Free, and no pitch in it
Eleven questions a good agency answers in a sentence and a bad one talks around for five minutes. Take it into the meeting. Ask them in order. You are not testing whether they are clever, you are testing whether they are specific.
“A team of specialists” is the phrase that usually means subcontractors you will never meet. The people in the pitch are often not the people on the project.
Every agency will list what is included. The number that actually decides your final invoice is the list of what is not.
This is the single moment where the relationship either stays honest or quietly stops being so.
You should never be surprised by your own website. If the first time you see it is the day it launches, you have no leverage and no time.
This is the mechanism agencies use to make leaving expensive. It is rarely stated and almost never volunteered.
Launch is where most agency relationships quietly end, which is exactly when the first real problems appear.
Lock-in is rarely a clause. It is usually a platform, a license or an account that happens to be theirs.
“A client in your industry saw a 300% increase” is unverifiable, and unverifiable numbers are the cheapest thing in marketing.
The response time you get while they are selling to you is the fastest you will ever see. Ask what it becomes afterward.
You are entitled to know who touches your business, your data and your accounts. Subcontracting is not wrong; hiding it is.
An agency that has never turned anyone away will not turn you away either, however wrong the fit is. This question finds out whether they have standards or just capacity.
The full guide carries the rest: what a good answer sounds like for each one, the warning sign that usually replaces it, how we answer it ourselves so you can hold us to the same standard, and a short page to score the meeting once you are out of it.
Send me the guideWe publish our answers to all eleven on this site, so the checklist works on GridPoint as well as on anybody else. Book a free call and ask every one of them. If we are not the right fit, we will say so on the call.
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