Choosing a marketing agency in India is strange shopping: every pitch deck looks confident, every case study looks impressive, and the real differences only show up three months after you have signed. These ten questions surface those differences before the contract does. Ask them in the first meeting. The answers, and the speed of the answers, will tell you nearly everything.
1. Who will actually work on my account?
The most expensive bait-and-switch in the industry: senior strategists pitch, juniors execute. Ask to meet the people who will be in your weekly calls. If the agency hesitates, the pitch team is a sales team.
2. What happens in the first 90 days?
A serious agency can tell you exactly what ships in month one, what gets measured, and when numbers should start moving. Vague answers here become vague invoices later.
3. How do you report: business numbers or vanity metrics?
Reach, impressions and engagement are ingredients, not outcomes. Ask to see a real (anonymized) monthly report. If it does not connect activity to enquiries, orders or revenue, the agency is reporting on effort, not results.
4. Who owns my ad accounts, website and creatives if we part ways?
The question most founders learn too late. Everything should be built on accounts you own, with admin access in your hands from day one. Any other arrangement is a hostage situation with a monthly fee.
5. What will you need from us to succeed?
Honest agencies have demands: approvals within set timelines, product access, a decision-maker in the room. An agency that needs nothing from you is planning to do everything shallow.
6. Which client did you lose recently, and why?
Every agency has lost clients. The ones worth hiring can tell you why without flinching. The answer reveals how they handle failure, which is what you are really buying insurance against.
7. How do you use AI, specifically?
“We are AI-powered” means nothing. Ask what is generated, what is human, and where the quality control sits. In 2026 the right answer includes both production speed and a named review process. Bonus: ask if they can get your brand cited by AI search engines. If they have not heard of GEO, they are a year behind.
8. Can I speak to a client you have worked with for over a year?
Anyone can produce a honeymoon reference. Retention is the only testimonial that cannot be faked. A one-year-plus client will also tell you what the agency is like when things go wrong.
9. What would you fix on our current marketing first, and why?
This is a free strategy sample. You are not testing whether they flatter you; you are testing whether they looked at your business before the meeting and whether their first instinct is a quick win or a foundation fix.
10. What is NOT included in this retainer?
Scope disputes kill more agency relationships than bad work does. Get the exclusions in writing now: shoot costs, ad spend, revisions policy, tools. The agencies that answer this crisply are the ones that will not surprise you in month four.
The pattern behind all ten
Notice what these questions really test: ownership, accountability and whether the agency treats your money like theirs. Price never appears on the list, because a cheap agency that fails the questions above costs far more than an honest one that passes them.
Want to try them on us? Book a call and ask all ten. We particularly enjoy question six, and our answers to question three are already public.