12 questions to ask an agency before you sign

A great pitch is designed to impress. Your job before you sign is to look past the deck and understand how the agency operates when deadlines slip, people rotate, and results are uneven. These twelve questions work across marketing, design, web, app, and AI engagements. Ask them in the finalist round, not after the contract is countersigned.

1. Who will do the day-to-day work on my account? Ask for names, roles, and approximate weekly hours — not a vague "dedicated pod." You want to meet the strategist, designer, engineer, or channel lead you will actually Slack, not only the partners who close deals. If staffing is "TBD after signature," you are buying capacity that does not exist yet.

2. Who is on the sales team versus the delivery team? It is normal for new business to lead early calls. It is a problem if the people who will ship the work never appear. Insist that proposed day-to-day owners join a final call and speak to approach, risks, and trade-offs in their own words. Silence from delivery is how bait-and-switch starts.

3. How will you define success for this engagement? Push for outcomes you care about — qualified pipeline, a shipped product milestone, brand system adoption — plus the assumptions those outcomes depend on. Activity metrics (posts shipped, tickets closed, assets produced) are useful leading indicators, not the definition of done. If they cannot restate your goal without flipping to a generic capability slide, keep looking.

4. What happens if results miss targets? Ask what "miss" means, when they diagnose, and what changes in the next cycle: more senior time, a different channel or architecture, a rescope, or a pause. Soft answers like "we will work harder" are not a plan. You want a remediation path in writing before optimism becomes a dispute.

5. How do you report progress, and how often? Agree on cadence (weekly async, biweekly live), the source of truth (dashboard, shared board, repo), and who owns decisions between meetings. Reporting that only surfaces at month-end leaves you managing by afterthought. For technical or AI work, ask how they surface blockers and dependency risks, not just demo-friendly progress.

6. What is in scope versus out of scope, and how do change orders work? A clear SOW lists deliverables, exclusions, and a priced path for net-new asks. Vague "we will figure it out" language is how budgets quietly double. Favor a change-log process over handshake scope creep — especially on retainers where "one more thing" is endless.

7. Who owns accounts, tools, and creative assets? You should own (or co-own with full export rights) ad and analytics accounts, domains, code repos, design files, brand systems, and model or data artifacts created for you. Agencies need access to execute; they should not hold your stack hostage. Put admin ownership, licensing, and IP transfer in the contract before kickoff.

8. What does offboarding look like if we part ways? Ask for a concrete exit: knowledge transfer, asset handoff timelines, residual access revocation, and whether wind-down is billed. Confident partners describe exit calmly because they expect to earn renewals, not trap them. Murky offboarding is a lock-in strategy.

9. Have you done work like this for a company at a similar stage? Relevant proof beats beautiful unrelated case studies. A Series B product team and a local retailer need different agency muscles. Ask what transferred from past work — process, tech stack, category insight — and what would be new on yours. Honesty about learning curve is a green flag.

10. Can I speak with a current client and a former one? References you choose beat the polished shortlist in the deck. Ask for someone who churned and why. How an agency talks about a relationship that ended tells you how they will treat conflict on yours. Probe responsiveness under pressure, not just NPS.

11. What do the first 30, 60, and 90 days look like? You want a phased plan: discovery inputs, first shippable milestone, and how they will know the engagement is on track. Agencies that jump straight to a year-long roadmap without a near-term proof point are selling confidence, not a plan. Prefer a pilot or phase-one SOW you can exit cleanly.

12. How do you handle capacity, vacations, and turnover on our account? Ask who covers when the lead is out, how they backfill mid-engagement, and whether you are notified before a staffing change. Thin benches show up as missed standups and junior swaps. You are hiring continuity as much as craft.

Take notes in the room. Compare answers across finalists on the same twelve questions — the differences are usually sharper than the decks. Vague, defensive, or "trust us" answers are the biggest red flags of all.

When you are ready to shortlist partners who can answer these questions with specifics — team, process, ownership, and a realistic first ninety days — get matched with agencies on Appsli and go into those conversations with this list in hand.