5 Reasons You Should Fire Your Marketing Agency Immediately
5 reasons you should fire your marketing agency immediately:
1. They aren’t in your CRM.
How is an agency supposed to optimize your programs to drive *revenue* if they can’t even see if opportunities are being created or the Sales team is following up or if the “lead” actually fits the ICP?
If they aren’t demanding to be in your CRM to have visibility to pipeline and revenue to optimize campaigns and strategy against, it’s time to fire them immediately and find someone else who gets it.
2. The metrics they celebrate and report on are vanity metrics like SQLs, MQLs, cost per lead, website traffic, and/or CPC.
This is partially your fault for allowing this behavior and hiring an agency to optimize for vanity metrics that aren’t aligned to qualified pipeline, revenue, sales velocity and CAC.
Whether it’s an agency or an internal team, this happens a lot. Using the wrong metrics ALLOWS all of this bad behavior (and often the metrics actually incentivize it).
3. They make more money when you spend more money on ads, not when you get more revenue and/or better ROI.
Paying an agency 10-25% of ad spend is super outdated and creates terribly misaligned incentives.
4. They charge very low prices.
Anybody that knows their work drives millions of dollars in revenue wouldn’t be charging you $5k/month. Get very clear when evaluating vendors whether you are outsourcing a business process or looking for a growth partner. They’re two very different things.
Outsourcing business process = they execute a business process cheaper and more efficiently than you could in-house. Ex. Run ads to get MQLs for 20% cheaper. Edit your podcast with offshore resources in Thailand.
Growth partner = They help you grow revenue, increase sales velocity, and/or lower CAC. Ex. Increased qualified pipeline by 120% while lowering ad spend by 40%.
5. They don’t challenge anything strategically - metrics, KPIs, goals, budget allocation, GTM strategy, etc.
Lots of CMOs I talk to say “My agency isn’t proactive”, “My agency isn’t pushing us”, “My agency isn’t strategic”.
That’s 100% true. Because agencies are built as an outsourced lead gen machine to appease the MQL waterfall model from 2012. And they make a boatload of easy money doing it.
It’s much easier for an agency to sell you an MQL/SQL machine of the past that you already think you need than to do the hard work to drive organizational change, adjust the metrics and build for the future.
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But here’s the unlock:
You don’t need a better agency. You need a new GTM framework that prevents agencies & internal teams from doing ineffective, low ROI work that gets defended & justified by reports filled with vanity metrics.
Vanity Metrics = KPIs that aren’t aligned with revenue and sales productivity, but are used to justify effectiveness of marketing programs. Ex. SQLs, MQLs, clicks, “leads”, cost per lead (CPL), cost per acquisition (CPA), website visitors, form conversion rate, etc.
