The landscape of marketing agencies and freelance providers is changing rapidly. Remote work policies and tech layoffs have been catalysts for many talented professionals to take their careers into their own hands and, as a result, more small agencies exist today than ever before. 

While having more provider options in the marketplace isn’t a bad thing, it can make the selection process far more difficult. The success of your marketing efforts often hinges on the capabilities, practices, and structures of the agency or provider you choose. With that in mind, here are three key traits for evaluating potential marketing service partners:

Project Management Capabilities

Understanding the project management capabilities and practices of your chosen agency or freelance provider is important when planning for the level of effort and the skills you and your in-house team may need to commit to the project to keep it moving forward.

With some providers, you are paired directly with expert consultants but expected to take on most of the overall project management yourself. With others, they have developed a specific way that they run their projects and you will mostly be interacting with a PM. There’s no single “right” way to run a project, but there are aspects of an agency’s project management capabilities that may be a better or worse fit for working with your team, depending on how you operate. Some aspects to look for are:

• Standardized Delivery Practices: Is your project something the agency has done before and has a strong track record of completing? Whether or not they have created a repeatable, proven process for projects like yours is important to help you understand if the success of the project hinges on the individual employees' knowledge, or if you’re getting the benefit of the collective knowledge of the agency as a whole. This also will tell you whether or not there are additional toolsets the agency is bringing to the table, all of which can be useful in evaluating the value-for-cost you are gaining by hiring them.
• Communication Practices: How often are they updating you on project status? Will they use your project management tool or their own? Does this schedule and process align with how you need to report on the project’s progress for your internal team or will you need to take their reporting and transform it for your own internal updates? All of these questions again point to how much of your team’s time you may have to dedicate to ensuring the project status is reported on regularly in the way you need it to be.
• Flexibility: An agency’s project management practices inform how quickly they are able to pivot and replace a resource working with you if a replacement is needed. If continuity of service is important to you, asking questions like “What happens if my primary consultant leaves your agency?” will help get a sense of how flexible they can be to accommodate unforeseen issues. 

Delivery Practices and Subcontracting

Because it can be incredibly difficult to predict agency service demand, many service providers subcontract work out to freelancers or other agencies to keep their resourcing elastic. This is neither a good thing nor a bad thing in and of itself, but you may want or need to know what time zone your agency team will be located in to ensure scheduling with them is easy. Also, if your procurement process requires that your vendors not subcontract or not subcontract to any resources outside of the United States, then gathering this information beforehand can be crucial to not getting stuck in a long vendor onboarding process that will delay your project. 

There’s also a give and take on price here. Agencies that mostly use full-time employees as their resources are likely to be more expensive than agencies that have a more flexible resource model. So if your budget is tight and your procurement or vendor onboarding requirements are strict around subcontracting, you definitely need to understand the agency’s practices fully before you attempt to onboard them.

Pricing Structure and Minimums

Asking questions upfront about how the agency prefers to structure an engagement (retainer, fixed-fee, hourly, etc.) and what their minimums are can give you a pretty good idea of the types of clients they typically work with and the types of projects they typically work on, which, in turn, can give you a good idea about whether or not that particular service provider is a good match for your needs. 

If you know that you want the flexibility of paying hourly, asking up front if that’s a possibility is a good first step and could be done via email prior to you getting on a call with a potential agency and wasting time with an engagement model that won’t work for you.

Likewise, if you know that the agency prefers to work on retainer for a fixed number of hours monthly, then you know that keeping their backlog stocked with projects to fill up their time is going to be extra effort you will need to put into the engagement in order to get the most value for your money.

At ServiceCrowd, we don’t believe that there is a right way or a wrong way for agencies to structure their delivery practices, but we do believe in fit between agency and client. That’s why we focus on specific dimensions of agency success, including project management, outsourcing practices and pricing structure to ensure our clients get the right partner as quickly as possible and don’t waste time or budget on an agency relationship that won’t really move the needle for their businesses.

If you want help finding the right fit for you in an agency partner and help short-cutting your agency search process, get in touch.