The best questions to ask a marketing agency are the ones whose answers you can verify after the meeting without the agency's help. Ask for named people, a written definition of the metric they'll be judged on, and the last account they lost. Every other question can be answered smoothly by anyone who pitches for a living.
By Avi Vatsa, CEO, Exchange Four Agency. Avi Vatsa leads the team that installs and runs AI-leveraged revenue systems for owner-led companies. His background spans law, technology, and marketing; he also co-founded Dialora, an AI voice-agent platform for automated lead capture and booking.
Why do most agency question lists fail?
Because the questions are answerable. Search "questions to ask a marketing agency" and you'll find lists of thirty, forty-three, even fifty. "What's your process?" "How do you measure success?" "Who will I be working with?" A competent salesperson has answered each of those two hundred times. They are not questions; they are cues.
The signal isn't in whether the agency has an answer. It's in whether you can check it three days later, alone, from your desk.
That distinction matters more than it sounds. An industry survey distributed via Businesswire found that 71% of brands report frustration demonstrating marketing ROI effectiveness — and almost all of those brands sat through a pitch where someone explained, persuasively, how ROI would be measured. The answer was good. It just wasn't checkable, and nobody checked.
So this list is short. Seven questions. For each: what a real answer contains, what an evasive one sounds like, and exactly how you verify it afterwards.
The seven questions and how to verify each
| Question | Verify by |
|---|---|
| Who does the work, and what else are they on? | LinkedIn, then a mid-engagement spot check |
| What number are you accountable to, in writing? | Read it back to them in one sentence |
| What was the last account you lost, and why? | Cross-reference the named client's current vendor |
| Show me a report you sent a client last month | Look for a line connecting spend to closed revenue |
| Who owns the assets if we part ways? | The contract, clause by clause |
| What happens in month one before anything ships? | Ask for the artifact, not the phase name |
| What would make you tell me this isn't a fit? | Whether any answer exists at all |
1. Who does the work, and what else are they on this quarter?
A real answer names three or four people, their roles, and roughly how much of their week you get. It volunteers who is offshore or contract. It says something like "Maria runs your account, she has four other clients, and the paid media build is done by a contractor we've used for six years."
An evasive answer describes a team without naming anyone: "You'll have a dedicated account manager and access to our full bench of specialists." The word "access" is doing the work there.
How to check it: get the names in writing, then look them up. Are they on the agency's LinkedIn page? How long have they been there? A senior strategist who joined six weeks ago is a different bet than one who has been there four years. The G2 review pattern that surfaces most often about agencies is "constantly changing project managers and the issues with communication made it difficult to work with them" — and you can predict that before you sign, from tenure data that's public. We went deeper on this in who actually works on your marketing account.
2. What single number are you accountable to?
A real answer is one metric, defined precisely enough that both parties would agree on its value at the end of a month. "Qualified opportunities created, where qualified means a booked call with someone who confirmed budget." That's checkable. It also tells you the agency has thought about what it cannot control and accepted the part it can.
An evasive answer is plural and soft: "We look at the full funnel — traffic, engagement, MQLs, brand lift." Four numbers is zero numbers. When they all move in different directions, the agency picks the one that went up.
How to check it: say it back in a single sentence and ask them to confirm. "So if, ninety days from now, we have fewer than X booked calls that met that definition, you'd call that a miss." Watch what happens to the room. Then get the sentence into the agreement. Our breakdown of the metrics an owner should demand every month sets the floor for what that report should contain.
3. What was the last account you lost, and what happened?
This is the question that separates pitch from practice, because there is no comfortable stock answer.
A real answer names a client or at least a recognisable description, says what went wrong, and assigns some of the fault inward. "We lost a SaaS client in Q1. We built them a demand-gen motion and their sales team never called the leads back inside a day. We should have caught that in week two and made it our problem. We didn't."
An evasive answer is always about fit. "Sometimes there just isn't alignment." Or worse, it's about the client: unrealistic expectations, wouldn't approve creative, changed direction constantly. An agency that has lost six clients and blames six clients will blame you seventh.
How to check it: if they name the account, look at that company's current site and job postings. Did they hire in-house? Move to a competitor? A thirty-second search tells you whether the story holds. Agencies rarely lie here outright, but the shape of the story is revealing on its own.
4. Can I see a report you sent a client last month, redacted?
A real answer produces it, or produces a near-identical template with numbers changed. It contains a line — a real line — connecting spend to pipeline to closed revenue, and it contains at least one number that went down with an explanation attached.
An evasive answer offers a "sample dashboard" instead. Sample dashboards are built by designers. Real reports are built by the person who had to explain a bad month.
How to check it: hold the report up against the brand guide's own test — does any figure on this page tie to a dollar? If the report ends at traffic, rankings, impressions and engagement rate, you have just seen exactly what you'll receive for twelve months. This is the mechanism behind the 71% frustration figure above, and it is visible before you sign. Our guide to calculating marketing ROI covers what the missing line looks like when it's there.
5. If we part ways in month seven, what leaves with you?
A real answer is specific and slightly uncomfortable for the agency: the ad accounts are in your business manager, the CRM is your licence, the creative source files transfer, the custom automations are documented and stay. They'll tell you the parts that don't transfer too — an agency's proprietary reporting layer, for instance.
An evasive answer reassures without inventory. "Everything we build for you is yours." Ask which Google Ads account ID the campaigns live in and watch the answer get vaguer.
How to check it: this one is purely documentary — it's in the contract or it isn't. Read who owns your marketing assets when you leave an agency before the meeting, so you know the specific accounts to name. Then cross-check against the contract clauses worth reading twice.
6. What exists at the end of month one?
Owners get burned here more than anywhere. The engagement starts, invoices go out, and month one is "discovery."
A real answer names artifacts: a documented offer, a tracking setup you can log into, a written diagnosis of why leads currently stall. Things you could show a board.
An evasive answer names phases. Discovery. Alignment. Foundation. These are calendar entries, not products.
How to check it: ask for one artifact from a past engagement's month one. An agency that builds real things has them lying around. An agency that runs phases has a slide about phases. Compare their answer against what an agency should deliver in the first 90 days.
7. What would make you tell me we're not a fit?
A real answer exists. That's the whole test. "If your average deal is under $2,000 and your sales cycle is same-day, we're the wrong shape." "If nobody on your side can approve copy inside a week, this stalls and you'll be paying for the stall."
An evasive answer is enthusiasm. Every agency that has never turned down revenue will tell you they can help anyone, and they will mean it at the time.
How to check it: you can't verify this one externally — but it's the one question where the absence of an answer is the answer. As Riggs Eckleberry, Chairman of OriginClear, put it about the working relationship he wanted: "They know exactly how to connect marketing execution to real business outcomes." Connecting execution to outcomes requires knowing which outcomes you can't produce.
What to do with the answers
Write the seven answers down during the meeting, verbatim where you can. Three days later, before you sign anything, work through the verification column alone. Most of it takes under an hour: LinkedIn, the contract, one search on a former client.
The pattern that shows up is rarely one catastrophic lie. It's drift — the named team became "specialists," the one number became four, the month-one artifact became a phase. Drift between the pitch and the checkable record is the most reliable predictor you have, and it costs you an hour to measure.
Coordination overhead across multiple agencies already runs 8–15% of annual vendor spend in labour that never shows up on an invoice, per industry vendor-management research. The hour you spend checking is the cheapest thing you'll do all quarter.
If you want the fuller process around these questions, start with the owner's diligence checklist, then read up on what changes when an agency owns the outcome instead of the scope — because most of the seven answers above get easier to give when the agency has already accepted the number. And once you've signed, keep asking: what to ask in a quarterly review with your marketing agency is the same scrutiny applied every ninety days instead of once. One of the questions deserves its own check: agency ad spend markup shows how to compare an invoice with the platform's own spend.