What questions should you ask in an agency pitch?

Use the pitch meeting to test diagnosis, audience reasoning, delivery team, work quality, learning, measurement, commercial terms, and risk. Ask every finalist the same core questions and attach evidence to the answers. A polished response is useful only when the proposed team, sample work, report, and contract support it.

Ask how the team understands the problem

1. What business and communication problem do you believe we are solving?
2. Which assumptions in our brief need validation?
3. Which audiences matter first, what should change for them, and why can PR contribute?
4. What would you advise us to delay, remove, or handle through another discipline?

Listen for a specific diagnosis and a research plan. A publication list without an audience or objective is incomplete.

Ask who will perform and review the work

5. Who owns strategy, daily execution, measurement, approvals, and escalation?
6. What involvement should we expect from each named person?
7. How do senior and junior team members divide work and quality review?
8. Who covers absence, overload, turnover, specialist questions, and urgent issues?
9. Which affiliates, subcontractors, databases, or AI tools will touch our information or work product?

Invite the delivery lead to the meeting. A mixed team can be effective when roles, supervision, and decision rights are clear.

Ask for evidence and adaptation

10. Show a relevant work sample. What was the starting point, your exact contribution, the client input, and the result?
11. How did audience or stakeholder feedback change the plan?
12. Show a redacted report. How does it separate activities, outputs, outtakes, outcomes, and impact?
13. How will we inspect target rationale, representative work, qualified responses, learning, and next actions?
14. Describe an assignment that underperformed. How did you diagnose it and what did you change?

Do not use a raw outreach number as the quality test. Ask whether the work was relevant, supported, timely, and adjusted when evidence changed.

Ask how the agreement works under pressure

15. What is included, excluded, and dependent on company input?
16. What fees, expenses, markups, taxes, production costs, and out-of-scope rates apply?
17. What term, renewal, notice, termination, and transition rules apply?
18. Who owns or licenses messages, content, lists, research, reports, accounts, and custom data?
19. How do you handle confidentiality, security, conflicts, paid placement, corrections, and case-study permission?
20. What happens if a launch slips, the account lead changes, an urgent issue appears, or the evidence shows the plan is not working?

Finish by naming the open questions, requested artifacts, owners, and due dates. Score the written follow-up with the meeting using the agency vetting scorecard. Verify work claims through case studies and references before relying on them.