Twelve questions. For each one, what a good answer sounds like and what should make you pause. Ours are included at the end, so you can hold us to the same standard.
Before hiring a marketing agency or consultant, ask what they would tell you not to do, who will actually perform the work, what you keep if the relationship ends, what success looks like in ninety days, and what is excluded from the price. These five reveal more than credentials or portfolios, because they test judgment, structure, and honesty rather than presentation.
The three that reveal the most
1. What would you tell me not to do?
Good: specific things, named, with reasoning. "Stop the Instagram account, it produces nothing and costs you an hour a week." "Do not rebuild the site yet, the problem is the form."
Worrying: a general answer, or a pivot to what they would add. A partner who cannot name anything you should stop is either not paying attention or unwilling to say something unwelcome, and both are expensive over twelve months.
2. Who actually does the work?
Good: a direct answer, by name and by task. "I do strategy and writing. Design goes to a contractor I have used for years."
Worrying: "our team." The common pattern is meeting a senior person during the sale and being handed to someone junior afterward. Not dishonest, it is how agency economics work, but you should know before signing rather than after.
3. What happens if we stop in six months?
Good: you keep the strategy, the documentation, the accounts, the prompts and workflows. Everything is in systems you own.
Worrying: vagueness, or discovering the website, the ad account, or the domain are in their name. That is not a partnership, it is a hostage arrangement, and it surfaces at the worst possible moment.
The nine others
4. What does success look like in ninety days? You want a number or a defined deliverable. "Increased brand awareness" predicts reporting you cannot evaluate.
5. Have you done this at my size? Enterprise experience is valuable and does not automatically transfer. Ask specifically how they adapt, because someone who has only worked with large budgets may reach for solutions your business cannot sustain.
6. What is not included? Ask explicitly. Software, ad spend, design, development, photography, and stock imagery are frequently excluded and frequently assumed to be included. This question prevents most billing disputes.
7. How do you report, and how often? Monthly, in plain language, showing outcomes rather than activity. A report full of impressions and posts published is a report designed to look busy.
8. What is your minimum commitment? A twelve month minimum on a first engagement should give you pause. Reasonable for a mature relationship, suspicious as an opening term, because it transfers all the risk to you before you have any evidence.
9. Can I talk to a client who left? Almost nobody asks this and the reaction is informative. Someone confident in their work can point you at a relationship that ended amicably.
10. What do you need from me? A good answer includes real time commitments: interviews, review cycles, decisions. Anyone who says "nothing, we handle everything" is describing work that will not sound like your business, because they have not planned to learn anything about it.
11. What would make you turn down this engagement? Tests whether they have a definition of a bad fit. Someone who will take any work has not thought about what they are good at.
12. What are you not good at? Everyone has an answer. Whether they will say it out loud tells you how the difficult conversations will go later.
The red flags, condensed
| Signal | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Guaranteed rankings or lead volume | Nobody controls Google's results. Ask for it in the contract. |
| Pricing as tiers with checkmarks | A number chosen for conversion rate, not for your situation |
| No written scope | You will discover what you bought in month three |
| Long minimum on a first engagement | Risk transferred to you before any evidence exists |
| Cannot name a bad-fit client | No filter, which means you are volume |
| Assets in their name | You cannot leave without losing something |
| Proposal arrives before questions are asked | Selling a package rather than solving your problem |
The last row is the one I would weigh most heavily. If someone sends a proposal without having asked substantial questions about your business, they are not proposing anything specific to you.
What you should bring
Worth saying, because the evaluation runs both ways and a badly briefed engagement fails regardless of who you hired.
Know roughly what a customer is worth. Know what you have already tried and what happened. Be honest about budget rather than making people guess. And be clear about who decides, because engagements stall most often on approvals rather than on work.
A vague brief produces a padded quote, every time, because the risk of scope expanding gets priced in.
Our answers
Since it would be inconsistent to publish this and not answer it.
What we would tell you not to do: every service page has a "do not buy this if" section, written before you ask.
Who does the work: Eric, supported by specialists for design and development. The person you talk to is the person doing the thinking.
If you stop: you keep everything. Strategy, prompts, workflows, standards, all documented and handed over. Building something that only works while we are in the room would be a dependency, not a service.
Minimum commitment: none. Audits are one-time, training is per engagement, ongoing work is monthly with quarterly scope reviews.
What is not included: software costs, ad spend, and heavy design or development, which go to specialists.
What we are not good at: high-volume production and ongoing paid media management. If that is your need, an agency or a specialist is the right answer and we will say so on the first call.
What we need from you: interview time, decisions, and honesty about what has not worked.
Thirty-three more answers are on the FAQ page, including cost.
Eric Howard
Founder of SteelAIQ and a chief marketing officer with more than twenty years running marketing organizations across enterprise software, manufacturing, and consumer brands. Based in Pittsburgh.
