The lead generation industry has a structural problem: the agencies easiest to hire are the ones that do the least. Anyone can export a database and call it leads. Before you sign anything, run the conversation below — the answers separate channel-builders from spreadsheet-sellers in under fifteen minutes.
Ask who owns what you are paying for
The single most expensive surprise: everything lives in the agency’s accounts, and the day you leave, the channel evaporates. Domains, mailboxes, lists, copy, CRM data — ask, item by item, whose name is on each. The right answer is yours. Our entire model is built inside the client’s own accounts precisely because a channel you do not own is a subscription, not an asset.
Ask what “qualified” means — in writing
“Leads” is the most abused word in B2B. A scraped contact, an email opener, and a decision-maker who booked a call are all sold under the same label at very different prices. Demand a written definition of a qualified lead, with the criteria that make it true, in the contract. If the definition is vague, the invoices will not be.
Ask about the machine behind the sends
Two minutes on infrastructure exposes most pretenders: Do they send from separate domains they set up for you? Are SPF, DKIM and DMARC configured — and can they show you? How long is warmup, and what is the daily cap per inbox? Who pays when a domain burns? An agency that cannot answer crisply is learning deliverability with your domain reputation. (The full technical picture is in our infrastructure guide.)
Ask what happens after a reply
Replies are where amateur operations quietly die. Who answers, how fast, with what script, and where does the meeting land? “We forward them to you” means you are the setter now. The answer you want: trained people, minutes not days, booked straight into your calendar and CRM.
Ask where the risk sits
Flat retainer, no defined deliverable, no refund mechanism — then every ounce of risk is yours, and the agency gets paid whether you win or not. A serious operator will put a number and a date in the contract and attach consequences to missing it. Ours is public: 100+ qualified leads within 14 days of launch, or a full refund. Ask any agency you are evaluating what their version is, and watch the reaction.
Then score it, don’t vibe it
We turned this entire diligence process into an interactive, 30-point scorecard: the Agency Checklist. Open it during the discovery call, tick what they clear, and let the score decide. It works on us too — deliberately.
Good agencies survive hard questions comfortably. The wrong ones get vague at question two.