Bringing in outside marketing help is one of the harder buying decisions a contractor makes, because the thing you’re buying is mostly judgment, and judgment is hard to evaluate from a sales call.
So here’s how I’d judge it if I were the one writing the check — the questions I’d ask, what a good answer sounds like, and the things I’d want cleared up before signing anything.
Do they ask about your business before they talk about channels?
The early questions should be about your average job value, your close rate, your crew capacity and your seasonality. Those four things determine what a lead is worth to you and how many you can actually handle, and without them any channel recommendation is a guess.
A good answer sounds like: “Before I recommend anything, I need to know what a booked job is worth to you and how many you can staff next month.”
Can they explain your own numbers back to you?
Ask someone to look at your accounts and tell you, in plain English, what your money is currently producing. It’s the most useful interview question available, because it tests two things at once: whether they can read an account, and whether they can explain it without hiding behind vocabulary.
The two figures you want are cost per lead and cost per booked job. If nobody can produce them, that’s not a dead end — it’s usually the first thing worth fixing, and it tells you the measurement needs attention before anything else does.
Will they teach you, or just report to you?
This is the difference I’d weigh most heavily. A monthly report you can’t interpret keeps you dependent on whoever wrote it. Someone who explains what impression share means, why conversion rate moved, and what a healthy cost per booked job looks like in your trade is handing you something you keep permanently.
For what it’s worth, that’s a stated goal in my own engagements: after a few months, my clients can read their own numbers and challenge any vendor’s report, including mine.
Do they know the difference between a lead problem and a business problem?
In the trades, plenty of growth problems aren’t media problems. They’re a phone ringing out at 4:40 on a Friday, an estimate that never got followed up, a booking process that loses people between the form fill and the appointment. I’ve seen a client whose cost per lead looked healthy while only about two-thirds of leads reached a scheduled appointment — closing that gap was worth roughly fifty extra appointments a month with no additional ad spend.
Somebody whose expertise stops at the ad platform will keep buying more leads to pour into the same bucket, which is expensive and eventually discouraging.
How do they get paid?
Worth asking plainly, and there’s no wrong answer — you just want to know. A percentage of ad spend is a common and legitimate model, but it does mean nobody in the room gets paid more for telling you to spend less. My fee doesn’t change when your ad spend goes up, which is why I can recommend cutting a channel without it costing me anything.
Will they tell you what they wouldn’t do?
Someone who says yes to every idea isn’t really advising you. I’d rather lose a piece of work than take money for a plan I don’t believe will produce jobs, and I’d look for that same willingness in anyone you hire.
Five things I’d want cleared up before signing
- Guarantees on rankings or lead volume. Nobody controls the auction or the algorithm. A target with a plan behind it is a fair thing to agree on; a guarantee is a different kind of promise, and worth asking how it’s honored.
- Reporting you can’t read. Ask to see a sample report before you sign, and ask them to walk you through it. If it takes twenty slides to say what happened, ask for the version that fits on one page.
- Account ownership. Your ad account, Google Business Profile, analytics and website should be owned by your business, with you holding admin access, and any vendor added as a manager. Clarify this up front and it never becomes an issue later.
- No conversation about conversion tracking. If nobody asks how your leads are currently counted, the numbers in every future report are built on an unexamined foundation.
- A long commitment before any diagnosis. A short paid audit or a defined first phase lets both sides find out whether the fit is right. If the work is good, the relationship continues on its own merit.
Consultant, agency, or marketing leadership?
These get used interchangeably and they’re genuinely different purchases.
If you know your strategy and it simply isn’t getting built well, you need execution: an agency, or a better-fitting one. Specialist teams work at a scale you can’t hire in-house, and a good one is worth keeping.
If you want a specific question answered — is this account healthy, is this budget right — that’s a consultant or an audit, and it’s a sensible, low-commitment place to start.
If you’d like someone senior owning the whole picture month to month, coordinating your vendors and reporting the result in plain English, that’s marketing leadership. It’s the seat I sit in, and you can read more about what that job actually involves.
Where I’d start
Before hiring anyone, get a straight read on what you already have. Request an audit and I’ll go through your accounts and tell you what’s working, what’s being wasted, and what I’d do about it — explained so you can act on it with or without me. If your current setup is in good shape, I’ll tell you that too.