About Mark & Agency Sales Design
Agency Sales Design is a content resource where I share all my lessons learned from running a 100 person agency and starting and exiting a 22 person digital PR agency.
It’s very therapeutic for me to write out my learnings and advice for aspiring agency owners. I don’t have all the answers, but I know I have some.
About Mark Colgan
I have over 14 years of experience in B2B Sales and Marketing (mostly SaaS and Agencies) having worked at FTSE 50 companies to venture-backed startups and more recently in bootstrapped productised service agencies.
I’m a Techstars Alumni and regularly speak at events and contribute to industry publications on the topic of sales and marketing.
I started working at the coalface of sales in the boiler room environment of recruitment agencies. After a few years in recruitment I moved into Marketing and led the implementation of several CRM and MarTech stacks (before it was even called RevOps).
More recently I’ve led a 100+ remote person agency in the lead research space as General Manager at TaskDrive.
In June 2020 I co-founded a Podcast PR Agency which serves B2B SaaS companies like Gong, Paddle, Hopin, Genesys, Treasure Data and hundreds more. As CEO, I was responsible for the HR, Operations and led the GTM efforts, generating over $1,000,000 in revenue before facilitating an acquisition and exiting in December 2022.
“What makes you different?”
- I’ve personally closed over $1,000,000 in revenue in the last 2.5 years.
- I’ve generated millions of dollars in net new ARR for Agencies and B2B SaaS and companies over the past 5 years.
- I recently exited a Digital PR Agency that relies on pitching customers as interview guests on podcasts (via email and social media) where we achieve an average 65% response rate (often higher).
- I previously ran TaskDrive, a lead research and data enrichment service, and oversaw the optimisation of 100’s of customers’ outbound email campaigns
- I lead the Outbound Prospecting course and Cold Email Writing Bootcamp at Sales Impact Academy and have coached 1000’s of SDR’s.
- I’ve advised and optimised over 200 companies outbound prospecting campaigns and speak with dozens of founders each month.
People come to me when they’re struggling to get replies, book meetings, and close deals through outbound prospecting.
I’m originally from the UK, but currently live in Lisbon, where I spend a lot of time trying not to get too sunburnt (even in winter), organising events and spending time with friends. I’m an average golfer, getting into cycling and love travelling.
I take my work seriously, but also like to enjoy life. You’ll often hear me saying “por que no?” (why not?) to anything that sounds fun or gets the heart racing like wingwalking, skydiving and paramotoring.
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Mark Colgan
Founder, Agency Sales Design
How It Started
As an agency owner you know you can’t do everything alone. However, it often feels that way.
With hundreds of important decisions to make each day, it can be hard to know where to focus…and what to do next.
But deep down, you know one area that you need to focus on is sales. But at the same time that isn’t your background or your zone of genius. And that doesn’t feel great.
That’s where Agency Sales Design comes in.
Imagine having a trusted advisor that can specifically help you with your agency’s sales.
Someone who has been exactly where you are, someone who couldn’t get to sleep at night as they worried about making payroll the next month.
Someone who would often think “I’m an agency owner, but this agency owns me”.
Through the content, mentoring and Close More Deals program we’ll work on the foundations of your positioning and sales process, fix the leaky bucket that is your sales pipeline and help you get more replies and meetings, so you can increase your revenue.
The sole purpose of this program is to help you generate more revenue. At the same time, you’ll be able to pay yourself more and sleep easier at night.
This is the type of support I wish I had as I grew my agency from $0 to $7 figures, before exiting in Dec 2022.
After my agency was acquired I spent months working out what to do next.
The only thing that excited me was helping other agency owners navigate the ups and downs of agency life by helping them with what I do best: Sales.
And that’s how this website materialised.
Over the years I’ve expanded the content to cover other areas of agency life.
However, my main focus is still on sales, specifically pipeline.
As without pipeline, there is no agency.