What questions should you ask when vetting a B2B marketing agency?

The best B2B marketing agency vetting questions cover six categories: ICP and strategy, content and technical SEO, AI and automation, lead gen and attribution, sales alignment, and onboarding. Ask them on the discovery call, before the RFP, before the contract. If the agency can't show how strategy, execution, and measurement connect, they can't build a predictable, AI-augmented pipeline engine without sacrificing the fundamentals that actually move revenue.

Here's what I'd require in every category:

• ICP and strategy. Make them walk you through how they'd map your buying committee and the Ten Demand States your prospects move through, using interviews, win-loss, and CRM analysis, not generic personas.
• Content and technical SEO. Require a redacted example of a technical audit and a content brief. Vague "we do SEO" answers are theater.
• AI and automation. Name the production workflows that use AI today, content drafting, audience modeling, SERP analysis, attribution modeling, and the ones still manual. Get the tool stack on paper. If they won't name tools or show a workflow, they're hiding immaturity, not protecting IP.
• Lead gen and attribution. Ask how they reconcile multi-touch attribution (how each touchpoint gets credit for revenue) with your CRM. If they haven't shipped a HubSpot, Salesforce, or Marketo integration in the last 12 months, they're guessing.
• Sales alignment. Require the cadence and format of their SDR-to-marketing feedback loop, plus a sample measurement plan.
• Onboarding. Demand a written 30-, 60-, and 90-day plan with milestones, Week 2 measurement baseline, Week 4 ICP validation, Day 60 first optimization cycle, before you sign. And if you operate in fintech, healthcare, or any regulated category, confirm how their internal compliance workflow handles SOC 2, HIPAA, and GDPR review on creative and data.

At The Starr Conspiracy, our pass-fail standard is simple: an agency that can't answer these on a discovery call without scrambling isn't ready to run your pipeline. You're hiring an operating system, not a slide deck. If pipeline is a Q3 problem, vetting is a Q2 job.

Get the 22 questions, organized by evaluation stage across six categories, in our B2B marketing agency vetting questions hub, copy, paste, and use them on your next discovery call.