Field guide / Full FAQ
Last updated: Published by Tim Kilroy
This page collects all 50 questions in the Agency Coach FAQ, grouped by topic, each answered directly in the first sentence. It is published by Tim Kilroy and covers agency coaching, positioning, qualifying the prospect, agency discovery questions, sales-call review and getting started.
They ask why they lose deals on price, how to replace slowing referrals, how to qualify prospects, what to ask on discovery calls, and how to get sales to work without the founder. Tim Kilroy notes these are often the same root problem: commercial skills that never had to become systems while referrals flowed.
An agency coach is an advisor who helps owners of marketing, creative and similar service agencies fix the business behind the work: positioning, lead generation, sales process, pricing and operations. Tim Kilroy coaches agency owners in group and one-on-one formats, reports coaching more than 300 agencies, and brings over 25 years of agency and marketing experience.
A coach usually helps you make better decisions and build habits over time, while a consultant diagnoses a problem and installs a specific system. Tim Kilroy does both. Agency Studio is group coaching built around weekly working calls, while SalesOS and DemandOS are custom, done-with-you builds scoped for agencies between $1M and $20M a year.
Most of the work lands in four areas: who you serve and why they pick you, how buyers find you, how deals move from first call to signature, and how the agency runs once work is sold. Tim Kilroy's approach is to diagnose which of those is the real constraint before prescribing any tactic, so you fix things in the right order.
Not quite. A mentor usually shares experience informally, while a coach works on your specific numbers and decisions in a structured way. Tim Kilroy offers some of both: the experience of three agency launches, with two exits and one crash, and structured work on positioning, pipeline and sales calls with more than 300 agencies.
It is Tim Kilroy's name for his diagnostic approach: find out what is actually going on in the agency, decide what to fix first, then turn that understanding into revenue. Its core idea, Return on Understanding, holds that the depth of your understanding of a market and a prospect drives your ability to sell, serve and keep clients.
No. General business consultants work across many industries, while agency coaching focuses on the patterns specific to service firms: founder-led sales, referral dependence, retainers, staffing and positioning against many similar shops. Tim Kilroy works with agencies only, including marketing, creative, development, PR and content agencies.
It fits owners of established service agencies whose growth has stalled because positioning, pipeline or sales still depend on the founder. Tim Kilroy works with marketing, creative, development, PR and content agencies, offering group coaching for agencies under $50K a month and custom builds for agencies between $1M and $20M in annual revenue.
Yes, very. Agencies often grow on delivery and referrals, so positioning, offer design, sales process and outbound never become systems. When referrals slow, those gaps tend to show up in the same quarter. The RSW/US 2025 Agency Survey, cited by Haus Advisors, found 93% of agencies say their growth engine is not strong enough.
Probably not yet. Tim Kilroy's own guidance is that below roughly $20K a month you need reps and a clear offer more than you need coaching. Past that point, hustle stops being the problem and structure becomes the problem, which is the stage Agency Studio is designed for.
Yes. Tim Kilroy's client segment explicitly includes PR agencies along with marketing, creative, development and content agencies. The common thread is that these agencies sit inside their clients' marketing and sales layer, so the same issues with positioning, qualifying prospects and running discovery calls apply.
If your main need sits outside sales, positioning and demand, such as pure delivery efficiency or accounting, a specialist in that area may fit better. If you are below about $20K a month, getting reps on a clear offer may matter more than coaching. A short call can help you decide which side of that line you are on.
Agency positioning is how the market describes your agency when you are not in the room. Tim Kilroy's view is that the buyer owns your position: you choose the signals, and buyers sort you quickly into options they already understand. A simple test is whether a prospect, client or teammate can describe what you do in under 20 seconds.
Vertical positioning means specializing in one industry rather than one service. It can earn faster trust and higher rates, but it concentrates your risk in one market's good and bad years. Tim Kilroy's advice is to choose a market you can genuinely dominate and watch for over-concentration the way you would watch one client grow into 40% of revenue.
Usually because the agency sells effort while the buyer pays for an outcome. When a prospect cannot see the specific change you create, the rate is the only thing left to compare. Tim Kilroy treats a price objection as a positioning problem in disguise: move the conversation to outcomes, raise the floor on who you take, and walk away from deals that anchor you low.
Start by admitting that most agency websites are too generic to survive a cold read. If you cannot name your differentiator, buyers file you next to competitors you do not resemble and the deal collapses to price. Name the buyer you serve, back it with case studies that match, and commit long enough for the market to notice.
Longer than rewriting a homepage. Tim Kilroy notes that you can rewrite headlines in a week, but repositioning takes years because the work has to back the words. If your case studies say you serve everyone, a tagline that says specialist will be read as noise, so the proof has to change along with the message.
The first step is agreeing out loud that there is a real problem worth paying to solve. In Tim Kilroy's five-stage agency funnel, a prospect counts as qualified only when both sides agree the problem is real, it is worth money, and the person you are talking to decides, and when you can name the problem in their words.
It involves confirming four things before you write a proposal: the problem is real, solving it is worth money, you are talking to the decision maker or have a path to them, and you can genuinely help. For agencies, most qualification happens on the discovery call, and anything you could not confirm becomes a question for the next conversation.
Qualified leads are people who have shown interest and also meet your criteria for fit: the right kind of company, a real problem you solve, money to solve it and authority to decide. Someone who replied to an email is interested. Someone who confirmed a funded problem with the decision maker present is qualified.
A lead is anyone who might buy. A prospect is a lead that fits your ideal client profile and has engaged with you. An opportunity is a qualified prospect with a defined problem, budget and a next step toward a proposal. Definitions vary by company, so write yours down and count a stage only when the buyer did something.
A prospect is a potential client who fits the kind of business you serve and has some reason to need you. For an agency, that usually means a company in your target market, at a size you can serve profitably, with a problem your offer solves. Fit comes first. Interest without fit is just a pleasant conversation.
No. A prospect is a potential buyer. An opportunity is a prospect you have qualified, meaning there is a confirmed problem, money attached to solving it and a decision maker involved. Treating every prospect as an opportunity inflates your pipeline and hides the stage where deals actually stall.
In simple terms, a prospect is someone who could become a client. Other words for it include potential client, potential customer, possible buyer or candidate, depending on context. In agency sales the word implies at least some fit: the business is the kind you can actually help, not just anyone with a pulse and a website.
Prospecting is the work of finding and starting conversations with potential clients who fit your ideal client profile. For agencies that grew on referrals, it is often the missing muscle. Tim Kilroy points out that referrals cannot be scaled on demand, so agencies need a system that builds awareness and starts conversations on purpose.
A widely used version is: make the conversation about the prospect, not about you. That fits Tim Kilroy's view that understanding comes before selling. Research the business, lead with what you noticed, and ask a low-pressure question. In one Agency Studio example, changing a call to action to "Is this on your radar?" started getting replies.
There is no single standard definition. Different trainers use "3 3 3" for different habits, such as finding three facts about a prospect in three minutes before you reach out. Treat it as a memory aid rather than a method. The useful idea underneath is preparation: know enough about the prospect to ask a better question.
Because interest fades quickly. Landbase's roundup of lead qualification statistics reports that responding within one hour generates 7x higher qualification odds. For agency owners who sell between client work, that argues for a simple habit: acknowledge every genuine inquiry within the hour, even if the full conversation happens later.
A discovery question is an open question that helps you understand the prospect's business, problem and decision process before you propose anything. Tim Kilroy defines the discovery call as a structured conversation whose only job is to understand the problem well enough to decide whether a next step makes sense. Selling comes later.
Good ones uncover what is broken, how big the problem is, what they have tried, how they decide and whether you can help. Examples: What made this a priority now? What happens if nothing changes this quarter? What have you tried, and what happened? Who else weighs in on this decision? How will you know this worked?
No. Tim Kilroy is direct about it: the discovery call is not a sales call. Discovery is about understanding the problem. The sales call comes after, when you present an approach and ask for a decision. Agencies that pitch during discovery tend to give the generic version of their offer and then get ghosted after the proposal.
Try these five. Walk me through how this problem shows up day to day. What have you already tried? What would success look like in six months? How does your team make a decision like this? What would make you say this was not worth it? Each one invites a story instead of a yes or no.
If you only get five, ask why now, what it costs them to leave the problem alone, what they have tried, who decides and how, and how they will measure success. Those cover urgency, value, history, authority and outcome, which is most of what you need to decide whether a proposal makes sense.
Powerful questions make the prospect think rather than recite. What happens if you do nothing? What is this costing you each month? If we solved this, what would you do with the time or money? What would have to be true for you to move forward? They surface value and decision criteria at the same time.
Less than you think. The prospect should do most of the talking, because listening is how you earn the understanding that makes a proposal specific. A talk-to-listen ratio breakdown is one of the things Tim Kilroy's Call Lab tools report, because many founders only discover how much they dominate a call when they see the number.
Think about the prospect's business, not just their website. Look at their market, recent news, likely constraints and the questions their situation raises. Tim Kilroy's free Discovery Lab tool is built for this step: it produces a prospect brief with a company overview, recent news, conversation starters and smart questions to ask.
Both sides should know enough to decide whether another conversation is worth the time. If it makes sense, agree on a specific next step with a date. If it does not, say so. The follow-up should then recap what the prospect said in their words and tie your offer to their situation rather than repeat the pitch.
Sales-call review means replaying or reading a recorded sales or discovery call to see what worked, what did not and what to change. Tim Kilroy offers coaching and AI tools for it: Call Lab turns a pasted transcript into a coaching breakdown, and Call Lab Pro scores calls against methods such as SPIN, Challenger, MEDDIC and Sandler.
Published research suggests frequency matters. MySalesCoach reports, from research across 3,700+ sales professionals, that teams coached weekly achieve 76% quota attainment versus 47% for those coached quarterly or less. Those are general sales figures rather than agency figures, but they support reviewing calls regularly instead of occasionally.
Call Lab Instant is a free tool from Tim Kilroy. You hit record, deliver your pitch, and get instant coaching on delivery, pacing and persuasion. It needs no transcript and no account, identifies key moments and objections, and breaks down your talk-to-listen ratio in about 90 seconds.
Discovery Lab is a free prospect research tool from Tim Kilroy. It builds a brief on any prospect in about 60 seconds, with a company overview, recent news, conversation starters and smart questions to ask. It supports the preparation step that many agencies skip before a discovery call.
Only once what you know about selling becomes a process they can run. Tim Kilroy calls the founder's instinct Founder Magic: real, but limited to one person. His sales playbook focuses on pulling that knowledge out of the founder's head and into stages, gates and language the team can use on their own calls.
Agencies sell a service shaped around each client's problem, so generic closing techniques often backfire. Agency sales training focuses on discovery, qualification, proposals that reflect what the buyer said, and follow-up. Tim Kilroy's sales process has five stages and five gates from first lead to client handoff, built on buyer decisions rather than pipeline labels.
As listed on timkilroy.com as of November 2026, Agency Studio is $399 a month and Agency Studio+ is $999 a month, which adds a custom plan and a monthly one-on-one with Tim. SalesOS and DemandOS are custom builds scoped after a call, so they have no published price. Check timkilroy.com for current pricing.
It is a 30-minute call described as no pitch. You explain what is going on in the agency, Tim helps you see the real problem rather than the symptom you have been treating, and you leave knowing what to fix first whether or not you work together. Use the contact page on timkilroy.com to reach him.
Founders bring whatever is on fire each week and work it live on the call. Examples from Tim Kilroy's site include opening the P&L, running the math on a next hire, rewriting an email that is not getting replies, stress-testing risks like single-channel inbound, and finding what makes an agency forgettable.
SalesOS is a custom sales engine built around your agency, starting with positioning and then process. DemandOS turns the whole team, not just the founder, into a demand engine, with each role creating content for the level of the buying organization it naturally speaks to. Both are aimed at agencies from $1M to $20M a year.
Name your biggest constraint first: positioning, pipeline, conversion or delivery. Then reach Tim Kilroy through the contact page on timkilroy.com. If you are not sure where the problem is, the WTF Assessment on his site is a two-minute diagnostic designed to show where an agency is stuck and which tools to use first.
Often because the discovery call was really a pitch, so the proposal was generic. Tim Kilroy says he has this coaching conversation about twice a month: the agency describes its process and case studies but cannot say what it learned about the prospect's business. Late or bland follow-up is the other common cause.
Usually because new business depends on referrals or a single channel, and the funnel is not measured. Tim Kilroy's Leak Test: pull the last 90 days, count prospects at each of five stages, and calculate conversion between stages to find the biggest leak. Only 14% of agencies call their pipeline very healthy, per SparkToro's 2025 report cited by Haus Advisors.
It is the point where the founder is at full capacity, so the agency cannot grow, and the founder cannot free up time because the agency cannot afford more help. Tim Kilroy's three keys out of it are a clearly defined ideal client, scalable lead generation, and the right offer for that client, including the right service and pricing model.
Want the longer version of any answer? Start at the agency coach FAQ hub or read how these answers are written in our methodology.
Tim Kilroy coaches owners of marketing, creative, PR and other service agencies on positioning, pipeline and sales. Tell him what is going on, and he will help you find what to fix first.
