A marketing director asks three agencies for a look at her accounts. Two send a slide deck of obvious observations within a day. One asks what she is actually worried about, what changed, and what the previous agency has said about it.
She hires the third. The other two competed on speed for work nobody was going to pay for.
Why the enquiry is really arriving
Performance has declined, reporting stopped making sense, the account manager changed for the third time, somebody senior asked a question nobody could answer, or a budget review is coming.
Why it gets mishandled
Agencies treat it as a pitch and rush a deck, or treat it as a freebie and resent it. Both misread what is happening, which is that somebody has already half decided to leave their current provider.
The cost of the free audit habit
Days of senior time given away, findings handed straight to the incumbent as ammunition, and a prospect who now values your thinking at nothing. It is the most expensive free thing in the industry.
Productise it instead
A named audit, a fixed fee, a defined scope, a stated turnaround and a written deliverable. Modest enough to be an easy yes, substantial enough to filter out tyre kickers.
What the audit should cover
Account structure, spend allocation, targeting, creative, landing experience, tracking and attribution, reporting quality and whether the objectives are measurable at all.
Ask what prompted it, first
The answer shapes everything. A director worried about attribution needs a different conversation from one who has been given a budget cut and needs ammunition.
Ask what access is available
Read only access, exported reports or nothing at all. It determines whether an audit is even possible and how long it takes.
Ask about the incumbent relationship
Under notice, contract ending, or staying put and wanting a second opinion. There is no point producing a transition plan for somebody who cannot move for nine months.
Say what the audit will not do
An audit built on read-only access and a fortnight cannot forecast results, rebuild attribution or settle an internal argument about strategy. Stating the limits in the scope is what stops a client treating the deliverable as a promise, and it makes the recommendations that follow considerably easier to accept.
Publish the audit as a service page
Scope, fee, turnaround, what is delivered and what happens next. Brands search for exactly this and find agency contact forms instead.
Make tracking the headline finding
Most audits find measurement problems before media problems, and a brand that cannot trust its numbers cannot judge any agency, which is the ground in reporting questions from marketing clients.
Convert the audit into a retainer honestly
A clear recommendation, a scope, a price and the option to implement it themselves. Pressure at this point undoes the credibility the audit just built, as in marketing retainer enquiries that stall at pricing.
Capture the enquiry when it arrives
These come in at night from somebody who has just read a report they do not believe, which is the same diagnostic conversion pattern as health screening enquiries that convert to bookings.
Qualify by account rather than by person
Company, spend, channels and access matter more than job title, which is the thinking in the role of chatbots in account based marketing.
Getting started
Publish a productised audit with scope, fee and turnaround, then capture the trigger, the spend and the access at any hour. SpideyChat for marketing agencies answers from your published pages. Try SpideyChat on your own site, or read about capture on the features page.