Hiring someone to help with your marketing is an odd sort of purchase. You often can’t judge the work until months after you’ve paid for it, the market is full of people using the same words to describe very different things, and the person selling knows far more about the subject than you do.
I’ve been on both sides of that conversation. I’ve pitched for work, and I’ve sat with business owners picking through proposals from three agencies that all look the same. These are the questions I’d ask if I were doing the hiring, and what a decent answer sounds like.
1. Who will actually do the work?
Pitches are often run by the most senior person in the building, and then the account gets handed to somebody two years into their career. That can be fine, as long as you know it’s happening and the senior person stays involved in decisions.
Ask for names, ask how much of their week you’re getting, and ask who you ring when something goes wrong. With a freelancer or a fractional CMO the answer is simple, which is much of the appeal.
2. What will you stop me doing?
Anyone who only adds to your to-do list isn’t thinking about your business. There’s always something to drop: a channel that eats hours and returns nothing, a newsletter nobody reads, a campaign still running because switching it off feels like admitting defeat.
Some of the most useful advice I give clients is about what to stop. It saves money immediately and frees up the time to do the remaining things properly.
3. How will we know in three months whether this is working?
You want a number and a date. Enquiries, qualified leads, cost per sale, revenue from a channel. “Brand awareness” and “engagement” are not answers unless somebody can tell you how they’re measured and what they’re worth.
If the answer is vague at the pitch, the reporting will be vague all year. When I take on an account the first question I ask is what a good month looks like in numbers, because everything after that depends on agreeing it.
4. Can you show me the numbers behind a similar result?
Everybody has case studies. Ask what the starting point was, what the budget was, how long it took, and what they’d do differently.
The detail is the tell. I can tell you that the Royal Armouries shop saw return on ad spend rise 141% on Google Ads and 246% on Meta year on year, and I can also tell you that the first months went on fixing conversion tracking rather than campaigns, because the sales data wasn’t reliable enough to make decisions with. Anyone who only has the headline is either new or hiding the messy part.
5. What do you need from us?
Marketing goes wrong when a supplier is left to guess. Good ones will tell you exactly what they need: access to your analytics and ad accounts, time with your sales team, sign-off within a few days rather than a few weeks, and someone internal who can answer questions about the business.
If somebody says they need nothing from you, they’re planning to work in the dark.
6. Who owns the accounts and the data?
Your Google Ads account, your analytics, your website, your ad account on Meta, your customer list. All of it should be owned by your business, with your supplier given access.
This sounds procedural until you part company and find that three years of history sits in an account you can’t get into. Ask the question before you sign, and get it in writing.
7. How do you charge, and what happens if we need more or less?
Retainer, day rate, project fee, percentage of ad spend. They all work, and they all create different incentives. A percentage of spend rewards spending more. A fixed retainer rewards efficiency, though the hours you get can shrink over time without anyone mentioning it.
Whatever the model, ask what happens when you need a big push, and what happens in a quiet quarter. Flexibility is much of the reason businesses use a part-time marketing director rather than hiring one.
8. What don’t you do?
Nobody is good at everything. A PPC specialist who also claims to be strong on brand, PR, email, SEO and video is describing a team, not a person, and you should ask who those people are.
I’m a Google Ads specialist and a fractional CMO. When a client needs a website built or video produced, I bring in a partner I trust and manage them, which is how the Rucklidge Law work runs. That’s a better answer than pretending.
9. Explain something technical to me, right now
Pick a term from their proposal and ask them to explain it as though you’d never heard it. Attribution. Performance Max. Impression share. Whatever they’ve used.
This is the most revealing question on the list. Marketing has a jargon problem, and jargon is often used to keep clients at arm’s length from their own budget. When somebody can explain their work in plain English, it usually means they understand it properly and they’re comfortable being held to it.
A note on gut feel
You’ll work with this person for a year or more, often on something you find frustrating. Whether you like them matters more than most people admit. So does whether they’ll tell you something you don’t want to hear, which you can usually sense in a first conversation by whether they push back on anything you say.
If somebody agrees with every idea you float in a first meeting, they’re selling. The right person will tell you when your favourite plan is a bad use of money, and they’ll say so before you’ve paid them.
If you’re weighing up your options, the difference between an agency and a fractional CMO is worth understanding first, because it changes who you should be asking. And if you’d like to put these questions to me, book a free consultation. I’d be glad to be interrogated.