How to plan your 2026 new business strategy

No doubt you have received numerous “first week back” emails.

However, these are the start of the year realities – fresh starts, grand plans and big ambitions!! New business is high on the agenda. A smorgasbord of thoughts, initiatives and Ideas.

You must take a step back!!

New business is so multi-faceted, with so many options. It is easy to try and do too much… and doing too much could mean nothing clicks!

Below are some simple, yet often forgotten tips for your 2026 new business strategy planning:

Identify what success looks like for your agency

There are so many ways to define this:

• Are you looking for new names and logos or is success growing existing clients and brands?
• Would one red hot new client, delivering agency changing revenue and opportunity, be the goal?
• Does your business model revolve around a higher number of lower value clients?

These are just three scenarios. There are many more, but new business goals are not always revenue based and understanding what new business success looks like for your agency will give you the foundations of a workable and achievable strategy.

Keep it simple

It is all too easy to start veering towards not just a rabbit hole, but a whole warren of new business holes and options. Conversations might revolve around LinkedIn, telephone lead generation, emails, AI tools, content, networking, referrals and more.

Agencies are notoriously time poor, so identify the right strategy and approach that can be given the time and attention required to ascertain if it has been successful. Whilst all your intended plans and approaches could be valid, trying to tackle them all is likely to result in none of them being delivered effectively.

If you are to have a multifaceted approach, prioritise and allocate appropriate and proportionate time to each.

Put resource in place

The best strategy in the world is pointless unless it can be implemented. Do you, or someone in your team, have the time to dedicate to new business? Most strategies will fail as resource gets dragged into day-to-day agency delivery and execution. Step one might be recruitment or finding an appropriate outsourced partner with expertise in delivering your desired strategy.

Do you need to invest in lead sources and databases? Working on excel spreadsheets is laborious and even the very best organisers can miss a trick. Make sure your new business resource is armed with the best possible tools to deliver the job.

Make it measurable with realistic timeframes

Ensure you can gauge what is working and what isn’t. Unless you are very lucky, new business won’t be instant and you need to be able to measure progress and pipeline quality. We call this campaign equity. Can you be sure that you are heading in the right direction?

Holding your nerve is key. If you have no wins in 6 months, but you have engaged with and met key prospects with budget, proposals are out pending answers and you are confident of progression with that pipeline, that is almost certainly a better place to be than one quick, lucky win and no future identifiable opportunities.

Break objectives into quarterly KPIs – outreach attempts, engaged, qualified prospects, briefs, proposals, pitches and of course wins.

It could be that the Q1 objective is to have the plan, direction and resource in place to tackle the rest of the year. That will yield better results long-term than going gung-ho into activity.

Take time up front to ensure the best possible direction

Lead sourcing and profiling is critical to any new business and must link back to your strategy and defined agency successes as well as the KPIs you are putting in place. Build lists of the right people in the right companies. A sniper’s rifle versus a blunderbuss.

Celebrate the failures and the successes

New business is hard, tiring and relentless, but can be so rewarding when those projects and accounts are won. However, if you lost a pitch, you still got on the pitch list. If budgets get pulled from an expected project, that is not your failure. Just engaging with a key decision maker in a target company should be deemed a success and could easily become a building block for a future new business relationship.

Just do it!!

New business can be likened to DIY procrastination around the house. There is always something else to do first!

• We need to get our website redone
• We’re developing new case studies
• We’re reimagining our value proposition
• We’re rebranding

Of course you need certain elements in place, but don’t overthink it. If you know the clients you want, the type of work you want and you have a desire to grow, it is a case of JFDI!! Other agencies will be.

Good luck going into 2026