What to ask after a marketing agency burned you

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By Brandon Aubey

In short: Got reports but no jobs? Use this question list before you hire again, so the next partner sells booked work, not pretty numbers.

The last agency sent dashboards. Your calendar stayed quiet. The problem was the offer, not your “tough market.” Before you hire again, ask questions that only someone who does the work can answer.

Feelings are not results

Reports show reach, clicks, or so-called leads. A lead is a person who might hire you. None of that is a booked job. A report can be true and still leave your calendar quiet.

Write down three things. What you paid. What they promised. What jobs showed up on the calendar. That list is your notes for the next call. Bring it. Do not rebuild it from how the meetings felt.

Questions to ask on the call

A pitch deck is a sales slideshow. Ask these questions. A pitch deck gets soft here. Someone who does the real work answers them.

1. What counts as a result? Is it appointments that show up, or form fills? A form fill is just a name typed into a web form.
2. Who answers the phone and follows up? How fast?
3. What do you need from us each week? That keeps any guarantee fair.
4. Can I see calendar results in my trade, or one close to it?
5. If we stop, what happens to the pages, ad accounts, and CRM? A CRM is the software that holds your customer list.
6. What will you not promise?

Question 4 is about real jobs on a calendar. One public home-service example is Gonzalez & Sons Roofing. They went from about two roofs a month to about eight. That is their result. It is not a promise for your business.

Red flags that usually repeat

• They blame only “your closers” and never check intake. A closer is whoever sells the job. Intake is how a new call gets handled. If nobody looked at missed calls, the closers are not the whole story.
• They will not define a lead. A click, a form, and a shown appointment are not the same. If they all count the same, you have no real result.
• They want a long contract before a clear 90-day scoreboard. Know what “working” means before the term locks you in.
• They worship one channel. More Facebook, more SEO, but no booking math. SEO means showing up on Google. Traffic that never becomes a booked job is just a bill.

The first 30 days

Good looks like real work, not a new slogan. In the first month you should see:

• A shared scoreboard. It tracks spend, conversations, bookings, and show rate. Show rate is how many booked people actually show up.
• One owner on their side. That person replies during business hours.
• Changes based on missed calls and no-shows. Not only new ad tests.

Did you only get new ads and new graphics? Then they have not looked at the phone.

The next call, without getting sold

Bring the last 90 days of your calendar. Bring what you paid for ads too. Rough numbers are fine. Look at the gap between what you paid and what got booked. That gap is what the call is about.

Ask them to find the problem first. Not to pitch a package name. The phone, the follow-up, and the calendar come first.

Do they start with plan tiers and prices? Before they understand your intake? Leave.

Next: Why answer speed is the real cost of a lead.

We can do this for you

You can do everything above yourself. Most owners do not have the hours. Dead River Management builds and runs it for home service businesses. We work in El Paso and across the country. You keep running jobs. We handle the demand, the follow-up, and the tracking. You judge us on booked jobs, not reports. See Demand Intelligence, read about the Demand Flow guarantee, or book a strategy call.

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