What to Ask Before You Sign: The Questions That Reveal Whether an Agency Can Deliver

Agency pitches are designed to be enjoyed. Good work on the screen, senior people in the room, a plan that sounds ambitious without being reckless.

What almost never gets tested is the thing that actually determines whether the relationship works: whether anyone has thought about how it will be judged, who will do the work, and what happens when it stops going well.

These eight questions do that. None of them is aggressive. All of them are hard to answer well if the answer has not been thought about before, which is exactly the point.

1. Who is actually doing the work day to day, and how many other accounts do they carry?

The people who pitch are frequently not the people who deliver. This is not necessarily dishonest, it is how most agencies are structured, but you should know it before you sign rather than after.

Ask to meet the person who will run your account. Ask how many other clients they hold and what size those clients are. If you would be the smallest account on a list of eight, understand what that means for where you sit in their week.

A good answer names people, is specific about capacity, and offers the introduction without being pushed. A weak answer talks about the team as a collective and moves on.

2. What does month four look like?

Almost every agency relationship improves in the first ninety days, because most accounts arrive with obvious problems and fixing obvious problems produces a quick lift.

Month four is when that runs out and the harder work starts. Ask what happens then. What does the plan look like once the easy gains are banked, and what will they be doing that is genuinely difficult.

An agency that has run real accounts will have a clear answer about the shift from fixing to compounding. An agency that has mostly run short engagements will describe the first ninety days again in different words.

3. When this underperforms, how will we know it was you and not the market?

The most useful question you can ask, and the one we covered in how to choose a growth partner for a fashion brand.

What you are listening for is whether they reach for your numbers or theirs. A strong answer starts with contribution margin, blended acquisition cost against a target agreed in advance, repeat purchase rate, full-price sell-through. It will also name what they cannot control, because an agency that claims credit for everything will eventually disclaim everything.

A weak answer is a dashboard. Reporting is not accountability.

4. How are you paid, and what does that make you optimise for?

Ask this directly and watch whether they engage with the second half of the question.

Percentage of ad spend rewards spending more regardless of return. Flat retainer pays the same whether the account grows or stalls. Retainer plus performance aligns both sides, provided the baseline is set honestly and the commission applies to growth rather than to revenue you already had.

Our own model is retainer plus commission above an agreed threshold, and the reason we prefer it is that it fails loudly. The trade-off is that agreeing a baseline honestly is a harder conversation at the start than signing a flat fee.

Whatever the model, the answer you want is an agency that can articulate its own incentive without becoming defensive about it.

5. What do you make of our return rate?

This one is specific to fashion, and it separates agencies who understand the category from agencies who have run ads for a clothing company.

Returns run 20% to 40% in apparel and around 31% in footwear. Any agency planning your paid spend without knowing your return rate by product is planning on gross revenue, which is not the number you bank.

Listen for whether they have ever pulled a product out of prospecting because it came back too often, and whether they think about size and fit content as a performance lever rather than a merchandising detail. Our piece on why fashion brands lose margin even when sales are growing covers why this sits at the centre of the economics.

6. What do you need from us for this to work?

Any answer along the lines of "just let us get on with it" is a problem.

Every agency relationship that works has obligations running both ways, and they are usually about stock availability, production lead times, approval speed, and access to real commercial data rather than just platform access.

An agency that asks what you can actually manufacture and hold before proposing a growth curve is planning against reality. One that does not is planning against a spreadsheet.

This question also does something useful for you: it surfaces the internal work you will have to resource, which is almost always more than brands expect.

7. What are you not good at?

Every agency has gaps. The ones worth hiring will tell you where theirs are, because they would rather decline a bad fit than lose the account in month six.

A specific answer is a strong signal. "We are weak on organic social, so if that is a priority you should keep a specialist" tells you they know their own shape. A non-answer, or a strength dressed as a weakness, tells you the pitch matters more to them than the fit.

This matters more than it used to. Around 32% of brands expect to handle nearly all creative in-house within twelve months, and 60% of senior marketing leaders have reduced agency spend as AI compresses parts of what agencies were paid to do. Agencies are being forced to be clearer about where they genuinely add value. The ones that cannot articulate it are the ones most exposed.

8. What happens if we want to leave?

Ask about notice period, what you own at the end, and how handover works.

The things to establish: who owns the ad accounts, the pixel and conversion data, the creative files and the Klaviyo flows. Whether accounts are in your business manager or theirs. What the offboarding process actually involves and whether it is chargeable.

None of this is pessimism. Agency relationships end for entirely healthy reasons, including brands growing to a point where they in-house. An agency comfortable with the question is telling you it does not rely on lock-in to retain clients.

A twelve-month minimum term with an opaque exit is worth negotiating before signing, not after.

How to run the meeting

Give every agency the same brief and the same data, so you are comparing responses rather than presentation quality. Three is enough. Eight produces a process you cannot evaluate properly and a lot of wasted goodwill.

Ask these questions in the second meeting rather than the first. The first is for understanding what they do; the second is where the real information is, and by then you will know enough to hear a vague answer for what it is.

Take your own notes on how they handle being pushed. You are not just buying a plan, you are buying a working relationship with people who will occasionally have to tell you something you do not want to hear. An agency that becomes defensive in a pitch will not become more direct once the contract is signed.

The answers matter less than whether they have been thought about

There is no single right answer to most of these. Different agency models genuinely suit different brands, and a good answer for a £3m DTC brand is a bad one for a £15m business with a wholesale book.

What you are really testing is whether the agency has thought about the relationship as a commercial arrangement with obligations and measurement, or as a piece of work to win.

The ones who have will make this an easy conversation. The ones who have not will make it a slightly uncomfortable one, and that discomfort is the most useful information you will get all process.