Questions to ask before hiring a marketing agency in India

Use the first meeting to find out who will do the work, what they will ask to see, how they will report and what they will say about their own failures. Prepare a one-page brief, send it to every agency beforehand, and run the hour by the clock. Below is a running order, with what to listen for in each answer, so that three meetings can be compared a week later. Ownership of accounts, exit terms and costs outside the fee are covered elsewhere and linked below.

Before the meeting: one page

Write what you sell, to whom, in which towns, how you get orders today, and what a good enquiry looks like. Add the last quarter's count of enquiries and orders if you have it, even from memory. Send the same page to each agency.

An agency that arrives with a deck and no questions has not read your brief. That is your first score.

The running order

People: who works on my account?

Ask for names, not job titles. Who writes the ads? Who reads the numbers? Whom do I ring if enquiries stop on a Saturday? If the pitch was made by one person and the work will be done by others, ask to meet them.

Ask what else each person handles. A strategist spread across fifteen accounts is not a bad sign in itself. One who cannot say how much of their week is yours is.

Records: what will you ask me for?

A good agency asks early for your enquiry records and sales numbers. If they do not, you will be judged on clicks. Put these four to them:

• What will you want to see before you start?
• How will you record which enquiries came from which source?
• If my sales are flat and your report says enquiries are up, whose numbers do we trust?
• What will you do if my team replies late?

The last tells you whether they look past their own work. Unanswered enquiries make any report look better than the business feels.

Reporting: what will I see?

Ask what a report contains and whether you can open the raw data without asking. Write down their answer. What matters is that the report measures enquiries, replies, quotes and orders against the position you started from. A report that stops at impressions is a report about the agency. Why your marketing generates enquiries but few sales shows what the fuller picture looks like.

Their weak spots: ask for a failure

"Tell me about a client it did not work for" separates agencies quickly. Some contracts forbid naming clients, so ask for a described case: the problem, the steps, what did not work and what they changed. A firm that can talk through a failure in detail is more convincing than one with only successes.

What stays out of the first meeting

Ownership of accounts, notice periods and costs outside the fee are real, but they belong in the written scope, not in an opening conversation. Raise them in your reply email, using the cost of a bad quote for the comparison sheet and hidden costs in marketing for the extras.

For example: a wooden toy maker in Channapatna

This is an invented case. The owner sells through shops in Bengaluru and Mysuru and wants gift-store buyers in other cities, and meets two agencies. The first has a polished deck and answers every question with a case study. It never asks how many enquiries he gets or how fast his two shop assistants reply. The second asks for his enquiry book in the first ten minutes. It says the assistants' reply speed may be a bigger gap than reach. It also describes a case in which its own landing page failed to convert, and what it changed.

The owner scores each answer 0 for none, 1 for a spoken answer and 2 for one given in writing afterwards. The first agency scores 3 out of 12 across the six rows. The second scores 10. The second also quotes about a third more and cannot start before the festival season ends, so the choice is still a trade-off, not a rout. The easy mistake would have been to meet them on different days with different questions. The same brief and the same hour mean the scores can be compared, and the owner keeps the first agency's deck for its design ideas.

When to walk away

Walk away, politely, if an agency will not discuss exit terms before you sign, or quotes a number of orders or rankings without asking about your business. Walk away from one whose main case is an unrelated trade with no notes on what went wrong.

You may also decide you do not need an agency yet. With no records, no one to answer enquiries and no budget to test, fixing those costs less than any retainer.

Send the one-page brief this week

Write the page tonight and send it to the agencies on your list. Our marketing audit page shows what a look at your own numbers covers, if you want that before any pitch, and the questions owners ask us include several on fees and exit terms. When you are ready to put us on the list, tell us what you need.