The Dirty Secret of the Agency Business
Here is something agencies do not want you to know: the person who sold you the work is almost never the person who does the work. You sat through a pitch from a sharp, experienced strategist. You signed the contract. And then your account got handed to a 24-year-old coordinator who manages 12 other clients and is mostly just making sure tasks get completed on time.
This is the agency model. It is built on a ratio — senior people sell, junior people execute. That is not inherently bad. But it becomes a problem when the senior thinking you were promised never actually touches your account after the kickoff meeting.
This is why the average client-agency relationship lasts just 3.2 years. And why most companies we talk to have cycled through 2-3 agencies in the last five years, always hoping the next one will be different.
Failure Mode 1: No Strategy, Just Tactics
The most common agency failure is jumping straight to execution without building a strategy first. You sign up for SEO, so they start building backlinks. You sign up for Google Ads, so they start running campaigns. You sign up for content, so they start writing blog posts.
Nobody stopped to ask: What is the business trying to accomplish? Who is the target customer? What does the competitive landscape look like? What is the customer journey? How do these channels fit together?
Without answers to those questions, you are paying for activity, not outcomes. The agency can show you a beautiful report full of metrics — impressions up, traffic up, engagement up — while the phone does not ring any more than it did before. This is the same disconnect we see when companies operate without a real marketing strategy.
The red flag: In the sales process, if the agency jumps straight to "here is what we will do for you" without first asking detailed questions about your business, your customers, and your goals, they are going to run a generic playbook. That playbook might accidentally work. But more often, it does not.
Failure Mode 2: Vanity Metrics Instead of Business Outcomes
"Your impressions increased 47% this month." Great. How many of those impressions became leads? "Well, that is harder to track."
This is the reporting dodge. Agencies are excellent at measuring the things that make them look good and terrible at measuring the things that tell you whether marketing is actually working. Impressions, reach, follower growth, engagement rate — these are interesting data points, but none of them are business outcomes.
The metrics that matter: leads generated, cost per lead, lead-to-customer conversion rate, marketing-sourced revenue, and return on marketing investment — the same essential marketing metrics we track for every client. If your agency cannot report on these numbers, they are either not tracking them (bad) or tracking them and not sharing them (worse).
The red flag: Ask your agency to show you how many leads they generated last month and what each lead cost. If they cannot answer within 24 hours, you have a measurement problem that is costing you money.
Failure Mode 3: The Set-It-and-Forget-It Approach
Month one with a new agency is usually pretty good. They are attentive, proactive, running new campaigns, making changes. By month six, the attention has drifted to newer clients who still feel new and exciting. Your campaigns are on autopilot. Optimization has slowed to a trickle. You are still paying the same monthly fee for a fraction of the effort.
We audited an HVAC company's ad account that had been managed by an agency for 18 months. In the last 6 months, the agency had made exactly 4 changes to the account — minor bid adjustments that could have been automated. The company was paying $2,400 per month in management fees for essentially nothing.
The red flag: Ask your agency to show you a log of every change they made to your campaigns last month. If the list is short or vague, you are not getting the attention you are paying for.
Failure Mode 4: Conflict of Interest on Ad Spend
Many agencies charge a percentage of ad spend as their management fee — typically 15-20%. This creates an obvious conflict: the agency makes more money when you spend more on ads, regardless of whether that additional spend produces results.
The incentive should be: spend money where it produces a return, and cut spend where it does not. The percentage-of-spend model incentivizes the opposite: keep spending more, because the agency's revenue depends on it.
This does not mean every agency on a percentage model is acting in bad faith. But the conflict exists, and you should be aware of it. The better model is flat-fee or performance-based — structures that align the agency's incentive with your business outcome.
Failure Mode 5: They Cannot Tell You What Is Not Working
A good marketing partner will tell you when something is not working and recommend killing it. A bad agency will keep running underperforming campaigns because stopping them means less revenue for the agency and an uncomfortable conversation with the client.
We have taken over accounts where agencies were running Facebook campaigns for B2B industrial companies. Facebook is not where B2B industrial buyers spend time. The campaigns generated impressions and clicks — which looked fine in the report — but zero leads. The agency never suggested stopping because they were getting paid to run them.
The red flag: If your agency has never recommended cutting a channel, campaign, or tactic, they are either not paying attention or not being honest. No marketing program is perfect. Something is always underperforming.
How to Spot the Red Flags Before You Sign
Before you hire an agency, ask these questions:
"Who will actually work on my account day to day?" Meet that person. Evaluate their experience. If they are not in the room during the pitch, that is a signal.
"How do you measure success?" The right answer includes business outcomes (leads, revenue, cost per acquisition). The wrong answer is vague or focused on activity metrics.
"Can you show me a client you have worked with for 3+ years?" Long-term retention is the best indicator of real performance. If every case study is from a client they worked with for 6 months, ask why.
"What have you recommended a client stop doing?" This tests intellectual honesty. A good agency has told clients to cut channels that were not working. A sales-driven agency says yes to everything.
"How do you handle it when something is not working?" Listen for a real process — testing, analysis, pivoting. Not just "we optimize."
"Can I see actual reporting from a current client?" Anonymized is fine. You want to see what their reports look like and whether they track real business outcomes or just activity metrics.
The Alternative: Marketing Leadership That Is Accountable
The fundamental issue with the agency model is accountability. Agencies are accountable for deliverables — they will run your ads, publish your content, manage your social accounts. They are rarely accountable for outcomes — whether any of that work actually grows your business.
A fractional CMO is accountable for outcomes. They sit in your leadership meetings. They own the marketing plan. They manage the agencies (if you have them) and hold them accountable. And they report on the only things that matter: leads, pipeline, and revenue.
This does not mean agencies are always bad. The right agency, managed by someone who knows what good looks like, can be highly effective. But an unmanaged agency is almost guaranteed to underperform.
Get Marketing Accountability, Not Just Activity
If you are frustrated with your agency — or about to hire one and want to avoid the common pitfalls — we should talk. We can audit your current setup, tell you what is working and what is not, and help you decide whether you need a new agency, better management of your current one, or a different model entirely.
Fusion Marketing provides fractional CMO services that include agency evaluation and management. We have worked with dozens of agencies across dozens of clients, and we know what good looks like. Call (704) 749-0642 or email contact@fusionmarketing.biz for a straight conversation about your marketing setup.
