Diagnosing What’s Holding Back Your AdTech Revenue Growth

All commercial leaders have one goal in common: growing their organization’s revenue.

Yet, there are only a handful of practical ways to make that happen. For AdTech organizations, landing new business and expanding existing accounts are two areas they have the most control over for driving revenue growth.

There’s just one problem: As AdTech companies mature, they often struggle to continually feed revenue growth with new customers.

Over the last year, acquiring new customers has been the dominant issue that AdTech leaders have shared with our Media practice leaders. Many of these organizations started off landing new customers with ease and growing alongside their existing customer base. But somewhere along the way, the companies hit a plateau in acquiring new customers.

There are a few reasons for this lull, some of which have to do with external factors and others that have to do with internal organizational factors.

The External Issue: More Competition, Fewer Easy Wins

The first issue AdTech leaders have to navigate is a rise in competition. Many AdTech firms entered the market by addressing unmet needs. For those who succeeded early, landing new customers felt relatively easy for a time. As competition intensifies, sustaining new-customer growth becomes increasingly difficult compared to a firm’s early years.

Another outside factor that’s making new customer acquisition more challenging is increased switching costs associated with changing vendors and/or partners. As AdTech matured, companies were not operationally or contractually embedded in advertising workflows. Today, unseating incumbents requires far more effort. Early on, it was easy for companies to switch vendors or partners because there weren’t any long-term commitments. As companies select a vendor and grow accustomed to that vendor’s ways of working, switching becomes more difficult and more expensive. This raises the barrier for competitors trying to win net‑new business.

As important as it is to address the external issues, AdTech leaders don’t really have much control over rising external pressures. That’s why it’s even more important for companies to look inward and determine what needs to change within the organization.

The Internal Issue: The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy at Play

Internally, many AdTech companies are still using outdated go-to-market (GTM) strategies from when the organization was first founded. From a strategic perspective, many AdTech companies initially launched a hybrid hunter. Sellers would go hunt for a customer, land said customer and then grow with the customer.

Although this model can work great initially, at some point, sellers end up primarily focusing on the strong existing customer relationships they’ve created. And because of how many relationships the sellers must manage, it becomes inevitable that these sellers just don’t have time to hunt for new customers anymore.

This dynamic quietly erodes new customer acquisition, even as sellers remain busy and productive. The model doesn’t break loudly; it breaks silently: Existing accounts get the attention, and the net-new pipeline becomes harder to sustain.

Different Growth Problems, Different Fixes

Because of both external and internal pressure, AdTech leaders are essentially trying to dig themselves out of a hole and go back to a place where they can once again easily land new customers to drive growth while continuing to expand existing accounts.

Critically, the same top-line problem can have very different root causes. Therefore, AdTech leaders must consider very different solutions. Depending on your topline issue, there are different diagnostic steps that leaders can take to effectively align the GTM strategy to growth.

New Business

Many AdTech organizations are maintaining, or even expanding, existing accounts, but still aren’t seeing the same level of growth they achieved historically. In many cases, the root cause is stalled new business, as sellers’ time and attention are increasingly absorbed by existing accounts.

To diagnose the causes of new business challenges, AdTech leaders should start by asking questions such as:

1. What does historical performance data look like between new and existing accounts?
2. What is the number of accounts sellers are landing today across new versus existing?
3. How are people spending their time across prospecting versus farming for new customers?

From there, AdTech companies can get a better understanding of why new business is lacking and what possible avenues they can take to rectify the issue. For instance, one solution AdTech leaders could consider is bifurcating roles, so that there are dedicated hunters and dedicated farmers. Other solutions include aligning incentives to encourage sellers to balance efforts between new and existing customers, as well as adding more effective marketing or lead generation roles.

Expansion

An organization could also be struggling with expansion issues that stem from broader go-to-market design issues, which could include role structure, coverage and/or account allocation. In many cases, sellers start with no book of business, land new customers and successfully expand those accounts until their account load grows too large to support continued expansion.

When it comes to addressing expansion issues, turning to benchmarks and workload studies are essential. With these resources, AdTech leaders can get a better picture of where the sellers inside the organization land against the average and map out how long it takes for sellers to do every activity they do.

When using benchmarks and workload studies together, AdTech leaders should ask:

1. What’s the average account load that someone in a specific role has?
2. What does productivity look like for sellers in this role?
3. Do we have the right headcount?

If the issue is too many accounts, the organization can reallocate accounts. If the issue is headcount, then roles can be restructured. Regardless of what the core expansion problems are, AdTech leaders can use benchmarks and workload studies to effectively take steps to improve expansion efforts.

Clarity is AdTech’s Best Growth Catalyst

Growth plateaus are rarely the result of a single issue, and they’re rarely solved with a single fix.

For AdTech leaders in 2026, the path forward starts with diagnosing whether new business or expansion is the primary constraint, then aligning the go-to-market model to support that reality.

In today’s more competitive, mature market, clarity is what ultimately unlocks the next phase of growth.