Questions to Ask Before Hiring a Marketing Agency

A note before the list, because you should know who is writing it: I sell marketing advice. I am one of the people these questions are designed to be used on. I have written them the way I would want a prospective client to interrogate me, which is the only version worth publishing.

The usual checklist — do you have experience in my industry, can I see case studies, what is your process — has one weakness. Every agency has answered those hundreds of times and has a good answer ready. A question with a prepared answer cannot separate anyone. What follows are questions nobody rehearses.

“What would you refuse to do for us, even if we asked and paid?”

Listen for whether there is anything at all. A supplier who will do whatever you request has no view of their own, which means every judgement in the relationship will be yours to make — including the marketing judgements you are hiring them for. A real answer names something specific and slightly awkward. It is the single most useful question on this page.

“What would you need from us that we probably won't want to give?”

Good marketing work needs things owners hate handing over: access to sales data, time with the people who actually speak to customers, and a decision about who the business is not for. An agency that says they need almost nothing from you is describing a relationship where they will produce output and you will approve it. That is a comfortable arrangement and it rarely changes anything.

“How would you know, in three months, that you were wrong?”

This asks whether they think in terms that can be disproved. The strong answer names a specific thing they expect to see, and what it would mean if it didn't appear. The weak answer explains that marketing takes time — which is often true, and is also the sentence that covers everything indefinitely. You are testing for a stated expectation, not a promise.

“Walk me one number from another client's report to that client's bank account.”

Anonymised, obviously. What you want to watch is whether the walk is possible at all: this figure meant these people, those people had these conversations, that produced this order. If the demonstration stops at the reporting layer and never reaches money, that is how your reporting will work too — which is the whole problem behind who checks your numbers and why independence matters.

“Which clients have left, and why?”

Everyone has lost clients. The answer worth hearing includes at least one where the fault was theirs, described specifically. “They were not a good fit” is a non-answer; “we kept producing work against a positioning they had never agreed internally, and we should have stopped and said so” is a real one. This is the question that tells you what they have learned rather than what they have won.

“Who exactly does the work, and what else are they doing that week?”

The people in the pitch are frequently not the people on the account. Ask for names, seniority, and how many other clients each of them carries. You are not looking for a small number — you are looking for whether anyone can tell you at all. A supplier who cannot say who will do the work has not decided yet, which means you are buying a promise about staffing.

“Before we brief you — what do you think our problem actually is?”

Ask this early, from whatever they could learn about you in an hour. You are not testing accuracy; you are testing whether they arrive with a view or wait to be told. Anyone who has nothing to say until you brief them will need briefing forever, and the thinking you assumed you were buying will quietly remain yours to do.

What to do with the answers

Don't score them. Notice which questions produced a pause, and which produced a fluent paragraph. Fluency means the question was expected — it tells you what they are used to being asked, not what they are like to work with. Hesitation followed by something specific is the best signal available to you in a first meeting.

And ask what happens before the work starts. If the answer is a campaign in month one rather than a set of questions, you are hiring capacity, whatever the proposal calls it. Whether that is right depends on something you should settle before any of these meetings: whether you need one experienced advisor or a full team.

• Ask the refusal question first, and wait through the pause without helping.
• Ask what they need from you that you won't want to give. Check it against what you'd actually hand over.
• Ask how they'd know in three months they were wrong, and write the answer down.
• Ask them to walk one anonymised number to a client's bank account.
• Get names of who will do the work and how many other accounts they carry.
• Mark which questions produced fluency. Fluency means rehearsed, not good.

None of this requires you to understand marketing. It requires you to interview a supplier the way you would interview anyone else spending your money — the argument running through Reports, Not Revenue.