Choosing an agency is mostly a test of whether you can tell confidence from competence in an hour. Everyone will show good work. Everyone will say they focus on results. The pitch is not where the difference shows.
These ten questions are the ones that get you past it. None of them are hostile, and a good agency will enjoy being asked. Watch for whether the answer is ready or improvised.
1. If This Were Your Money, What Would You Not Do?
The most useful question in the meeting. An agency that wants the whole budget will find value in everything you suggested. One that intends to keep you will happily tell you which part of your own brief is a waste, and why.
2. Who Actually Does the Work?
Pitches are run by senior people. Projects often are not. Ask who will be on it day to day, how many other accounts they carry, and whether you will speak to them or only to an account manager relaying messages in both directions.
3. Whose Name Is on the Accounts and the Code?
Ad accounts, analytics, the domain, the repository, the hosting. If these sit in the agency’s name, leaving costs you your history as well as your notice period. The correct answer is that everything is yours and always was.
4. What Does Success Look Like in Ninety Days?
You are listening for a number attached to your business rather than to their activity. Enquiries, qualified leads, revenue. If the answer is impressions, reach or content produced, they have told you what they intend to be measured on.
5. What Is Explicitly Not Included?
Every proposal has an edge. The good ones state it. Vagueness here is not generosity, it is the thing you will argue about in month three when you assumed testing, or copy, or migration, was covered.
6. Can You Show Me Something That Did Not Work?
Every agency with real experience has a project that went sideways. The ones worth hiring will tell you what happened, what they got wrong and what they changed afterwards. A perfect record means either a short history or a selective memory.
An agency that cannot describe a failure has either not had one yet or is not going to tell you when yours starts.
7. What Does Reporting Look Like, and How Often?
Ask to see a real report from another client with the name removed. You are looking for plain language, a note on what changed and what happens next. A dashboard screenshot is data, not reporting, and it puts the interpreting work back on you.
8. What Do You Need From Us?
Projects fail on the client side as often as the agency side, usually for want of content, approvals or access. An experienced team will name exactly what they need and when. One that says very little is needed is either being polite or has not planned it.
9. What Happens If We Leave?
Notice period, handover, who holds what. Ask it early and cheerfully. The reaction tells you whether the relationship is built on results or on how difficult it would be to unpick.
10. What Would Make You Turn This Project Down?
The last question and often the most revealing. A team with standards can describe the client, budget or timeline they would decline. A team that would take anything is telling you what your project will be competing with for attention.
Reading the Answers
You are not scoring ten out of ten. You are listening for two things: whether the answers are already prepared, which means they have thought about this before you asked, and whether any answer makes the agency look less good in the short term. Willingness to say something unflattering is the single most reliable signal available to you.
The Takeaway
Good agencies are easy to identify once you stop asking about capability and start asking about constraints, ownership and failure.
- Ask what they would cut from your brief before you ask what they would add.
- Confirm every account and repository stays in your name.
- Agree what ninety days of success looks like in your numbers.
- Get the exclusions written down, not described as reasonable.
- Ask how leaving would work while you still have leverage.
We answer all ten of these before anyone signs anything, usually on the first call. If you want to put them to us, book a slot or read how we approach marketing work first.