How Vertical Focus + Process Lets a Team Close Without the Founder
Behind the Agency Podcast with Corey Quinn, author of Anyone, Not Everyone: A Proven System to Escape Founder-Led Sales
TL;DR – Key Takeaways
Founder-led sales isn’t bad. Being stuck in founder-led sales is the trap (and it makes selling the agency way harder).
Corey sees 3 main causes:
No real focus (serving everyone = too much complexity)
“Watery positioning” (buyers can’t tell why you’re different → you lose deals or compete on price)
Slow/inconsistent sales without the founder (no repeatable process)
In broad agencies, founders stay in sales because they’re the only person who can credibly sell across a bunch of industries and services.
The fastest simplifier: pick a vertical focus (ex: “family law attorneys” instead of “tech/SaaS/e-comm”) → suddenly everything gets clearer: content, case studies, keywords, conferences, partnerships, outreach.
Corey’s favorite non-obvious outbound tactic: send a gift before the cold call to bypass gatekeepers and create warmth/reciprocity.
Real numbers from Scorpion:
grew from $20M → $150M in 6 years
scaled a sales org from 6 → 100 reps
spent roughly $3M/year on gifts (about half of a $6M marketing budget)
Paid ads can work, but they often dump you into the “comparison shopping” arena. Corey likes remarketing + careful keyword selection + tight targeting more than spraying broad ads.
Big point that most agencies fight about (and shouldn’t): attribution. In B2B services, it’s almost always multi-touch, not “one click then buy.”
Vertical associations + conferences aren’t a hack. They’re a long game:
year 1: stranger
year 2: familiar
year 3: trusted
If you want to speed up relationship building in a niche: start a vertical-specific podcast. It’s a shortcut to meeting the “connectors” and “mavens” in that industry.
Meet the Guest
Corey Quinn has spent about 17 years in the agency world, mostly in sales and growth leadership.
He’s also the author of Anyone, Not Everyone, a book written for founders who are tired of being the permanent closer.
Corey’s background is interesting because he saw two totally different “agency growth realities”:
Founder network growth (warm intros from a connected CEO)
Specialization-led growth (clients buy because the agency is the obvious expert)
That contrast is basically the spine of the book.
Episode Summary
1) Corey’s “aha”: not all agencies grow off a founder’s Rolodex
Corey started selling for a PPC/SEO agency targeting enterprise. The founder had an Ivy-league network, so Corey was getting warm intros to big-name CMOs. Sales was hard work, but the leads were warm.
Then he ran sales at another agency founded by an ultra-connected exec (ex-CEO of MySpace), again powered by relationships.
So for years, Corey thought that’s just how agencies grow:
Charismatic founder + insane network → warm intros → sales team closes.
Then he joined Scorpion (focused on local service businesses, especially attorneys) and saw something different:
Attorneys were calling in because they found Scorpion through other attorney sites (credit link in the footer → call → one-call close). They didn’t know the founder. They didn’t care.
They cared that Scorpion was a specialist with proof.
That’s when Corey saw the escape hatch.
2) Why founders get stuck in sales (the “3-part trap”)
Corey lays out a clean framework for why this happens:
Lack of focus
If you serve retail, SaaS, e-comm, local services, nonprofits… it’s chaos. The founder ends up translating the agency in every call because no one else can credibly do it across that many worlds.
Watery positioning
This phrase is perfect. It’s when you might be good… but your message is so generic that buyers can’t see it. So you lose deals you should win, or you win by dropping price. And then the founder jumps in to “save” the deal.
No system → sales slows when the founder steps away
Not enough process. Not enough strategy. So the founder gets pulled back in.
Put all three together and the founder becomes the bottleneck—and the agency becomes harder to sell someday.
3) Specialization isn’t just a marketing choice. It’s an operating system.
This is where I was nodding along with you on the show.
Corey’s point: when you pick a real vertical, it doesn’t just help marketing.
It simplifies everything:
content topics become obvious
keywords become obvious
case studies become obvious
conferences become obvious
associations become obvious
partnerships become obvious
And most importantly: you can hire and train salespeople who can speak the buyer’s language without the founder in the room.
He even references David C. Baker’s idea of targeting a market size roughly in the 2,000–10,000 business range—small enough to become truly expert, big enough to build a real company.
4) The Kevin question: “Tech/SaaS/e-comm is broad… how do I niche?”
Corey didn’t dunk on Kevin. He gave a real answer:
Tech, SaaS, and e-comm are huge buckets. You can win there, but only if you pick a smaller sweet spot inside one of them.
He used a plumber example (tons of businesses, even a small share = big agency). The point wasn’t “go do plumbing.”
The point was: if your niche still feels like “everybody,” you haven’t niched yet.
And I loved your career analogy:
Early career = try a lot.
Later career = specialize to get paid.
Same for agencies:
Early agency = take work, learn what you’re good at.
Later agency = pick the lane and go deep.
Also, Corey added a super practical filter most founders ignore:
If you pick a niche… you might fill your business with those clients.
So make sure you actually like them.
5) The cookie play: “gift-based outbound” to bypass gatekeepers
This story is wild—and specific enough to be useful.
At Scorpion, inbound was working. But they wanted to grow faster.
Outbound is hard because gatekeepers block you.
So they started sending an overnight FedEx box with gourmet cookies to the attorney before calling.
Why it worked:
FedEx bypasses the normal mail flow
attorney opens it
cookies end up in break room
everyone talks about it
“Scorpion” becomes familiar inside the office
the follow-up call gets through with way less resistance
And it scaled:
As Scorpion went from a 6-person sales team to ~100 reps, gifts became a major part of the budget—Corey said roughly half of a ~$6M budget.
This is a good example of something that sounds “too simple”… until you remember sales is just humans making decisions.
It’s like showing up to a party with good food. You instantly become welcome.
6) What actually drives consistent high-quality leads: vertical focus + multi-touch
Corey’s answer on consistent leads wasn’t “do this one channel.”
It was: build a presence in the vertical across multiple channels:
outbound (including gifts)
conferences and speaking
content marketing
podcasts (they launched one for the trades)
relationships with associations
building trust until word-of-mouth kicks in
He also described a smart move Scorpion made when expanding into new verticals:
They didn’t just ask one sales team to sell attorneys and plumbers.
They built separate sales units per vertical so the team could speak like insiders and build credibility faster.
7) Paid ads: why they often bring junk (and how to use them sanely)
You brought up a thing I’ve seen too: agencies run paid ads, get leads, but they’re trash.
Corey’s take was pretty balanced:
Paid ads often put you in an active buying pool → you get compared to 3 other agencies → longer sales cycles.
Outbound can “subvert” that because you can reach someone before they start shopping.
For Scorpion, paid search was tough because attorney search behavior was vague (“SEO”) rather than “marketing for attorneys,” so the targeting was messy.
His safer “if you’re being conservative” approach:
remarketing
tight keyword discipline
careful targeting on platforms like LinkedIn/Facebook
test incentivized offers that lead to a conversation
But the bigger point he made is the one most agencies avoid:
Attribution fights are silly in long sales cycles. It’s almost always multi-touch.
8) Associations + “keep showing up” (the long-game that works)
Corey told a med spa example that’s painfully real:
Owners get spammed nonstop by agencies. Most of it is garbage.
One clean way to separate:
Get involved in the industry association and show up consistently.
And he gave the best “reputation math” explanation I’ve heard in a while:
year 1: stranger
year 2: familiar
year 3: trusted
A misconception in agencies is thinking one conference sponsorship = pipeline.
Nah. It’s more like going to the same local bar every week. Eventually the bartender knows your name.
9) The “accelerator”: a vertical-specific podcast
Corey claims this can shorten the time it takes to build relationships with key people in a niche.
Because you’re not begging for attention—you’re giving someone a platform.
It’s marketing + relationship building at the same time.
And for agencies trying to break into a vertical, that’s a pretty solid “cheat code”… in a non-slimy way.
Notable Quotes / Moments
“It’s okay if a founder is in sales. It’s when they’re stuck in sales.”
“Watery positioning.”
“If you market to everybody, you market to no one.”
“We grew from $20M to $150M in 6 years.”
“Half of our $6M budget was gifts.”
“There is no magic bullet… it’s long-term reputation building.”
“Stranger → familiar → best friend” (conference consistency idea)
Offer from Corey
Corey shared a free offer for listeners:
Get the audiobook for free at anyoneoneveryone.com
Includes a free online workbook with worksheets, templates, and SOPs for moving from generalist → vertically specialized.
