In this discussion, the speakers critique the common practice of marketing agencies reporting only raw lead numbers without context, emphasizing that such superficial metrics hinder effective decision‑making for clients. They argue that agencies must provide detailed, actionable data—such as breakdowns of phone calls into service and sales calls—and use that data to inform strategic choices. Transparency and data sharing are presented as essential for treating the agency as an integrated part of the client’s team rather than a separate vendor. The conversation outlines concrete questions clients should ask, the importance of understanding whether calls or lead‑form submissions convert better, and how to shift spend toward the higher‑performing channel. Overall, the content offers a roadmap for clients to demand richer metrics, foster collaborative data exchange, and optimize marketing spend based on measurable outcomes.
Chapters
Most agencies, when they deliver a lead, they send you a report and they're like, look, we got you 300 leads last month. And then the home improvement company's thinking, well, half of them were service calls or half of them were salespeople trying to call me. And that's just a sign that your agency isn't digging deep enough. So how do you make marketing decisions when the agency comes to you and says, we gave you 300 leads with absolutely no context as to the quality of those leads or if there were even leads to begin with? And so how does somebody know whether or not all of this stuff is kind of being done in the, in the backend? And what are the questions that they should be asking? If you're on a call with your digital marketing agency and all they talk about is how great they are and how many leads they're delivering, but you're not seeing it, you're not closing the sales. And if the agency isn't offering up data, then they're leaving out parts of this. Like when we report our call data, we say, look, you got 200 phone calls, 20 of them were service calls. These are these 20 calls right here. Make them point out the parts that they feel didn't go perfectly through all of that. And what steps are they taking? Because on the paid side of the world, you're spending money to attract those service call clicks. So make sure that you're asking the right questions, follow your intuition, and make your, your digital agency provide you with data that's actually very meaningful and very actionable for you. You're looking for your agency to make decisions based off of that data and then share that information with you, provide some insights, not just a report.
It really should feel like your agency is not a separate part of your team. They should be an integral part of your team. How are you sharing data with your team to understand, hey, if I'm your agency and I'm running things and things are looking really great and I'm saying, hey, you have 100 leads a month and it's a really low cost, but you're also not telling me, hey, I'm not really seeing this turn on my side. That kind of goes both ways too. So being able to share data with your agency team and then agency team being able to be super transparent about the data and the things that they're seeing on their side is only going to make that partnership very strong and be able to make optimization decisions that are only going to benefit you. So don't gatekeep the data that you guys have. Understand that data. Is a call converting better than a lead form? How do we start to push more calls versus lead fills? So that way, whenever the agency is deciding how we need to move forward from a strategic perspective, we have all the information that we need to make the better decisions on our side.
