We've turned down a handful of good-sized contracts over the years for the same reason: the prospect couldn't tell us what "more leads" needed to mean in a number, by when, at what cost, and — critically — of what quality. That's not us being precious about process. It's the single biggest predictor we've found of whether an engagement survives past month six.
"More" is not a target
More leads than what baseline? More by when? At what cost per lead is the campaign still profitable, and at what cost does it become a loss even though the lead count looks great in a monthly report? Without those numbers, "success" gets redefined every review call based on whoever's mood is worst that week. We've seen agency relationships end not because performance was actually bad, but because nobody agreed in month one what "good" meant, so nothing that happened afterward could be judged fairly.
The conversation we have before signing anything
Before we take on a new client, we ask for three numbers most companies haven't calculated: current customer acquisition cost, average deal size, and sales cycle length. If a prospect doesn't know these, that's not a dealbreaker — but it means the first month of work is defining them, not running ads. We tell people that upfront. Some walk away because they wanted to start "getting leads" immediately. That's usually a sign the relationship would have ended in a dispute over metrics within two quarters anyway.
Lead volume without a quality bar is a trap
We inherited an account once where the previous agency had delivered 3x the lead volume promised in their contract — and the client's sales team had started ignoring the lead notifications entirely, because close rate had dropped from 22% to 4%. Technically, that agency hit their number. Practically, they'd built a system optimized for a metric that was actively hurting the business, because "leads" was never defined narrowly enough to exclude the wrong ones.
We fixed it by tightening targeting until volume dropped by half — and pipeline value went up, because the remaining leads actually matched the ICP the sales team could close.
What we ask for instead
Before any campaign goes live, we get agreement on: target cost per qualified lead (not just cost per lead), minimum deal size we're targeting for, and a shared definition of "qualified" that sales and marketing both sign off on. It's a slower start. Every client who's stuck with us past the first quarter has told us it's the reason the relationship didn't fall apart the way their last agency relationship did — because when the numbers moved, everyone had already agreed on what moving them actually meant.
If an agency accepts "just get us more leads" as a brief with no further questions, that's not confidence. That's setting up a fight for month four.