6 Questions to Ask Any Marketing Agency Before You Sign

Every generator dealer I talk to has been burned by at least one marketing company. Usually the same story. Good first call, nice slide deck, six months of reports, no more installs than before.

The problem is not that dealers pick badly. It is that the sales call is designed so you cannot tell the difference between a good shop and a bad one. Everybody says the same words.

So stop grading the pitch. Ask six questions instead. The answers sort it out fast.

1. Who owns the accounts and the website when we part ways?

Ask it exactly like that. Not "do I own my data" — ask who the account holder is on the Google Ads account, the Google Business Profile, the domain name, the phone tracking numbers, and the website files.

Good answer: you own all of it, it is registered under your business email, and you get logins today.

Walk away answer: "we manage that on our platform" with no way to take it with you. That is not a service, that is a hostage situation. When you leave, your ad history, your review history and your rankings leave with them.

2. What exactly gets counted as a lead?

This is where most reporting falls apart. If a wrong number, a parts question and a supplier calling about an invoice all get counted as leads, the report looks great and your calendar stays empty.

Ask them to define a lead in one sentence, and ask whether calls under 30 seconds are counted.

Good answer: a tracked call over a set length, a form fill, or a booked appointment — and they will show you the recordings so you can grade them yourself.

3. Show me a dealer you took from where I am to where I want to be.

Not a logo wall. One account, real numbers, and where the numbers came from.

The right follow-up question is: can I see this inside Google Search Console (the free Google tool that reports how often your site showed up and got clicked)? Anything that cannot be traced back to a source you can log into yourself is a claim, not a result.

Our own numbers live on beefygeneratormarketing.com/results and they are pulled from that tool. Hold anybody, including us, to that standard.

4. What happens to a lead at 9pm on a Saturday during an outage?

Storm demand does not respect office hours. If the agency has no answer for after-hours calls, they are selling you traffic and letting it fall on the floor.

Good answer: they either help you set up call answering, or they tell you plainly that answering is your job and they will not run ads until you have it handled.

Walk away answer: silence, or "that's on your side." They know it kills the results and they took the budget anyway. There is more on how we handle it at beefygeneratormarketing.com/services/ai-voice-answering-storm-call-capture.

5. What is the contract length, and what happens in month two if it is not working?

Long contracts are not automatically bad. Search work takes months. But the contract should say what you get, not just what you pay.

Ask: what is in scope every month, in writing? What is the notice period? Do I keep the website if I cancel?

Walk away answer: a twelve-month term, an auto-renewal, and a scope described as "ongoing optimization." That phrase means nothing and cannot be enforced.

6. Who is actually doing the work, and have they run a generator campaign before?

You are not buying a strategy. You are buying somebody's Tuesday afternoon.

Ask for the name of the person on your account and how many other clients they carry. Ask whether the work is done in-house or handed off.

Generator dealers are a strange market. A single install can be a five-figure job, most of the demand shows up in a few days after an outage, and half your competitors are electricians who install two units a year. Somebody who has only run restaurant ads will learn on your money.

The pattern behind all six

Every one of these questions asks for something specific: a login, a definition, a source, a name, a clause. Vague answers are the signal. A shop that does good work has these answers ready because clients ask them all the time.

One more thing worth saying out loud. We deliberately do not publish a ranked list naming other agencies. Those lists are almost always paid placement dressed up as research. What we did publish is how to judge a shop for yourself: beefygeneratormarketing.com/best-generator-marketing-agencies.

Use these on us too

If you are talking to us, ask the same six. You should get straight answers on ownership, lead definitions, sourced numbers, after-hours calls, scope and staffing.

If you want a second set of eyes on what you are currently paying for, book a free strategy session at beefygeneratormarketing.com/contact. Bring your last three monthly reports. Half the time the problem is visible in ten minutes.