If you are a contractor about to sign with a marketing agency, ask these seven questions first. We would rather be held to them than not.
- How many jobs did I close from your leads?
- Show me closed revenue, not lead count.
- Who calls my leads, your team or mine?
- How fast are they called, in minutes?
- Is the lead exclusive to me?
- What happens if it does not work?
- Can I see a live dashboard rather than a monthly PDF?
Questions one and two do most of the work. Lead volume and cost per lead are the easiest metrics in this industry to make look good and the hardest to bank. An agency that cannot connect its activity to closed revenue is selling you leads and calling it marketing, and those are different businesses with different economics.
How to actually run this call
Do not email the list. Ask them out loud, on the phone, in this order, and write down the first sentence of each answer.
You are not grading the content of the answer so much as the shape of it. A vendor who has built this before answers in a sentence or two and then offers to show you. A vendor who has not gives you a paragraph about their process. Length is the tell.
Budget twenty minutes. Any agency that cannot spare twenty minutes before you hand them a retainer is showing you what the onboarding is going to feel like.
1. How many jobs did I close from your leads?
What you are really asking is whether this company tracks anything past the handoff.
A good answer is a number and a source. Fourteen last quarter, here is the view, here is how we know. A weak answer is “that depends on your sales process.”
It does depend on your sales process. That is not a reason to stop counting. If nobody counts the jobs then nobody can say whether the money was worth spending, and the conversation at renewal becomes a matter of opinion. You will lose that one, because they have it every month and you have it once a year.
2. Show me closed revenue, not lead count.
Lead count is the number that moves whether or not anything good happened. Widen a targeting radius, take a qualifying question off the form, run a giveaway, and the count goes up while the quality goes down. Cost per lead falls at the same time, so both headline numbers improve while your calendar fills with people who were never buying.
Revenue does not move in that direction by accident.
Expect one honest caveat here. An agency cannot see your bank account, so some of the attribution is estimated. That is fine. Ask how they estimate it, then ask to see the leads that turned into jobs by name rather than as a total, because a total is a claim and a list is a record.
3. Who calls my leads, your team or mine?
This is the question that separates a marketing service from a list. Most providers stop at delivery: the ads run, the inquiries land in a notification or a spreadsheet, and the hardest part of the work goes straight back to you, at night, after a full day on site.
There is no wrong answer to this one. There is only an answer you need to price. If the calling is yours, then somebody in your business has to own it, and that person is either a hire or it is you at 9pm. Decide which before you sign, not in month two. The longer version of this argument is we call your leads, you do not.
4. How fast are they called, in minutes?
Minutes, not hours, and not “quickly.” Four hours feels rapid to a contractor who is on a job. To a homeowner who filled in a form on a lunch break it is a long silence, and if the inquiry went to more than one company, somebody else has already spoken to them.
Ask three things: the number they measure, what they call it, and what happens to an inquiry that arrives at 8pm on a Saturday. That last one is where most answers come apart, because evenings and weekends are exactly when homeowners fill in forms and exactly when nobody is staffed.
5. Is the lead exclusive to me?
Ask it plainly and listen for hedging. “Exclusive in your service area” and “exclusive to you” are different sentences. So are “we do not sell a lead twice” and “the platform does not sell it twice.”
What you are trying to find out is simple. When your phone rings, is the homeowner expecting you, or are you call three of five? It changes your close rate more than anything you will ever say in a living room, and it is decided before your phone rings at all. If the answer matters to you, ask for it in the agreement and then read what the agreement actually says.
6. What happens if it does not work?
Every honest answer to this is a version of “here is the point where we would tell you to stop.” Ask for the timeline, the number that would count as working, and who decides.
Be careful with a guarantee that sounds too clean. A guarantee of leads is easy to hit and means very little. A guarantee of jobs depends on your crew, your pricing and your close rate, none of which the agency controls, so anyone offering one has either written a lot of small print or has not thought it through.
What you want instead is a stated review point and an exit that does not cost you your accounts. Which raises the thing these seven questions do not cover, and it is the one that hurts most on the way out: who owns the ad account, the CRM, the domain and the data.
7. Can I see a live dashboard rather than a monthly PDF?
A monthly PDF is a document written after the fact by the person being graded. A live view is the same data before anybody chose which parts of it to show you.
It does not have to be beautiful. You need one screen you can open on a Tuesday that shows inquiries, calls attempted, appointments booked and jobs won, for a date range you pick yourself. If the answer is “we send a report,” ask why the report cannot be a link.
The answers that should worry you
- “Leads are our product. What you do with them is on you.” That is a true description of a list broker. Decide whether you meant to hire one.
- “We cannot share that, it is proprietary.” Your own results are not their intellectual property.
- “Everyone in your trade sees a cost per lead of X.” A number with no source, quoted about an industry rather than about you.
- “Let us get you live and we will sort the reporting out after.” Reporting built after the money starts moving tends never to get built.
- Any answer that arrives as enthusiasm instead of a fact. These are record keeping questions and they have record keeping answers.
What to do with the seven answers
| What you heard | What it probably means | What to do next |
|---|---|---|
| Names closed jobs and can show them | They track past the handoff | Keep going. Move to the calling questions |
| Only reports leads and cost per lead | The work ends at delivery | Price the calling as your cost, not theirs |
| Calls in minutes, by a person | The expensive part is covered | Ask what a booked appointment contains |
| “You get the lead instantly” | Software, not staff | Assume every call is yours to make |
| Cannot say whether a lead is shared | It is probably shared | Expect a lower close rate and budget for it |
| Opens a live view without being pushed | Nothing to hide | Open it yourself on a Tuesday and check |
| Wants the ad account in their name | The exit is expensive by design | Fix it in the agreement before you sign |
Three questions that sound smart and are not
- “What is your cost per lead?” It is the number everybody quotes and the one that tells you least. An inquiry that never becomes an appointment still cost you full price. Ask for cost per booked estimate instead, which is the same money divided by something real.
- “How many clients do you have?” A big roster says nothing about whether the ones who look like you stayed. Ask how many contractors in your trade they have kept past a year.
- “Do you work with anyone else in my trade?” Everyone does, and the honest ones will say so. The version of this question that has teeth is question five, about the inquiry itself.
Ask them of us
We publish this knowing our own clients will use it on us. That is the point. An industry where these questions are standard is one where good operators win more work and bad ones churn out faster.
Ask them of us, about any of the five things we run. We answer all seven on a first call, including the ones where the honest answer is not flattering.
One thing to do before that call, whoever you end up hiring. Have your own numbers in front of you. The five numbers every flooring owner should know take an afternoon to assemble off a written record, and they turn a sales call into a conversation between two people who can both count.
