The way you are going to win 2026 is by believing the math. Not the “you have to talk to a million people BS” that you read. Here’s the real sales math truth. Small, consistent actions beat big, sporadic efforts every time. The data on habits, compounding, and goal achievement all tell the same story—if you do a few simple things every week, reliably, you will absolutely out-sell and out-grow the agencies that “go big” once in a while.
• If you own an agency, you don’t actually have a “sales problem.”
• You have a “consistency problem.”
• You already know what to do: reach out, follow up, add value, ask for the meeting.
• The issue is not knowledge, it’s cadence.
Momentum isn’t an emotion; it’s the byproduct of doing small, specific sales activities on a schedule, whether you feel like it or not. So what should you do?
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Hey, everybody. Drew McLellan here from Agency Management Institute this week coming to you from home in Denver. You know, as we as we round the year and we welcome 2026, as you might imagine, many of you are very focused on putting together a new business program, thinking about growth for your agency, for the year. And I was as I was working on the content for the program that we have, the Sales Momentum Learning Lab, I was thinking about this and I wanted to communicate with you as well as the participants. I actually don't think you have a sales problem. That's actually not your problem. What you have is you have a consistency problem. So many of you fall under the feast and famine new business program. You intend to do certain things. Probably right now as we are starting the new year, you've got a new business program that's really robust and you've got all kinds of activities planned. But the reality is, much like a lot of New Year's resolutions, all of that's going to fall by the wayside in the next few weeks or the next month as things start getting busy, as your day job starts demanding more and more of your time and your sales focus wanes.
Many agencies do not have a consistent, every day, every week sales program. Most of it's why I built the sales momentum Learning Lab. But here's the deal for all of you. You don't have a sales problem. You have a consistency problem. You already know what to do. And if you did it every day for 20 or 30 minutes, you agency owner, agency leader, whoever is going to own sales inside the agency. If you could do that consistent behavior on a daily and weekly basis, you have no problem at all. So it's really not about knowing what to do. It's really about doing it so consistently that it builds momentum. I love the word momentum because it's not an emotion. It is a byproduct of doing small, specific things over and over and over again on a schedule, whether you feel like it or not. That is the art.
So when I look at agency owners and I look at who's a great salesperson and who's got great consistent sales and who doesn't. It's the people who who view it as a must do daily and weekly activity. Those agencies have full pipelines and they are bursting with opportunity. The agency owners who are brilliant, who write great content and copy but only do it every so often when they have time, or when they get a signal from a client that they might be going away. Those are the agencies where the pipeline is meager at best. So this is really, sales for you in 2026 is really about consistent behaviors. When you do something consistently and you just keep building on it, the power of the compounding of that activity is amazing. So if you do something 1% a day over the course of a year,
you're going to be 37% – 37 times better thanks to the power of compounding. We know that when you do something and you show up consistently, that's what begins to open the floodgates for you.
So I want to challenge you this year to stop thinking about sales as this big activity and instead, small, consistent behaviors; small, consistent deliverables; small, consistent conversations. That's what I want you to build for 2026, because within 90 days you're going to see a difference. It's going to be remarkable what that compounding will do for you in terms of building a pipeline, in terms of building relationships, in terms of creating new opportunities. And the goal is if you can create that kind of momentum in your own behavior, then all of a sudden you're going to have a really great sales year in 2026, which I know many of you need after 2025. So don't go big. Go small and consistent. Okay?
