The questions to ask an agency before signing are mostly not about their work. Most agency relationships that go badly were predictable, and the evidence was available before anyone signed anything. The pitch is designed to show you the best version of the agency, which is fair enough. Your job is to find out what the ordinary version looks like.
These are the questions I ask when a client brings me in to vet a shortlist. None of them are gotchas. Good agencies answer them easily and often appreciate being asked, because the questions filter for clients who will be reasonable to work with.
Who is actually doing the work?
This is the big one. The people in the pitch are usually the founders and the senior strategists. The people on your account will often be considerably more junior, and there is nothing wrong with that as long as you know before you sign.
Ask for names, roles and how much of their week you get. Ask who covers when that person is on leave. Ask how many other accounts they carry. If the answer is vague, the answer is that they do not know yet, which means you are buying a resourcing decision that has not been made.
| Item | In the pitch | On your account |
|---|---|---|
| Founder or director | Yes | Partly |
| Senior strategist | Yes | No |
| Account manager | Partly | Yes |
| Junior executive | No | Yes |
Who owns what if this ends?
Ask specifically: if we part ways, who owns the ad accounts, the analytics property, the website, the domain, the creative files and the data? The correct answer is you, on every item. It is very often not the answer you get.
Agencies that set up accounts under their own business manager will tell you this is standard practice, and it is common, but common and correct are different things. Sort it before you sign. Afterwards you are negotiating from a much weaker position, usually while trying to leave. I have written about the wider ownership problem separately because it goes well beyond agencies.
What do you need from us?
An agency that has no requirements of you has not thought seriously about delivery. Good ones will tell you they need a single decision-maker, a realistic approval turnaround, access to certain systems, and someone who can answer questions about the product within a day.
This question also tells you something about the relationship you are about to have. An agency that is willing to make demands during a pitch is an agency that will tell you when something is not working later.
Show me something that went wrong
Every agency has an account that went badly. Asking about one is not an attempt to embarrass them. What you are listening for is whether they can describe the failure specifically, what their part in it was, and what they changed afterwards.
An agency that blames the client entirely is telling you what they will say about you. An agency that cannot think of one is either new or not being straight with you.
There is a longer version of this with thirty questions in the agency vetting scorecard, which is what I use when I sit in on a client's shortlist. If you have already signed and something feels off, independent vendor vetting is the work of looking at it from the outside.