Best lead generation agencies for marketing agencies

The 10 agencies at a glance

The four standards we judged everyone on

Most of this category sells to everyone and mentions agencies in a list of verticals. These four questions separate the ones who have actually done it.

1. Can they name an agency they have sold for? Not "we work with agencies." A named agency, with a number. Selling a $60,000 retainer to a marketing director is a different conversation from selling software seats, and an agency that has never done it will find out on your budget.

2. Can you see the price before a sales call? Four of the ten publish a price, including Grow Surely. It does not make the other six worse, but it tells you how long the buying process takes.

3. Is there a way to see it work before you pay? You already know what a confident pitch sounds like, because you give one. The question is what happens in month one if nothing lands.

4. Whose brand is on the work? Buying leads for your own new business and reselling lead generation to your clients are different purchases. Only one agency here is built for the second.

Based on what each publishes openly as of October 2026. "Not advertised" means we could not find it stated publicly, not that it does not exist - several will run a trial if you ask.

Grow Surely runs the first week free because most clients carry on afterwards. Retention sits at 95% a month, and a week of real meetings settles the question faster than any case study can. The honest limits are that there is no white-label option, so an agency reselling under its own brand is better served by Softtrix, and it is the newest firm on this list - Belkins has been at this since 2017.

1. Grow Surely

Best for: Agencies that want named proof from other agencies, and want to see it work before paying.

Agencies are the clients Grow Surely has the most named, checkable proof for. Five published case studies where the client is itself an agency, with the numbers attached and the people named.

The offer is the other half. Grow Surely works the first 7 days free, books 3 to 5 qualified meetings against criteria you set, and only then is there a contract to discuss. For an agency that has been burned by a retainer that produced nothing, that is the part that matters.

Lou Petracci Chief Revenue Officer, AdLeverage

"Our stats after four months: $35,000 spent, $1,585,000 in revenue generated. That's a 45.3X return."

Pros. The proof is agency-specific rather than generic B2B. AdLeverage, a full-service paid ads agency serving home service businesses, spent $35,000 and generated $1,585,000 in revenue over four months - a 45.3X return, and their Chief Revenue Officer says so by name above. Courimo, an SEO agency, was broken into the US market for $100,000+ in revenue and 33 meetings in 2 months. JARS Digital, a B2B SaaS demand gen agency, closed $150,000+ and 86 meetings in 9 months. Bound Marketing, a UK HubSpot partner agency, saw $600,000+ in pipeline and 65+ leads in 4 months. Freshwater Creative, a creative agency, took 197 qualified leads in 6 months and is still a client at ten months. Monthly retention sits at 95%.

Cons. Single channel. If you want cold calling and LinkedIn coordinated alongside, Belkins and Martal do that and Grow Surely does not. There is no white-label option either, so an agency reselling under its own brand is better served by Softtrix.

Verdict. Pick Grow Surely if you want the work to prove itself before money changes hands. Look elsewhere if you need cold calling and LinkedIn coordinated under one roof.

Ask them this. Ask for the pilot to run on a segment you pick, not one they pick. A pilot run on the easiest slice of your market converts beautifully and tells you nothing about the rest of it.

2. RevBoss

Best for: Agencies that want a partner whose whole book is agencies and SaaS.

RevBoss is the closest thing to a direct competitor on this specific list. They are US-based, they name marketing agencies and creative agencies as a core segment rather than a footnote, and they have been doing it long enough to have the patterns.

Pros. They sell to agencies on purpose, so the sequences are built for how agency buyers think. A pilot is available, and published entry pricing at $2,500 means you can budget before a sales call.

Cons. Reported pricing varies between sources, with some quoting $3,500 per seat rather than $2,500 flat, so confirm what the number covers. The model is seat-based rather than outcome-based, which suits agencies with a sales person to plug it into.

Verdict. Pick RevBoss if you want a partner whose core book is agencies and you have someone in-house to work the replies. Look elsewhere if you want outcome-based rather than seat-based pricing.

Ask them this. Ask whether the quoted price is per seat or flat, because published sources disagree. Also ask what a seat includes, since that is where the $2,500 and $3,500 figures diverge.

3. Cleverly

Best for: Founder-led agencies whose buyers genuinely live on LinkedIn.

Cleverly is the cheapest real entry point here and the most transparent about cost. Three published LinkedIn tiers and separate published prices for email and calling.

Pros. Price transparency at a level nobody else on this list matches, and the lowest floor by a distance. For a small agency testing whether outbound works at all before committing real money, this is the lowest-risk way to find out.

Cons. LinkedIn-first. If your buyers are marketing directors who ignore LinkedIn requests, you are paying for the wrong channel. The cheapest tiers are also the lightest on personalisation.

Verdict. Pick Cleverly if you want the cheapest honest way to find out whether outbound works for you. Look elsewhere if your buyers ignore LinkedIn.

Ask them this. Ask what personalisation actually happens at the tier you are buying. The entry tiers are cheap because something is automated, and it is worth knowing what.

4. Belkins

Best for: Agencies that need the decision to be defensible to a partner or a board.

Belkins is the lowest-variance pick in the whole category, with more public review evidence than anyone else here carries, and a pay-per-appointment option that shifts some risk off you.

Pros. The review base is the moat. They also report first appointments within a month of launch, and 50+ industries means they have run something close to your niche before.

Cons. Not agency-specialised. You are one vertical among fifty, so the agency-specific knowledge is shallower than RevBoss or ourselves. At a large agency you also get account managers rather than principals.

Verdict. Pick Belkins if the decision has to be defensible and you want the most-reviewed option in the category. Look elsewhere if you only want cold email and do not want to fund a wider motion.

Ask them this. Ask what share of the retainer funds channels other than email, and whether the $300 to $800 per-appointment rate changes with seniority. A VP-level meeting and a coordinator-level meeting cost them very different amounts to produce.

5. Softtrix

Best for: Agencies reselling lead generation to their own clients under their own brand.

Softtrix is the only genuine white-label option here. They execute in the background while your agency stays the visible brand, which is a completely different purchase from buying leads for your own new business.

Pros. If your model is selling lead generation as a service line without hiring the team, this solves exactly that. Your client never sees a third party.

Cons. White label is the product, so the proof is invisible by design. You will not find named case studies, because the whole point is that nobody is named. Judge it on a trial rather than on published evidence, because there is not going to be any.

Verdict. Pick Softtrix if you are reselling lead generation to your own clients and need to stay the visible brand. Look elsewhere if you want public proof you can check first.

Ask them this. Ask for a reference you can speak to directly. White label means there is no public proof by design, so a private reference is the only evidence available and it is reasonable to require one.

6. SalesHive

Best for: Agencies that want volume and a US-based SDR team behind it.

SalesHive operate at a scale almost nobody else here matches, and the meeting count across clients is their headline claim.

Pros. Volume and process maturity. Running 2,285 clients means the playbook is well worn, and the US-based SDR layer matters if your buyers will not take an offshore call.

Cons. Volume is also the risk. A process built to work across thousands of clients is by definition not built around yours, and agency new business is an unusual sale that generic sequences handle badly.

Verdict. Pick SalesHive if you want volume with US-based SDRs behind it. Look elsewhere if your sale is unusual enough that a generic sequence would miss.

Ask them this. Ask who specifically writes your sequences and how many other clients that person covers. At 2,285 clients the answer determines whether you get a campaign or a template.

7. Martal Group

Best for: Agencies selling into North America that want reps rather than just campaigns.

Martal rent you a team and a process rather than selling you a channel, and they appear consistently across independent roundups.

Pros. The fractional model scales up and down more gracefully than a fixed retainer, which suits agencies whose capacity moves with project work.

Cons. Multi-channel by default and not agency-specific. If email is where your buyers actually respond, some of the spend funds channels that will not move your number.

Verdict. Pick Martal if you want a fractional team across email, phone and LinkedIn that scales with your capacity. Look elsewhere if email is the only channel your buyers answer.

Ask them this. Ask how many accounts your fractional SDR carries across other clients. Fractional is efficient at the right ratio and thin at the wrong one, and the ratio is rarely volunteered.

8. SalesBread

Best for: Agencies chasing a small number of high-value accounts.

SalesBread is the deliberate opposite of volume. Lists built by layering 30+ filters, and every message written by a person rather than generated.

Pros. For an agency whose target list is 300 companies rather than 30,000, this shape is correct, and the per-message quality is genuinely higher than anything automated.

Cons. Low volume is the design. If your agency needs a wide top of funnel to find the few that fit, the per-lead cost will look high next to a volume sender.

Verdict. Pick SalesBread if your target list is hundreds of accounts rather than thousands and every contact is expensive to burn. Look elsewhere if you need volume to find the few that convert.

Ask them this. Ask how many contacts a month the published price actually supports at your list size. One lead a day is a real commitment, but it implies a volume ceiling worth knowing before you sign.

9. Abstrakt Marketing Group

Best for: Agencies that want outbound and inbound run as one programme.

Abstrakt deliberately run inbound and outbound as separate programmes that feed one pipeline, including the CRM and routing layer most agencies leave broken.

Pros. The breadth is real. If your agency has leads leaking because nothing routes them properly, fixing that alongside the outbound is worth more than more leads would be.

Cons. Breadth means you are buying a system, not a channel, with the commitment and cost that implies. An agency that only needs meetings booked is overbuying here.

Verdict. Pick Abstrakt if leads are leaking because nothing routes them properly and you want that fixed alongside the outbound. Look elsewhere if you only need meetings booked.

Ask them this. Ask what you are committing to beyond the outbound. The model is a system rather than a channel, so the contract, timeline and cost are all larger than a meetings-only engagement.

10. CIENCE Technologies

Best for: Larger agencies with real reporting requirements.

CIENCE is built for organisations where outbound performance has to be explained to someone. The reporting layer is as much the product as the SDRs are.

Pros. The most instrumented option here. For an agency group running several offices or service lines, the segmentation and reporting justify the overhead.

Cons. Their Clutch rating sits at 4.2, the lowest here, and the enterprise process is heavy for a 15-person agency. Not agency-specialised either.

Verdict. Pick CIENCE if outbound performance has to survive a board review. Look elsewhere if you are under about fifty people and the process overhead would outweigh the reporting.

Ask them this. Ask what the 4.2 Clutch rating is driven by, then read the three-star reviews rather than the five-star ones. A mid rating on a large review base is more informative than a perfect one on a small base.

Why agency new business is its own problem

Every agency on this list will tell you outbound works. Fewer will tell you why it keeps failing specifically at agencies, which is worth naming before you buy anything.

Nobody owns it. The people capable of selling your agency are the people delivering the work. New business happens in the gaps, and the gaps close the moment a big project lands. That is the whole feast-and-famine cycle in one sentence, and no amount of sequence-writing fixes it if prospecting stops whenever you get busy.

Your buyer has been pitched by forty agencies this quarter. A marketing director's inbox is the most saturated inbox in B2B, because every agency in the world is emailing it. Generic outbound into that audience does not underperform, it does nothing at all.

Referrals hide the problem until they stop. Most agencies grow on referral until a client leaves, then discover the pipeline was never a pipeline. The time to build outbound is while referrals are still working, which is exactly when nobody wants to spend money on it.

We go deeper on which channels actually work in , and the service page is at lead generation for marketing agencies.

Hire an SDR or outsource it

The honest version of a question every agency owner asks, including the case against hiring anyone on this list.

An in-house SDR runs roughly $60,000 to $80,000 a year fully loaded, before the sending and data stack, and before anyone has written a sequence. They also need managing by someone who knows outbound, which at most agencies is nobody.

Below about ten new clients a year, outsourcing usually wins on both cost and speed to first meeting. Above that, in-house starts winning on margin, because the fixed cost spreads across more revenue and the knowledge stays in the building.

The hybrid most agencies land on is outsourcing the top of the funnel and keeping the conversation in-house from the first reply. You are better at selling your own agency than anyone you hire will be. What you are bad at is doing it consistently when you are busy, and that is the part worth handing over.

What a new client is actually worth to your agency

Agency owners tend to judge lead generation on cost rather than on return, which is odd given you would never let a client do that with their ad spend. The arithmetic is worth doing once.

Start with lifetime value, not the first invoice. A $5,000 a month retainer that lasts fourteen months is $70,000 of revenue. At a 50% delivery margin that is $35,000 of gross profit from one client.

Against that, a $3,000 a month outbound retainer producing two new clients a year is $36,000 of cost against $70,000 of gross profit. That works, and it keeps working as long as retention does.

Then be honest about the alternative. Referral is free and uncontrollable - you cannot increase it on purpose, and it dries up exactly when a client leaves and you need it most. Paid search for agency services is brutally expensive because every agency bids on the same terms. Content works and takes a year.

Outbound is the only channel where you can decide to have more pipeline next quarter and then have it.

The number to track is payback period. If one new client covers four months of outbound spend, you can run it indefinitely. If it takes twelve, the channel is marginal and the problem is usually deal size rather than the agency.

This is also the reason outbound rarely works for agencies with sub-$2,000 monthly retainers: the economics cannot absorb the acquisition cost, and the answer is to raise prices rather than find a cheaper agency.

The five ways agencies actually get clients, ranked by what they return

Every agency uses some mix of these. Ranked by return per hour for a typical ten to fifty person agency.

1. Referral. Highest close rate, shortest cycle, zero cost, and completely outside your control. It is the best channel and it cannot be a strategy, because you cannot decide to have more of it. Agencies that grew on referral alone are the ones most exposed when a big client leaves.

2. Outbound. The only channel where volume is a decision. Lower close rate than referral, far more predictable. Works when the targeting is narrow and the proof is specific. Fails when the list is "marketing directors" and the email is about your process.

3. Partnerships. Other agencies with an adjacent service and the same clients. Slow to build, excellent once working, and almost nobody does it systematically because there is no dashboard for it.

4. Content and SEO. Compounds genuinely, takes nine to eighteen months, and most agencies abandon it at month four. Worth starting the year before you need it, which is never when it feels urgent.

5. Paid. Expensive for agency services because you are bidding against every other agency for the same handful of terms, with no margin advantage. Works as a retargeting layer under the other four. Rarely works cold.

The practical answer for most agencies is referral plus outbound, with partnerships built quietly underneath and content started before anyone asks for it.

What to send a marketing director who gets forty agency emails a week

This is the hard part, and it is why generic outbound fails so completely at agency-to-agency selling. Your buyer is professionally fluent in exactly the thing you are doing to them.

They can spot a template instantly, because they approve them. A first line referencing their LinkedIn post reads as automation, not research, to someone who has set up the same automation.

So the only real differentiator is specificity that cannot be generated. Something about their actual client roster, a service line they have just launched, a vertical they clearly want more of. That takes research per account, which is why it only works on narrow lists.

Lead with proof, not process. Nobody buying agency services cares about your methodology, because they have one. They care that you did this for someone like them and here is the number.

And do not pitch a meeting in the first email. A marketing director will not give you thirty minutes on the strength of one cold email. Ask a question they can answer in one line. The meeting comes from the reply, not from the ask.

The useful test: would this email be embarrassing if it were forwarded to the person you copied the template from? If yes, do not send it.