The agency report lands in your inbox on the 12th of the month. Traffic is up, and there's a chart showing MQLs climbing for the third month in a row. Then you sit down for the pipeline review, your sales leader says the leads are junk, and nobody in the room can tell you what marketing produced in revenue last quarter.
Most CEOs in that spot assume they hired the wrong agency. Sometimes that's true. More often, the report is accurate about everything it measures and silent about everything that happens after the form fill. The agency reports what it can see, and in most B2B companies, it can't see past the moment a lead enters the CRM. In Revenue Rewired, the framework we use at StringCan to diagnose where revenue leaks out of a growth system, we call this a Metrics Misfire. Before you replace your agency, find out whether the scorecard was ever built to show revenue.
If your marketing isn't delivering desired results, inspect the scorecard before you judge the agency. Most agency reports track the activity an agency controls, such as traffic, click rates, and MQLs, and stop at the form fill. Check whether each lead source is tied to CRM stages, whether anyone reports how many of those leads became sales opportunities, and whether the agency can see what sales did with them. Don't assume rising MQLs mean a rising pipeline. That gap is a Metrics Misfire, one of the five revenue leaks in StringCan's Revenue Rewired framework. Left alone, it means you'll switch agencies, reset months of ramp time, and get the same result with a new logo on the report.
The scorecard usually gets set during onboarding, when everyone wants early wins. The agency proposes metrics it can move quickly, and nobody has CRM data ready to propose better ones. A year later, that scorecard is still running the relationship.
There's also an incentive problem. If the agency is measured or paid on lead volume, it'll get very good at producing lead volume. Targeting gets wider and cost per lead drops while the share of leads sales would ever call keeps shrinking. That's the Volume Trap sitting on top of the Metrics Misfire, and the report looks its best right when the leak is worst.
The agency usually isn't hiding anything. It's reporting the only numbers it has access to.
Run these questions before your next agency review. If most answers are no, the problem sits upstream of your campaigns.
If you answered yes to five or more, you've got the data to judge the agency fairly, and the conversation should be about performance. If most of your answers were no, a new agency will inherit the same blind spot.
The fix starts in the CRM. In Revenue Flow, StringCan's method for aligning, fixing, activating, and improving a growth system, this is Align work: agreeing on definitions and metrics before anyone adds more activity.
Start by adding numbers to the monthly report that sit after the form fill. At minimum, it should show marketing-sourced opportunities, the conversion rate from lead to opportunity, and pipeline value by source. Give the agency read access to that data or report it alongside theirs, so marketing and sales look at the same number.
Then fix the feedback loop. Sales should tell marketing every month which leads were good, which weren't, and why. With that feedback, you'll learn within a quarter whether you have an agency problem or a handoff problem, and those two call for very different fixes.
Bring these instead of reacting to the slides:
A good agency will welcome these questions. If the answers are vague, you've learned something too, and you'll make the switching decision with evidence instead of frustration.
How do I know if my marketing agency is working?
Look at what happened after the leads arrived. An agency is working if marketing-sourced leads turn into sales opportunities at a rate you can see and that improves over time. Traffic, impressions, and MQL counts tell you the agency is busy. They don't tell you whether the work reaches the pipeline. If you can't lead-to-opportunity conversion by source, you can't judge the agency yet, and that's the first thing to fix.
What metrics should a B2B marketing agency report on?
Keep the activity metrics for diagnosing campaigns, and add the ones that sit after the form fill: marketing-sourced opportunities, lead-to-opportunity conversion rate, pipeline value by source, and closed revenue by source over a longer window. In B2B companies with long sales cycles, closed revenue lags, so opportunity creation is the most useful leading number.
Should my marketing agency have access to our CRM?
Usually, yes, with limits. It doesn't need to edit deals, but it should be able to see what stage its leads reached and why some were disqualified. Without that view, it's optimizing for the only thing it can measure, which is lead volume. Read access to lead source, lifecycle stage and opportunity stage is often enough to change what the agency builds next month.
When is it time to change marketing agencies?
After you've fixed the scorecard and given the agency a fair window with the new numbers. If marketing-sourced opportunities still don't improve after a couple of quarters of clean reporting and honest sales feedback, the agency is likely the issue. If you switch before that, you're betting a new team will succeed with the same blind spot. That rarely works, and the onboarding time is a pipeline you don't get back.
Not sure whether you're looking at an agency problem or a system problem?
Take the Revenue Leak Finder, a short diagnostic that shows B2B leaders where revenue may be leaking across their growth system. If your result feels familiar, send it to me and I'll tell you where I'd inspect first. If you've already decided to make a change, a Growth System Session can map what to fix before the next agency starts.
Jay Feitlinger is the CEO of StringCan and the creator of Revenue Rewired.