Strategy
What this article covers
Every agency pitch you sit through will use the same words. Growth. Data-driven. Full-funnel. The deck will be handsome, the case studies will be flattering, and by the third meeting they will all sound like the same company. The difference between an agency that moves your numbers and one that sends you a tidy monthly report is almost never visible in the pitch — it shows up in how they answer questions they were not expecting.
Here are seven of those questions, and what the answers actually tell you.
1. "What would you measure in the first ninety days?"
Ask this before anyone mentions budget. A team that has thought about your business will name two or three numbers and explain why those come first — cost per qualified lead, say, or the share of traffic that reaches a product page. A team that has not will answer with activities: posts per week, ads launched, articles published.
Activities are not results. Any agency can promise volume. What you want is a team willing to be judged on something that shows up in your bank account, and honest enough to admit which of those numbers they cannot influence in ninety days.
2. "Which part of this should we not pay you for?"
This one is uncomfortable on purpose. A good answer exists in every real engagement: the piece you already do well, the channel that will not pay back at your size yet, the work your own team should own because it needs to live in-house.
An agency that cannot name a single thing to leave out is selling a package, not a plan. The ability to scope work down is the clearest signal that someone is thinking about your return rather than their retainer.
3. "Who is actually doing the work?"
Pitches are run by senior people. Delivery often is not. Ask who writes the copy, who builds the audiences, who touches the account week to week — and ask to meet them before you sign, not after.
You are not looking for a famous name on every task. You are looking for an honest org chart: who does what, who reviews it, and who you call when something breaks.
4. "Show me a campaign that did not work."
Case studies are a filtered feed. The instructive story is the one that went sideways: what the hypothesis was, when they noticed, what they changed, and what it cost to find out.
A team that can walk you through a failure calmly has a process. A team that claims never to have had one either has not run enough campaigns or is not telling you the truth, and neither is the partner you want holding your budget.
5. "What do you need from us?"
Marketing fails on the client side at least as often as on the agency side. Approvals sit for three weeks. Nobody can answer a product question. The sales team never reports back which leads were any good.
An experienced agency will tell you exactly what it needs and when — a named decision-maker, a feedback window, access to analytics and ad accounts, someone who can answer questions about the product. If they ask for nothing, they are planning to work in a vacuum, and vacuum work is generic work.
6. "How do the pieces connect?"
The most expensive pattern in marketing is buying channels that do not talk to each other: an SEO retainer here, a social contract there, a freelancer running ads, and a developer nobody briefed. Each one reports success, and the business grows slower than any of the reports suggest.
Ask how the work connects. How does what ranks in search inform what gets written? How does what performs in paid change the landing page? If nobody owns the joins, you are paying several teams to guess in parallel.
7. "What happens if we want to leave?"
The answer should be boring: your accounts are yours, your data is yours, your content is yours, and here is how the handover works. If the ad account is in their name, the website is on their hosting, and the analytics belong to their agency property, then leaving means starting over — and you will feel that leverage the first time you ask for a discount.
The pattern behind all seven
Every question above is a test of the same thing: does this team think in terms of your business, or in terms of their deliverables? Deliverables are easy to sell and easy to deliver, which is exactly why so many agencies organise around them.
You are looking for the rarer kind — a team that will tell you what not to spend on, admit what did not work, name the numbers it expects to move, and hand everything back cleanly if you ask. That team is harder to find, and considerably cheaper to work with over three years.
If you want a second opinion on a plan you have already been given, or you are not sure which specialisms your business actually needs first, tell us where things stand and we will come back with a straight answer.
