Website visitor identification works for companies that own their network, which excludes most small businesses.
It is new and unproven at large volume, without public customer reviews yet.

Which plan?

A small agency doing only its own new business can run comfortably on Working at $39. Once you want separate profiles per client, or you resell lead generation, Agency at $149 is the one, and bring-your-own data key removes the markup entirely. The broader agency setup is in lead generation for agencies and lead gen for many clients.