When an agency produces activity but no leads, the cause is almost always one of three gaps: no specific target audience, reporting built on awareness metrics that never connect to revenue, or no system that carries interest from first touch to booked meeting. Agencies execute strategy. If nobody owns the strategy, a new agency will produce the same result. Diagnose first with five questions: who are we targeting, what happens after someone shows interest, which numbers connect to revenue, what did we learn and change last quarter, and what would you cut.
A client once told me, right after hiring me, that he didn’t think marketing works. He’d spent over a year with an agency. LinkedIn, email campaigns, YouTube videos, a website refresh, a blog. Posted consistently, did everything they told him to do, and got zero qualified leads out of it. Not one.
He assumed the agency was the problem. It wasn’t, at least not in the way he thought. The agency was doing exactly what it was hired to do: produce marketing activity. Nobody had hired anyone to produce leads.
That distinction sounds like a technicality. It is the whole answer to the question in the title, so it’s worth taking apart carefully.
An Agency Can Be Busy and Useless at the Same Time
Here is the pattern I see when a company comes to me frustrated with their agency. The agency delivers on schedule. The blog posts go up, the emails go out, the monthly report arrives with a deck full of charts. Everyone is working. And none of it connects to anything.
Content happens in one place, ads happen somewhere else, and there is no defined path from an initial point of contact to a booked meeting. A company running that program has built a pile of activity rather than a program. When something does work, nobody can tell you why, which means nobody can repeat it on purpose. That is gambling with a marketing budget, outsourced.
The agency rarely gets challenged on this because the report looks healthy. Which brings up the second problem.
Check the Scoreboard They’re Showing You
Pull up your agency’s last monthly report and look at what it actually measures. If the headline numbers are impressions, reach, follower growth, and open rates, you are looking at awareness metrics. Those numbers have a real job: they tell you whether anyone is seeing you at all. What they cannot tell you is whether the marketing is working, because they never touch money.
The numbers that connect to your P&L live further down the funnel: leads generated, meetings booked, pipeline influenced, cost per acquisition, close rate on marketing-sourced deals. If your agency’s reporting never reaches those numbers, one of two things is true. Either the data connection between marketing and revenue doesn’t exist, or it exists and the numbers are bad. Both are worth knowing.
A useful test: if your CEO asked what marketing produced this quarter and the honest answer is a follower count, you have your diagnosis.
Five Questions That Sort This Out in One Meeting
You don’t need an audit to figure out whether your agency can get you leads. You need one honest conversation. Ask these five questions and listen closely to the answers.
1. Who exactly are we targeting? The answer should be specific: role, industry, company size, the problem that keeps that person up at night. If the answer is a hand-wave at your industry, the agency is producing content for nobody in particular, and nobody in particular is responding to it.
2. What happens after someone shows interest? Walk the path with them. Someone downloads the guide or fills out the form. Then what, and how fast, and who owns it? Most broken programs die right here. Leads come in and sit in an inbox for three days, or they get one generic newsletter and nothing else.
3. Which of these numbers connect to revenue? Have them walk you from their report to your closed deals. If the trail goes cold at "engagement," the measurement stops where the money starts.
4. What did we learn last quarter, and what did we change because of it? A real marketing program is a feedback loop: put something out, watch the data, adjust, run it again. If the answer describes activity rather than learning, the program isn’t iterating. It’s repeating.
5. What would you cut? An agency that can name the weakest part of its own program is thinking about your results. An agency that defends everything is thinking about its retainer.
Want the full framework?
This article is adapted from How to Grow Any Organization by Tom Zandstra. The book covers all three pillars in depth, with real client examples and action steps for each chapter.
Download the free book →Sometimes the Agency Isn’t the Problem
This is the uncomfortable part. Agencies are execution engines. You point them at a strategy, and they produce the assets and campaigns that strategy calls for. When no strategy exists, they don’t stop working. They fill the vacuum with tactics: post more, try video, refresh the website. Every one of those might be the right move inside a real plan. As a substitute for a plan, they’re noise.
So before you fire anyone, ask who was supposed to own strategy. If the answer is that you handed the agency a budget and said "get us leads" with no agreed target audience, no offer worth responding to, and no system to catch the interest they generate, then a new agency will produce the same result with different branding on the invoices.
The client from the top of this article rebuilt on that lesson. We started with who his buyers actually were, interviewed his CEO, his sales director, and his SDRs, and rebuilt the content around the problems those buyers were sitting with. Then we connected the pieces into a funnel and measured it. It closed business within the first few months, on the same budget, at the same posting frequency. The agency’s output wasn’t the variable that changed. The strategy underneath it was.
What to Do Next
Run the five questions above with your agency this month. Their answers will land you in one of three places.
If they know your audience, can trace their work to revenue, and are iterating on what they learn, keep them and be patient. Systems compound, and you may be closer than the lead count suggests.
If they’re competent executors with no strategy above them, the gap is leadership, and filling it is your job. That can be you with a framework, a senior hire, or a fractional CMO who builds the system and directs the agency inside it.
If they can’t answer the questions at all, you already know.
