Before You Fire the Agency, Check What You Asked It to Do

The reports look busy. The numbers don’t move. Six months in, the obvious conclusion is that the agency isn’t good enough.

Sometimes that’s true. More often the agency has been executing competently against a brief nobody ever wrote, and replacing them will reproduce the same result with a new logo, a new onboarding fee, and three months of lost momentum.

Before you make the call, work through these.

Was there ever a target?

Not a goal. A target. A specific number, agreed by both sides, with a date attached.

“Grow leads” is not a target. “Two hundred qualified opportunities per quarter at under $400 each, where qualified means X” is. If the agency was never given the second kind, they optimized for whatever they could control and report, which is usually volume and cost per click. That’s what you asked for, whether or not you meant to.

Did anyone define qualified?

The most common agency dispute in existence: marketing reports leads, sales says they’re junk, the agency points at the volume, and everyone is technically correct.

That’s a definition failure and the agency cannot fix it. Only you can, by getting sales and marketing to agree in writing what a qualified lead is before anyone spends another dollar. More on why that seam is where marketing usually breaks.

How fast do they get answers from you?

Agencies work at the speed of client feedback. If approvals take a week, if questions go unanswered, if the person who can say yes is in a different meeting, the agency spends most of the retainer waiting.

That’s a capacity problem on your side, and it’s the single most common reason agency relationships underperform. Ask them directly how long they typically wait. A good agency will tell you.

Are they being asked to set strategy?

An agency is built to execute in channels. If you hired a paid media agency and expected them to work out your positioning, your offer, your pricing and your ICP, you outsourced the part of the job that cannot be outsourced.

They will do it, because you’re paying them. They will do it from the outside, without your margin structure or your sales conversations, which is why the answer usually feels generic. That’s a different role.

Can they tell you what isn’t working?

Ask what they’d stop doing if it were their money. A good agency has an answer. A worried agency, or one that has never been asked, will tell you everything is performing.

The structural issue is real and it isn’t dishonesty: an agency is rarely positioned to recommend that its own scope be cut. That’s not a reason to distrust them, it’s a reason to have someone on your side of the table making allocation calls.

Then it might be the agency

If you gave them a clear brief, agreed targets, a decisive point of contact, fast feedback, and the right scope, and it still isn’t working after two full quarters, that’s an agency problem. Change it.

Just be honest about which situation you’re in first, because firing a competent agency to fix a leadership gap is an expensive way to learn the difference. Here’s how to run a real evaluation of what’s being proposed.