17 Questions That Would Have Saved Your Last Agency Hire
The evaluation framework that predicts agency failure before you sign the contract
What You'll Learn
- ✓17 specific questions organized by the 4 categories that actually predict delivery (not presentation skills)
- ✓The exact red flags that signal failure — visible before you sign anything
- ✓The one question 90% of businesses never ask (it's the single best predictor of agency quality)
- ✓A scoring system so you stop evaluating agencies with your gut
Business owners who've been burned by an agency that overpromised and underdelivered — or who are about to hire one and want to avoid a $50K+ mistake. The average bad agency hire costs 6-12 months of wasted budget plus the opportunity cost of what you could've built.
The $50K Mistake You're About to Make (And 17 Questions That Prevent It)
Imagine walking into your next agency pitch meeting with a framework that predicts — before you sign anything — whether this agency will actually deliver. Not guessing based on their slide deck. Not hoping their case studies translate to your business. Knowing.
That's what these 17 questions do. In 8 minutes, you'll have the evaluation framework we built after hearing agency horror stories from 250+ businesses. Most cost $50K+ in fees before the owner realized the pitch and the delivery were completely different things.
The problem isn't your judgment — it's that the standard evaluation process is designed to favor agencies, not clients. You're evaluating their presentation skills, not their delivery capability. This checklist flips that.
The 4 Categories That Actually Predict Delivery
Most evaluations only check Category 1 — which is exactly how bad agencies keep winning contracts. Here are all four:
- •Category 1: Capability — can they actually do what they claim? (Everyone checks this. It's not enough.)
- •Category 2: Accountability — how do they measure success and what happens when they miss?
- •Category 3: Integration — do they connect channels into a system or run expensive silos?
- •Category 4: Alignment — are their incentives aligned with your outcomes or their revenue?
Here are the 17 questions across all four categories, starting with the one most businesses never think to ask...
Frequently Asked Questions
What to ask a marketing agency?
Most prospects ask the wrong questions (price, deliverables, contract length) when the right ones are about evidence and process. The five questions that actually predict agency quality: (1) Show me a campaign you killed and why. (2) Who specifically does the work on my account, and what's their experience level? (3) What's your retention rate over 12 months? (4) How do you decide what to test next? (5) What's your process when something isn't working in month two? Bad agencies dodge specifics. Good ones answer in 30 seconds with concrete examples. The questions don't change — only the willingness to answer them does.
How to pick the right marketing agency?
A 3-step framework: (1) Diagnostic-fit — does the agency actually understand your business, or just sell channels they specialize in? An agency selling SEO when you need positioning is a misfit. (2) Operator-fit — are the senior people you met in the pitch the ones who'll do the work, or is the senior pitch a bait-and-switch to junior execution? (3) Evidence-fit — do they show real outcome math (CAC, retention, payback period) or hide behind 'engagement' metrics? ABMG's 90% retention rate is the structural outcome of getting all three right at intake. The wrong fit on any single one breaks the engagement, no matter how good the execution.
What are some good marketing questions to ask?
Good marketing questions split into two buckets: diagnostic ('what's actually broken?') and tactical ('which channel should we try?'). Mid-market companies spend 80% of their time on tactical when 80% of the wins are in diagnostic. Three diagnostic questions worth asking: What's our CAC by channel? What's our retention curve over 6 and 12 months? Where do leads die in our funnel? Three tactical questions: Which channel ROI is best per dollar today? What's our top-performing creative theme? What's our highest-converting landing page? Diagnostic questions reveal whether you have a marketing problem or a positioning problem. Without that diagnosis, every tactical answer is a guess.
What are the 5 critical questions in marketing planning?
ABMG's annual planning framework distills the 5 critical questions: (1) What's our growth target in dollars and units this year? (2) What's the unit economic that makes that work — what CAC can we afford? (3) Which channels can deliver that math at our current scale? (4) What's the actual bottleneck — demand, conversion, or delivery? (5) What's the smallest budget required to prove the next bet? Most marketing plans fail because they answer Q3 (channel selection) before Q1-2 (target plus unit economics). You can't pick a channel until you know what the channel needs to deliver. And you can't pick a budget until you know which bottleneck the next dollar is supposed to relieve.
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