Pitch meetings are structured so the agency talks and you listen. That is backwards. The hour is far more useful if you spend most of it asking, and these are the twelve questions that have told us most about an agency when we have sat on the buying side of the table.
Four questions to ask a marketing agency about its people
One: who works on this account day to day, by name and role, and how many hours a month each of them is allocated? A proposal that answers in deliverables rather than people is hiding the allocation.
Two: will the people in this room still be on the account in month four? The gap between the pitch team and the delivery team is the single most common cause of disappointment in this industry. An honest no with a described handover beats an evasive yes.
Three: how many accounts does that strategist carry? Beyond about six, nobody is thinking about yours between meetings.
Four: what has your team turnover been in the last twelve months? Agencies that churn staff churn client knowledge, and you pay for the relearning every time.
Four questions about the work
Five: show me a monthly report you sent a client last month, with the name removed. Three pages of real reporting tells you more than the entire deck. Check whether it states a baseline and whether it contains a single piece of bad news.
Six: what would you stop doing that we do now? No opinion means no analysis.
Seven: what is the plan for the first thirty days, and what does done look like at the end of it? You want measurement live and verified, an audit delivered, baselines written down and agreed, and at least one thing shipped.
Eight: who writes the Arabic, and is it Egyptian Arabic or Modern Standard? Ask to read something they wrote, not something they translated.
Four questions about the commercials
Nine: whose Business Manager and Google Ads account will the campaigns live in, and who owns them if we part company? The answer must be that everything sits under your business, with the agency granted access as a partner.
Ten: is media spend billed through you or paid direct? Direct, wherever possible. Spend routed through an agency is a switching cost dressed up as a convenience, and it makes the invoice impossible to audit.
Eleven: what is the notice period, is there an auto renewal, and what triggers it? A twelve month lock with ninety days notice is a moat.
Twelve: on the last day, what do we get back and by when? Logins, source files, content, historical data, in writing, with a deadline.
One test that costs nothing right now: ask how they are handling the analytics transition. Google has confirmed that Universal Analytics stops processing hits on 1 July next year, and any agency that has not already started running a parallel property for its clients is going to hand you a reporting history that begins in the middle. It is a small question that reveals whether they are ahead of the work or behind it.
If you would rather walk into those meetings holding your own numbers instead of theirs, start with the free audit, because the buyer who knows their own baseline is a much harder person to sell to.
