Hiring a marketing partner is a bet on a relationship you’ll likely be in for at least a year. Almost every agency’s sales conversation will sound confident. The questions below are designed to tell you which confidence is actually earned.
Ask how they report, before you ask what they’ll do
Every agency will describe their services well. Fewer can show you, concretely, what a monthly report looks like and which metrics it leads with. If the answer leads with traffic, impressions, or “engagement” rather than pipeline, qualified leads, or cost-per-qualified-lead, that’s a preview of how the relationship will be measured a year from now.
Ask who actually works on your account
The person in the sales meeting is often not the person who will run your account day to day. That’s not automatically a problem, but you should know the answer before signing: who is your senior point of contact, how much of the actual work do they touch, and what does the account team look like once the contract is signed.
Ask for proof that fits your business, not just their biggest client
A logo wall of well-known brands tells you an agency can win a pitch. It doesn’t tell you they can do the specific job you need done, in your industry, at your size, on your budget. Ask for an example closer to your own situation, and ask what specifically they did — not just what the result was. An agency that can walk you through the how, not just the outcome, is showing you a repeatable method rather than a one-time result.
Watch for single-channel “silver bullet” pitches
If every conversation comes back to one channel — “you just need better SEO” or “you just need to run more ads” — be cautious. Growth problems are rarely solved by one channel in isolation, and a partner whose entire offering is one channel has an incentive to diagnose your problem as the thing they sell, whether or not that’s actually the biggest lever available to you.
Ask what happens when something isn’t working
Every program has a channel or campaign that underperforms at some point. What matters is what the agency does next: do they have a defined process for diagnosing and adjusting, or does underperformance just quietly continue while the invoice stays the same. This question, more than any pitch deck, tends to reveal whether you’re hiring a partner or a vendor.
At Krisdha, this is the standard we hold ourselves to as well — a single senior team across channels, reporting that leads with pipeline and not just traffic, and case studies we can walk you through in detail rather than just show you the headline number. If it’s useful, you’re welcome to put us through the same checklist.
