The most common mistake is asking questions that cannot be answered badly. What's your process? Do you have experience in my industry? How many leads can you get me? Every shop on your shortlist has a fluent, sincere, well-rehearsed answer ready for each of those, and not a single answer will separate the competent agency from the merely confident one. You hang up with a favorable impression and no information, which feels a lot like progress until the second call gives you the same feeling about a different company.
What works is asking questions that are expensive to answer — the ones that require an artifact, a name, a date, or an admission. A question is doing its job when a weak agency has to stall on it and a strong agency can answer in the same breath as hello. The rest of this page is how to build that kind of list, how to run the conversation, and how to grade what comes back.
Make them produce something, not describe something
Descriptions are free. Artifacts are not. Instead of asking how they report, ask them to send a report they delivered to a client last month with the names blacked out. Instead of asking about their approach to testing, ask what they tested in a client account last week and what happened. Instead of asking whether they know your industry, ask which competitor of yours they have already worked with and why that relationship ended. An agency that has done the work has these things lying around. An agency that has been coasting on decks will promise to follow up, and the follow-up will be a deck.
Ask about the account they lost most recently
This is the question that earns its keep. Every agency loses clients; the useful signal is whether they can describe a loss without turning it into a story about a difficult customer. Listen for whether they know why it ended, whether they saw it coming, and whether anything changed afterward. A shop that says the client wanted results too fast has told you they will say the same about you. A shop that says they were slow to admit a channel wasn't working, and now they flag it at day thirty, has told you something you could not have learned any other way.
You are not the only person rehearsing this call
Thirty distinct queries collapse into this single topic, and together they pull 420 searches a month. That is thirty different ways of typing the same anxiety into a search bar — what to ask, what to ask before signing, what to ask before hiring, red flags, questions for a first meeting. Nobody phrases it thirty ways because they want thirty answers. They phrase it thirty ways because they don't trust themselves to recognize a bad answer when they hear one, and they are hoping the right wording will do the recognizing for them. It won't. Wording is not the constraint; knowing what a good answer looks like in your own business is.
The calendar is doing some of the talking
The same search ran 170 times in September of last year and 10 times this May. That is not seasonality in marketing — it is seasonality in nerve. Budgets get set in the fall, contracts come up for renewal, and a year's worth of vague dissatisfaction finally turns into a shortlist. By late spring, everyone who was going to switch has switched. Practically, this means the agency you call in autumn is fielding calls from everyone else too, and will be least inclined to negotiate and slowest to onboard. Calling in the quiet months buys you a more attentive version of the same company.
Grade the answers while you're still on the call
Keep this within reach during the conversation. The left column is what you ask; the middle is the answer that should slow you down; the right is what the same question sounds like when the agency has actually done this before.
| Ask this | Worrying answer | Answer worth hearing |
|---|---|---|
| Who will actually touch my account day to day? | The team handles it collaboratively. | A name, their other accounts, and how often they're in the account. |
| How will we know this worked? | Traffic, engagement, and brand lift. | A named action on your site tied to revenue, plus how it gets recorded. |
| What happens if the first quarter is flat? | We'd give it more time to build. | A checkpoint date, a stated threshold, and what they change if it's missed. |
| Who owns the ad account and the data? | We manage it under our agency structure. | You own it, they get access, and they'll show you where to revoke it. |
| Why did your last client leave? | They weren't patient enough. | A specific mistake and what they changed because of it. |
Measurement before media
Any agency can spend money. The one worth hiring can prove what the money did, and the proof gets built before the first campaign goes live, not after the first invoice. So make the tracking conversation come first: which actions on your site count as a real inquiry, how those get recorded, what happens when someone calls instead of filling out a form, and how the numbers in their report reconcile with the numbers in your inbox. If they treat that as a formality to get past on the way to the fun part, you will spend next year arguing about whose spreadsheet is right. If you are switching from an existing agency, ask the new one to look at what's already in place and tell you what's broken — that review is short, cheap, and it will tell you more about how they think than any pitch.
Run the call in this order
Start with your own numbers, out loud: what a customer is worth, what you can spend before it hurts, how long you can wait. Then ask for artifacts. Then ask about the lost account. Then walk the measurement questions. Save pricing for last, because a retainer figure is meaningless until you know what's attached to it, and asking early lets the agency build the rest of the conversation around justifying it. End by asking what they need from you — the agency that names your obligations up front is the one that has been burned by clients who never sent the photos, never answered the questions, never approved the copy.
If the honest conclusion is that you don't have the hours to run this in-house, that's a legitimate outcome, not a failure of the exercise — someone has to sit in the ad accounts weekly and read the reporting critically, and it does not have to be you. Just make sure the scope you buy is the one your answers pointed at. The questions above are the same ones we expect to be asked, and we'd rather you asked them of everyone, including us.