An agency I work with recently told me about a difficult situation they were in the midst of. A major client whose account was roughly £100k in annual revenue was making noises about not renewing their contract. At the same time, they were working hard to close new business deals worth similar amounts (and above).
I got the feeling that they were spending more time working on closing new business than securing the renewal of the existing client.
They’d been working with this at-risk client for three years. All the setup costs, relationship building and learning curve had already been paid for. They didn’t seem to grasp that the new prospects they were chasing would require all of that investment again from scratch.
This isn’t an isolated case. Most agencies instinctively chase new logos when revenue needs to grow. It feels like progress. It’s a measurable activity. It’s tangible.
Also, let’s be honest, it’s exciting. Nothing wrong with that.
But often, the faster and more profitable path is expanding work with clients who already trust you.
Yet we get carried away with new business.
The new business bias (and why it feels safer than it actually is)
There’s a pattern I see constantly: when existing clients feel difficult or underwhelming, founders default to new business as the solution.
It makes sense. New business feels like control. When you’re frustrated with a challenging client relationship or worried about retention, pitching new prospects feels like you’re “doing something” about growth. You can track leads, measure conversion rates and see the pipeline building.
Existing clients, on the other hand, often feel saturated. Many founders assume their current clients are already getting everything they need from the relationship. So growth must come from elsewhere, right?
Not always. In fact, it’s quite often the opposite.
My own agency grew massively in the first five years of our journey and whilst new business was a key driver of this, I can honestly say that the bigger driver was the fact that we retained and grew existing clients very, very well.
The thing is, the hidden costs of new client acquisition don’t show up cleanly in your P&L. The time spent pitching, onboarding, learning the business, making early mistakes while you figure out what actually works – none of that appears as a line item. So founders consistently underestimate how expensive new business actually is compared to upselling existing clients.
Occasionally, I’ll see agencies who charge larger fees up front to compensate for this. But it’s pretty rare and usually, the opposite happens – some will charge a little less up front than they need in order to win longer-term business.
I saw this recently with an agency that delivered a comprehensive audit to a client for £12k. The work was excellent, covering multiple domains, incredibly detailed, genuinely worth significantly more than they charged. But they’d massively underpriced it to win the client initially and it didn’t naturally lead into ongoing retainer work.
This is the pattern: agencies often underprice initial one-off work to win clients, making the early relationship far less profitable than upsells to existing clients would be. You’re competing on price to get in the door but then anchoring yourself to this level.
The numbers don’t lie (even if your gut does)
The economics are straightforward, even if we don’t always act like they are.
Setup costs are already paid with existing clients. The first 3-6 months of any client relationship involve learning their business, their team, their approval processes, their internal politics. All of that investment is sunk cost with existing clients. With new prospects, you’re starting from zero.
Trust eliminates friction. Selling additional services to a client who already trusts you requires a tenth of the effort compared to convincing a skeptical prospect. Proposals can be simpler, conversations shorter, close rates higher. You’re not proving yourself anymore – you’re offering to help with a problem they know you understand.
And margin is better on cross and upsells. You can price based on value delivered because the client has seen results already. You’re not competing against three other agencies in a pitch. You’re the incumbent with a track record.
The blockers to doing this
So the question becomes, if upselling is so much more profitable, why aren’t more agencies doing it? Let’s explore some of the most common reasons.
You don’t have a clear view of what else clients need
If your team is in delivery mode – focused only on executing the current scope – then they’re not identifying adjacent problems the client has. And most agencies don’t structure client conversations to discover new needs. They just report on existing work.
Again, there is nothing wrong with this on its own. After all, your core job is to deliver the work that you’ve already committed to delivering.
I saw this recently with an agency where the senior management team wasn’t picking up on client dissatisfaction signals. The team took things too literally – they only recognised a problem if a client explicitly said “I am not happy.”
The same dynamic applies to upsells. Teams won’t spot opportunities unless clients explicitly ask for more services, which they rarely do. The agency has to proactively ask the right questions.
Occasionally, even if a client does ask for existing services, I’ve seen teams not take advantage and open a conversation. On one occasion, I saw an agency team offer to recommend another agency for an international expansion brief – when they worked in the location being asked about!
Your services aren’t structured to naturally expand
If everything is sold as one-off audits or fixed projects, there’s no built-in expansion path. Retainers that don’t have clear “what comes next” milestones make upselling feel awkward and forced.
The agency I mentioned earlier that delivered the £12k audit is now restructuring their approach. Instead of selling comprehensive audits as one-off deliverables, they’re breaking them into phased retainers – delivering discrete sections (technical, content, UX, AI optimisation) over 6-12 months.
This isn’t just better for the agency themselves, it’s better for the client too. It means that work is more likely to be acted on and implemented because it’s being broken down into smaller, less intimidating phases.
The current model leaves money on the table because the audit ends and there’s no natural next step. Restructuring creates an expansion path that feels logical to the client, not like a sales pitch.
Founders are too busy with delivery and firefighting to focus on growth conversations
Strategic expansion conversations with clients require headspace and preparation. They don’t happen accidentally during status update calls.
One founder I work with described being “pulled in 100 different directions,” stuck in “full firefighting mode,” feeling more like a Head of Department than a co-founder running the business. When you’re that deep in delivery and team management, you physically don’t have time for the strategic client conversations that lead to upsells.
This founder was struggling to keep up with what was happening on over half their agency’s accounts, including the biggest one. That makes proactive upselling nearly impossible.
Your team are reluctant to “sell”
This was a big blocker for me when running my agency. At first, my team was reluctant to look for cross and upsell opportunities because it felt like they were “money grabbing” and selling for the sake of selling. This (fairly) made them feel uncomfortable.
When I told them that this wasn’t what I wanted and instead, I just wanted them to look for opportunities to help clients grow and solve their problems, it landed much better.
I still struggled with some team members, but I didn’t need all of them to be great at this, I just needed a few.
When you should prioritise chasing new logos
To be clear: new business will always be part of agency growth and sometimes it’s absolutely necessary. The question is about how you choose to prioritise your time, energy and headspace when you are busy.
Revenue concentration risk
This is the big one. If one or two clients represent a huge chunk of revenue, you need new business for stability, even if upselling is more profitable in theory.
The agency I mentioned at the start – facing a major client churn while also dealing with renewal risk on another large client – had to focus on new business. In that scenario, even though upselling is generally more profitable, they needed to chase new logos because upselling would have made their revenue concentration issue even worse.
Service evolution
If you’re launching a new service or moving into a new market, you need proof points from new clients, not just expansions of existing work. You need to be able to demonstrate that you can deliver a new service from scratch, not just tagging it onto existing services that another client may not require.
Clients have genuinely reached the limit
And sometimes, clients genuinely have reached the limit of what they’ll buy from you, either due to budget constraints, internal politics, or strategic shifts in their business. You may have been through them one by one to look for opportunities and genuinely can’t keep pushing them.
New business isn’t wrong. It just shouldn’t be the default growth strategy when existing clients are stable and have opportunities for growth.
Before your next big new business push, pull up your client list and ask yourself: “Which of these clients could we be doing more for?”
The answer might unlock faster, more profitable growth than your pipeline will.