Questions to Ask a Marketing Agency Before You Sign

If you only have 30 minutes with an agency, ask these eight. 1) Who specifically will do the work day to day, and what else are they staffed on? 2) How do you define a qualified lead for a firm like ours, and who makes that call? 3) What does month one through three actually produce, and what is the earliest honest date for pipeline impact? 4) How will you attribute closed revenue back to channel, and what happens when our CRM data is messy? 5) What do you need from us each month, in hours and from whom? 6) Who owns the ad accounts, analytics properties, content, and landing pages when we leave? 7) Show me two clients in our revenue band where the program underperformed and what you changed. 8) What is the contract term, notice period, and what specifically is out of scope and billed separately? The pattern to watch for is not whether the answers are impressive. It is whether they are specific. A competent agency answers with names, dates, thresholds, and numbers. A weak agency answers with process language, awards, and platform badges. Specificity is the signal, because specificity only comes from having actually run the work at your scale.

The single largest gap between what firms buy and what they get is staffing. The strategist on the pitch call is frequently a sales role, and the execution lands with a junior coordinator managing 12 to 20 accounts. Ask: who is the named strategist on our account, how many accounts do they carry, what is the ratio of senior to junior hours in our monthly allocation, is any of the work subcontracted or offshored, and can I meet the person who will write our content and build our campaigns before I sign? Good answers include specific names, a stated account load per strategist, and a willingness to introduce the practitioner in a second call. Red flags include refusal to name the team until after signature, an account load above roughly 15 clients per strategist for anything beyond a basic retainer, and subcontracting that the agency describes as a partner network without naming the partner. Also ask what happens if your strategist leaves, because turnover in this industry is high and the handoff plan is the difference between a two-week dip and a lost quarter.

Ask how the agency defines a lead, because that single definition governs every number in every report you will receive. A form fill is not a lead. Ask: what is your definition of a qualified lead for our ICP, who applies that definition, do you listen to calls or read form submissions to score quality, what percentage of leads in comparable accounts are disqualified, and will your dashboard report on marketing-qualified, sales-accepted, and closed-won stages or only on volume? Then ask about attribution mechanics, in detail. Which CRM do you integrate with and have you done it before with our CRM? Do you push offline conversions from closed-won deals back into Google and LinkedIn? How do you handle the calls, referrals, and dark-social touches that never appear in analytics? What do your reports look like in month two versus month eight? Ask for a sample report from a real account with the client name redacted. If the sample is a platform export of impressions, clicks, and cost per click with no revenue column, you are buying media buying and calling it marketing.

Ask for scope in deliverable counts, not adjectives. How many pages, articles, campaigns, landing pages, creative variants, and strategy hours per month? What is explicitly excluded and billed hourly? Is ad spend included in the retainer or separate, and what is the minimum media budget you would recommend for our market? Are there setup, onboarding, or platform fees? Does the fee escalate at month 4 or 7, and by how much? What happens to the fee if we pause a channel? On the contract, ask about the initial term, the notice period, whether the term auto-renews, whether early exit triggers a penalty, and what specifically you keep. You should own your Google Ads and Google Analytics accounts, your Google Business Profile, your GA4 property, your ad creative source files, your content, and any landing pages built on your domain. Agencies that host your pages on their own subdomain or build in their proprietary platform are creating exit friction on purpose. A 12-month lock with a 90-day notice period on a program that has produced nothing by day 120 is the most common way B2B firms lose a year.

Vendor evaluation changed in the last two years. A meaningful share of your buyers now form a shortlist inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Gemini before they visit a single website, and an agency that has no answer for that is optimizing for a search behavior that is shrinking. Ask: how do you measure whether we are cited in AI answers for our category, what have you changed in your content approach for AI retrieval, can you show me a client that is cited by ChatGPT or Perplexity for a commercial query, and how do you structure pages so answer engines can quote them? Competent answers involve entity and schema work, answer-first content structure, monitoring specific prompts on a schedule, and building the citation surface (reviews, directories, third-party mentions) that AI systems draw from. Weak answers treat AI as a content production tool for cheaper blog posts. That distinction matters commercially: firms getting cited in AI answers are compressing their sales cycle because the buyer arrives pre-sold, and firms who are absent are losing deals they never see in analytics.

Guaranteed rankings or guaranteed lead counts. No agency controls the algorithm or your close rate, and a guarantee is either meaningless or a sign the guarantee is defined so loosely it cannot be breached. Ownership of your accounts held by the agency. Refusal to name the working team. Reports with no revenue column. Case studies with percentages but no baseline, timeframe, deal size, or industry. Pricing that cannot be broken into deliverables. Pressure tactics on a discount that expires this week. An unwillingness to describe a client engagement that failed. One more that firms consistently miss: an agency that agrees with everything. If a prospective agency reviews your current program, your positioning, and your offer and has no disagreement with any of it, they either did not look or they are not willing to tell you something uncomfortable while they are still selling. The willingness to push back before the contract is signed is the best available predictor of whether you will get honest counsel afterward.

Shortlist three agencies, no more, and run them through the same structure so the comparison is real. Call one is discovery and fit, and you send this question list in advance so the answers are prepared and specific rather than improvised. Call two is with the practitioner, not the seller, and covers the actual first-90-days plan. Between calls, verify independently: check two references you sourced yourself rather than the ones supplied, look at whether the agency ranks and gets cited for its own commercial terms, and read their last six months of published content to judge whether they think in your category or ship generic advice. Score each agency on five axes rather than gut feel: staffing specificity, lead-quality rigor, attribution capability, contract fairness, and category fluency. Weight attribution and lead quality highest, because those are the two areas where a mistake is invisible for six months. Then ask each finalist for a paid diagnostic before a retainer. A short paid engagement, typically $1,000 to $3,000, reveals more about how an agency works than any pitch deck, and it caps your downside at a fraction of a 12-month contract.