Fire your agency if they cannot show you which of their work produced qualified opportunities, after you gave them a clear goal and enough time. But check first whether anyone on your side owns the plan. Most agency relationships fail because nobody inside the company decided what the agency should accomplish, so the next agency usually fails the same way.
I get this question from owners who have been paying an agency for a year or more. The monthly report looks busy: impressions, clicks, posts, a few new pages. But the sales team says the leads are thin, and nobody can say whether any of it paid for itself. The owner wants to fire them and wonders if the next agency will be any different. That doubt is worth listening to.
Nobody gave the agency a business goal. The agency was hired to "do SEO" or "run ads," not to produce a specific number of qualified opportunities from a specific type of customer. So they optimize what they can control and report on that.
The agency measures activity, not pipeline. Reports show traffic and click-through rates because those are easy to pull. Whether a lead became a meeting, a proposal or a customer lives in your CRM, which the agency often cannot see.
The leads are fine, but follow-up is not. Sometimes the agency is doing its job and the leads die after they arrive: slow response, no follow-up sequence, a sales team that does not trust inbound. Firing the agency does not fix that.
The agency is the wrong fit. Sometimes it really is them. The account is run by a junior person, the strategy has not changed in a year, or they are good at a channel that does not suit your buyers.
Pull three things before you decide. First, the original scope or contract: what did you hire them to do, and was there a stated goal? Second, your last 20 to 30 qualified leads or new customers and where each one came from, using your CRM, your sales team's memory and the agency's tracking together. Third, how fast those leads were contacted and what happened next.
If there was never a clear goal, the problem is ownership on your side, and a new agency will hit the same wall. If the agency's channels show up in your best leads but follow-up was slow, fix sales follow-up first. If you cannot tell where any of your leads came from, fix tracking before you judge anyone; my answer on how to find out which marketing is working walks through that. If the goal was clear, tracking works, follow-up is fast, and the agency's work still does not show up in your pipeline, it is time to go.
Fire them when they had a clear goal, a fair amount of time and decent data, and still cannot connect their work to qualified opportunities. Also when reports never change, nobody can explain the strategy, or account staff rotate every few months.
Fix the brief when the agency is competent but was never told what success looks like. Give them a 90-day target in pipeline terms, access to lead outcomes, and a monthly review where they explain what they would change.
Change the setup when the real gap is that nobody senior owns marketing. An agency is a supplier. It needs someone on your side who sets priorities and judges results, and if that is a busy owner, the agency will drift. If paid search is the main spend, my answer on whether a PPC agency is wasting your money has a channel-specific checklist.
Week one: secure your assets. Confirm your company owns the ad accounts, analytics, domain, website and email platform, with your own admin access. Read the notice period in the contract.
Week two: trace your last 20 to 30 qualified leads to a source and note how quickly each was contacted. This single exercise answers most of the question.
Week three: meet the agency with what you found. Set one pipeline goal for the next 90 days and ask them what they would change to hit it.
Week four: decide. If they engaged seriously, give them the 90 days with a monthly check. If they got defensive or vague, give notice and line up the replacement first so spend does not stop and restart.
Switching agencies costs onboarding time and often a dip while the new team ramps up, so decide on evidence, not frustration.
If the gap is senior ownership, a fractional CMO is one way to close it without a full-time hire. A full-time CMO typically costs $280,000 to $450,000 a year in salary. At MarkCMO, fractional CMO work runs $2,500 to $50,000 a month depending on scope, with most clients between $8,000 and $15,000 a month, month to month with no long contract. I run every account myself, bring 15 years leading marketing and operations, and target first results within 30 days. Part of that work is often directing the agency you already have, so you may not need to replace them at all. The details are on the fractional CMO cost page, and the fractional CMO vs marketing agency comparison covers how the two roles fit together.
Get help when you have already switched agencies once and the same problem came back, when the owner is the only person judging marketing, or when you are about to sign a new contract and cannot say what success should look like. Otherwise, run the 30-day plan and decide with real numbers. Learn more about how fractional CMO services work.
It depends on the channel. Paid search and paid social should show qualified leads and clear numbers within 60 to 90 days. SEO and content usually take longer, often six months or more, but you should still see leading signs earlier: pages published, rankings moving, traffic growing on the right topics. If after 90 days the agency cannot show any leading number moving in the right direction, the timeline is not the issue.
Ask four things. What goal were you working toward, in your own words? Which of your activities produced our last ten qualified leads? What would you stop doing if your budget was cut in half? What do you need from us that you are not getting? The answers tell you whether they understand your business, whether they track the right thing, and whether part of the problem sits on your side of the table.
Only if you know exactly what that person will own. A single marketing hire is usually a doer, not a strategist, and putting one person in charge of the plan, the vendors and the execution at the same time is a common reason marketing hires fail. If nobody has set the plan yet, start with senior direction, then decide whether execution belongs in house, with an agency, or with freelancers.
You should not, but check now. Make sure your company owns the ad accounts, the analytics, the domain, the website hosting and the email platform, with your own admin logins. If the agency set them up under their own account, ask for ownership to be transferred before you give notice. Losing years of ad history or tracking data is one of the most expensive mistakes in an agency switch.
MarkCMO provides the strategy and the roadmap, and then delivers it across three tiers, so you get direction and execution from one team instead of handing a deck to someone else to build.
Fractional CMO and COO leadership: strategy, positioning, go-to-market, and the roadmap that sets the direction.
Running the function day to day: managing teams, vendors, budgets, and the operating cadence that keeps the plan on track.
Hands-on delivery: marketing execution, software development, tech-stack build and integration, plus finance and operations support, everything a business needs to scale.
From tech to marketing to finance, strategy through execution, MarkCMO can lead it, manage it, and build it.
Book a free 30-minute call; you leave with the one thing costing you the most pipeline, whether that is the agency, the brief they were given or what happens to leads after they arrive.
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