Your retainer scope says "ongoing support".
Pull out your current agreement. Find the section labeled "scope of work" or "deliverables." Read it out loud. If the words that appear most are "support," "consulting," "as needed," or "ongoing," you don't have a scope. You have an agreement to invoice.
The best engagements name specific deliverables, frequencies, and accountability mechanisms. The worst engagements name dollar amounts and time periods, and leave everything else to interpretation. Guess which one favors the agency.
Ask your agency to put, in writing, the three specific deliverables you'll receive this month and the three you'll receive next month. If they can't, you're paying a retainer with no shape.
Your account manager can't answer the question.
You ask a real question ("why did the conversion rate drop in week two?") and your account manager says they'll loop in the team. You wait three days. The team's answer comes back as a paragraph and a deck. None of it answers the question.
This is the structural problem of the account-management model: the person who talks to you is not the person doing the work. Information passes through them, gets translated, gets softened, and arrives back at your inbox three days later with the urgency removed.
Demand a direct channel (Slack, email, or call) to the person executing the work. Watch your AM's body language when you ask. If it tightens, you've found the problem.
The report doesn't tie to revenue.
Look at the last three monthly reports. Find the word "revenue." Now find the word "leads." Now find the word "ROAS." Now find the word "impressions."
If "impressions" appears more often than "revenue," you're being managed to vanity. If "leads" appears more often than "revenue," nobody has tied the funnel together. The honest test of a marketing agency isn't whether they can drive leads; it's whether those leads close, and whether the close value covers the cost of getting them.
Ask for a single dashboard line: revenue generated, cost to generate it, net profit. If the answer is "we don't have access to your revenue data," push them to integrate. Marketing without revenue tie-back is theater.
The QBR slide deck is 40 pages of vanity.
Quarterly business reviews are where bad agencies pad. A good QBR has five things: what we did, what we learned, what we'd do differently, what we're trying next, and the revenue impact. A bad QBR has thirty extra slides of executions, reach numbers, top-performing posts, and an "engagement rate" chart that goes up and to the right because every chart eventually does.
Count the slides in your last QBR that contained an actionable next move. Then count the slides that didn't. The ratio tells you what they're optimizing for.
Before your next QBR, send your agency a one-line ask: "Bring three slides: what worked, what didn't, what we're doing next, with revenue impact on each." Watch what happens.
Nothing is being tested.
Ask your agency this question: "What is the active hypothesis we're testing this month, what's the bar for success, and when will we know?" A good agency answers in one breath. A bad agency stalls, then sends you a Notion link three days later that lists everything they're "monitoring."
Marketing without testing is just doing more of the same thing. Sometimes that's right. Most of the time, "we're optimizing" is a euphemism for "we ran out of new ideas."
Require one named test per month, in writing, with a defined success metric. If the test fails, that's information. If they refuse to name a test, that's also information.
Days pass without a word.
You sent an email Tuesday. It's now Friday. No reply, no holding response, no "we're working on this, more by EOD Monday." The campaign is running. Money is moving. You can hear crickets.
Communication blackouts are the clearest tell of an account that's been deprioritized internally. The senior person assigned to you got moved to a bigger client; the junior left to cover is overwhelmed; nobody wants to be the one to tell you.
Set a 24-hour response SLA in writing, even if the response is "we're on it, full answer by Wednesday." Acknowledgment is the floor.
The deliverable arrives. Why does it exist?
An agency sends you a new landing page, a fresh ad set, an email sequence. It looks fine. You ask: "What is this trying to prove?" There's no answer. It exists because it was on the deliverables list.
Good marketing has a hypothesis attached to every artifact. Bad marketing is a content treadmill: produce, ship, repeat. The treadmill keeps the retainer fed. It doesn't grow your business.
Before every deliverable, demand a one-sentence hypothesis: "We believe X. This will prove or disprove it by Y date with Z metric." If they can't say that sentence, kill the deliverable.
The pitch team isn't the work team.
You met with three senior people during the sales cycle. Smart, sharp, opinionated. You signed. Three weeks in, kickoff happens with two people you've never seen before. They're nice. They're junior. The seniors "are still involved." You will never speak to them again.
This is the most common screw-job in the agency business, and it's not always malicious. The senior who pitched is on the next pitch. Capacity got reshuffled. The bait-and-switch isn't a plan; it's gravity.
Before signing, get the names and time allocations of the people who will do your work in writing. Include them in the contract. Tie senior involvement to specific deliverables, not "oversight."
Kickoff was a party. Month three is a wake.
The first 30 days had momentum. Workshop, brand sprint, three new pieces of creative, hot Slack thread. Then it cooled. By month three, the weekly stand-up turned into a status check, the status check turned into an email summary, and the email summary turned into a calendar hold nobody really takes.
Agency engagements have a half-life. Most aren't refreshed. Watch for the moment your work stops being on someone's top-of-mind list.
Run a "is this still alive?" review at month three. Bring real numbers, real activity logs, real next moves. If you can't fill a page, neither can they.
The answer to everything is "we'll handle it."
You don't know what's happening with your paid accounts. You don't see the creative briefs. You don't know who's writing the emails. Whenever you ask, the answer is "we'll handle it", said warmly, designed to reassure.
Good agencies make their process visible. Great agencies make their process teachable. The ones that hide the work behind "we'll handle it" are usually hiding a process that wouldn't survive examination.
Ask to see, by month two, every brief, every spec, every test plan. Not for control; for evidence. Process exists or it doesn't.
The 15-minute scorecard.
Check every box that's true about your current agency. The total tells you what to do.