TobinLeff: a new client closed in nine weeks, from 34 owner meetings

What TobinLeff was solving for

TobinLeff advises owners of marketing and communications agencies on sell-side mandates. The partners are good at running a process. The constraint sat earlier than that: the supply of owners willing to have a first conversation depended on the partners' own network, which is finite and does not scale on demand.

This is the structural problem in every advisory practice. Capacity to run deals exceeds the supply of owners ready to start one, and the gap gets filled by waiting. Referral flow is excellent when it arrives and impossible to forecast, so a quarter with two mandates and a quarter with none look identical from the inside until the quarter ends. We cover the general shape of this in M&A mandate origination, and the buy-side and sell-side versions differ more than people expect, which is the subject of sell-side versus buy-side origination.

The job here was a standing flow of first conversations with agency owners who were not running a process and were not in anyone's inbound.

A new client closed in nine weeks, and the engagement grew

By 13 October 2026, about nine weeks after the first email went out, TobinLeff had closed a new client from the owner conversations the engine opened, and told us several more are advancing. For a sell-side advisory that is the result everything else on this page exists to produce: meetings are the leading indicator, a new client is the outcome.

What happened next says more than the number. TobinLeff had tried several other ways of originating owners before this one. After nine weeks it hired us for a second job, building targeted buyer lists for some of its own clients to find strategic acquirers, because of how the owner lists had been built. It also referred another firm to us, which we now work with.

The timeline has an honest shape. The first meeting came the day after launch; the new client took about two months, because an owner deciding who should sell their business takes longer than one deciding to take a call. Two agency advisors' timelines are compared in agency mandate origination.

What the first six weeks produced

Sending started on 9 August 2026. The first meeting was booked on 10 August, the day after. Inside six weeks the engine produced 509 replies, 80 of them positive, 54 of those high intent, and 34 opportunities moved into Meeting Booked on TobinLeff's own board. That runs at roughly two and a half times the positive-reply rate we see across the platform as a whole.

These are blended averages. They include every segment and message variant we tested, including the ones that underperformed and have since been switched off. The campaigns still running are the survivors of that test, which is the entire point of treating the first month as a measurement rather than a launch. A provider quoting only its surviving variant is describing a result the next client will not reproduce, which is why our published origination benchmarks include the parts that do not flatter us.

How the engine was actually built

Three decisions did most of the work, and none of them is the copy.

The market was split into sub-verticals and each was measured separately from the first send. "Marketing agencies" looks like one category and behaves like eight: a PR shop, a public affairs practice and a full-service advertising agency have different economics, different acquirers and different reasons to sell. Tracking each as its own experiment costs nothing at setup and cannot be retrofitted later. It is the reason the finding below existed at all, and it is the step most programmes skip. The general method is in building an M&A target list.

Contacts were resolved at the owner, not the agency. On an owner-operated agency one named individual decides whether to sell. A reply from a marketing manager is not a lead in this category, it is noise that looks like progress, and it burns the company for a later attempt.

The approach asks for a conversation, not a mandate. The opener is about where the agency market is heading, not about whether the owner is selling. Owners one to three years from an exit engage with the first and delete the second, and that earlier population is exactly the one a sell-side advisor cannot otherwise reach. More on the mechanics in outreach to business owners and the first call with a business owner.

Every reply is then read, categorised and routed to the named partner the owner was told about. Handing a warm owner to a different person is the fastest way to lose them, and it is a routing problem rather than a copy problem, so it is entirely preventable.

A six-fold reply-rate spread inside one industry

Weekly positive replies ran 24, 26 and 20 in the first three weeks, then eased to 11, 8 and 9. That is not a campaign breaking. It is a narrow, high-quality universe being worked faster than it was replaced, and the answer to it is better targeting rather than more volume.

Because every sub-vertical had been measured separately, the answer was already in the data. Reply rate inside the single category "marketing agencies":

Three further segments returned nothing at all on more than 300 leads each. The two largest segments by volume were among the weakest by rate. Concentrating sending into digital experience, public affairs and social media is worth roughly four times the reply rate of spending it on full-service advertising, and no amount of better writing closes a gap that size.

That map is the real deliverable of a first month. It is also why we treat a week-four dip as a targeting signal rather than a failure, and why the metrics worth watching are not the ones most dashboards lead with, a point we make at length in deal origination metrics and deal origination vanity metrics.

What we would tell the next agency M&A advisory

Three things, in the order they matter.

Expect the first three weeks to be the best weeks, then a dip, and budget a re-targeting round in week four instead of reading the dip as the programme dying. Do not buy a list of a category; buy a list of the sub-verticals inside it that reply, because the spread within one industry is larger than the difference between industries. And route replies to the named person the owner was told about, every time.

If you are weighing whether to build this inside the firm or buy it, the honest comparison is in outsourced deal origination versus in-house, and how the origination engine works sets out what a mandate like this looks like operationally.