Problem · Owners
We hired a marketing agency and we are not getting leads.
The retainer bills on the first of the month. The report arrives on the fifth. It shows impressions up, followers up, and a traffic chart with an arrow. Nowhere on it is the number you hired them for. That is not an accident of reporting. The agency model is built to be paid for activity, and activity is what you are getting.
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Every ISOVERTIC tier states its deliverables for the 90 day ramp in writing, and Kinetic at $10,000 a month adds a monthly meeting number to the agreement. If the number is not met, the engagement is month to month and you leave. Pricing is published.
Why the report never shows meetings
An agency is usually scoped to a channel: SEO, or paid, or social. Inside that channel it can be excellent and still produce nothing you can bill, because a lead has to cross three more steps to become revenue: a page that converts, a follow up within a business day, and a sales conversation. If the agency does not own those steps, it reports on the ones it owns. Impressions, clicks, rankings. All true. None of it a meeting.
More than 70 percent of marketing leads are never contacted by sales at all. When the agency produces 40 leads and nobody on your side calls 30 of them, the agency shows 40 and you feel zero. Both are right, and neither owns the seam.
Three questions that end the debate
What number did you commit to in writing for day 90? If the agreement has deliverables but no outcome, you bought activity. How many of last month's leads turned into a held conversation, and who counted? If nobody can answer, nobody is tracking the seam. Who exactly works on our account, and have they sold to our buyer before? If the answer is a rotating pod of juniors, you are training them with your budget.
Ask all three in one email. A good agency answers in a day. A bad one schedules a call.
What to buy instead
Buy the whole pipeline or buy nothing. One team that builds the page, writes the content, runs the ads, and books the meeting cannot hide behind a seam because it owns every seam. Our Catalyst tier at $5,000 a month runs content, one Google Ads campaign, a landing page, and lead follow up within one business day. Kinetic at $10,000 adds the outbound seat and a monthly meeting number in the agreement.
The 90 day ramp has deliverables in writing and a written review at day 90. After that the engagement is month to month. If we are not producing the number we wrote down, you should not be paying us, and the structure makes leaving a decision rather than a negotiation.
How long to give an agency
Ninety days for paid search to reach a stable cost per lead. Six months for organic content to show compounding growth. If at day 90 there is no number and no plan with a number in it, the next 90 days will look the same. The clients in our case studies crossed 5x to 7x their prior monthly lead average in month five, against the six months before we started, and we publish the method so you can check it.
Questions on this problem
Not always. If they run one channel well, keep them on that channel and we run the rest. If they cannot answer the three questions above, the decision makes itself.
Organic compounding does take months. A written 90 day number does not. Any firm can state landing pages live, campaigns at a cost per lead, and meetings booked by day 90. Ask for it.
Yes. Kinetic and above carry a monthly meeting number in writing, set in the ramp against your market size, offer, and deal value.
George Stoff, Founder and Lead Engineer
Thirty years building software, brands, and demand. On every account.