Three Questions to Ask Before You Sign With a Marketing Vendor

A lot of marketing contracts get signed the same way. There’s a good sales call, the person across the table is sharp and confident, the plan sounds right, and the owner signs. Three months later the owner is looking at a report they don’t fully follow, talking to someone they’ve never met, and trying to work out whether they can leave.

It happens a lot with service businesses here in San Diego and Southern California: smart owners, good businesses, and contracts they never fully understood. None of it requires bad intent from the vendor. It happens because nobody asked a few plain questions up front.

Who exactly is doing the work?

The person who sells the engagement and the person who does it are often different people. A contract can get signed off a great sales call, and then the work goes to whoever’s available that week.

So ask by name. Who will be working on my account, how much of their time is it, and will it be the same person next month? It’s a reasonable thing to ask, and a vendor who bristles at it has told you something.

What will I be able to see, and how often?

If the answer is a monthly PDF, that’s not visibility. It’s a summary you receive after the decisions are already made, with the month’s money already spent.

What you want to know is what you can look at yourself, how current it is, and whether you can open it without asking permission. An owner who can see the numbers weekly can catch a problem in week two. An owner who gets a PDF finds out in week five.

A monthly PDF isn’t visibility. It’s a summary you get after the decisions are already made.

What happens to my accounts and data if I leave?

This is the one that costs people the most, and almost nobody asks it. Some vendors build in a switching cost on purpose, buried in who technically owns the ad accounts and the analytics setups. If the vendor created the ad account under their own login, walking away can mean starting from zero, and the history you paid to build stays with them.

Ask who owns each account, whose name is on it, and what you’d get in hand if you ended the contract tomorrow. You want that answer in writing, before any money moves.

None of this is meant as an accusation. It’s about knowing what you’re buying before you’re three months in, when walking away is harder and the sunk cost starts making decisions for you. I’d want those answers in writing before I signed with any vendor, and that includes me. If you’re talking to someone about your marketing, whether that’s an agency, a freelancer, or a one-person shop like mine, ask them these three before you sign.

What would you want to know before signing with a vendor that you’ve never asked?