You've got a proposal open in another tab right now. Maybe two. Both decks have the same stock photo of people high-fiving in front of a monitor, both promise to "unlock growth," and both want a few thousand dollars a month starting next week.
Here's the uncomfortable part: agency pitches are built for exactly the meeting you're sitting in. Every objection you're likely to raise, someone in that agency has already role-played. The deck looks polished because polish is the product being sold in the room. It tells you almost nothing about what happens in month four.
So instead of judging the pitch, ask five questions. Good agencies answer them without flinching. The ones dodging, deflecting, or padding are telling you something too.
Q1: What number goes up if this works, and when?
Not "we'll increase your visibility." Not "we'll drive more traffic." A real answer names one business metric and puts a date on it: booked estimates by March, membership signups by Q3, calls that convert to paying jobs by the 90-day mark.
Traffic and impressions are inputs, and agencies love reporting on inputs because inputs almost always go up. Run an ad, traffic goes up. Post more, impressions go up. None of that tells you whether your phone rang.
There's also a difference between a lead and a lead you can bill. A form fill from someone three states away who was looking for a different service is a lead. It shows up on the monthly report as a win. It never becomes revenue, and an agency that can't tell you which of their leads turned into paid work hasn't actually closed the loop between the campaign and your bank account. The arithmetic version of this question works on any vendor, not just an agency: read the proposal like a CFO and make them show the payback.
Q2: Who owns the accounts you'll be working in?
Ask this about your ad accounts, your analytics, your domain, your Google Business Profile, your CRM integration. If the answer is anything other than "you do," they've just told you what happens the day you leave.
An agency that builds campaigns inside accounts they control is making your exit expensive on purpose. Ownership questions come up constantly in web work too, and the logic is identical whether it's your website or your ad account: the person who can lock you out is the person who actually owns it, regardless of whose name is on the invoice.
Q3: What would you do first if I gave you $500 instead of $5,000?
This is the question that can't be answered from a slide. It forces someone to prioritize out loud, in front of you, with no time to build a deck around it.
A good answer sounds specific and a little boring: fix the Google Business Profile categories, because you're not showing up for the search terms people actually use. Or: your website doesn't have a phone number in the header, so mobile visitors have to hunt for a way to reach you. That's someone who looked at your actual situation before they walked in.
A bad answer restates the package they already pitched, just with smaller numbers. That's someone reciting a script, and a script can't diagnose your business.
Q4: What's the first thing you'd tell me not to buy?
An agency that sells six services is going to recommend six services. That's just what happens when the person advising you also profits from every line item they add to the invoice.
Ask them to subtract instead of add. A landscaping company with three trucks and a full schedule through October does not need a TikTok strategy. A single-location dentist doesn't need programmatic display ads running across four states. If nothing gets cut when you ask this question, either your business somehow needs every single service in their catalog, or nobody's actually looked at what you need versus what they sell.
Q5: What happens in month seven?
Most agency contracts do their real work in the first six months: audits, account setup, initial campaigns, a burst of visible activity that makes the early invoices feel earned. Then it settles into a maintenance rhythm that looks a lot like the setup phase, minus the setup.
Ask directly what changes after month six. What gets tested next. What gets cut if it's not performing. If the answer is a vaguer version of what they already told you about month one, you're paying for a subscription to the same report, forever.
Here's how I'd answer all five
This is the only part of this post where I talk about Marshland, and only because you've read five sections of this without a sales pitch, so I've earned two sentences per question instead of a deck.
On the number: it depends on your business, but I name it and date it before we start, in writing, and I check back against it. If I can't tie a change to your calendar or your phone log, I don't count it.
On ownership: you own every account, every login, every asset, from day one. I work inside your systems rather than moving you into mine.
On the $500 version: usually it's something unglamorous. Your email deliverability is broken, your CRM and your website don't talk to each other, or your Google listing has the wrong hours. Small, cheap, and ignored because it wasn't sold as a project. After six months of writing these tips, those are still the three fixes that move the needle most.
On what to cut: almost always something. Nearly every business I've looked at in Phoenix or Scottsdale is paying for a tool nobody logs into, or running an ad platform that doesn't match where their customers actually search.
On month seven: the website, the email, the phone system, the CRM, and whatever vendors you're already paying get looked at as one connected system instead of five line items competing for budget. That's what a Care plan is for, and it's the reason month seven looks different from month one instead of producing the same report nobody opens.
Bring these five questions to your next pitch meeting
You don't need anything from me to use this list, just copy the five questions and ask them at the next meeting. If you'd rather hear my answers first, or you want a second opinion on the proposal already sitting in your inbox, request a callback and I'll answer all five about my own work and tell you what I actually think of the proposal. Fifteen minutes, no obligation either way.
Open whichever proposal is sitting in your other tab and find the line that names a business metric with a date attached. If it's not there, that's your first question answered before you even send it.