What To Send An Agency Before You Start

Most agency relationships waste their first month, and it is almost never the agency being slow. They are guessing about your business because nobody gave them anything to work from.

You already have everything that fixes it. It is just spread across six places and none of it has ever been written down in one spot.

Your last twelve months of sales

Not revenue. The list. Who bought, what they bought, what they paid, and how they found you.

That single export answers questions a discovery call cannot. It shows which service actually makes money versus which one you talk about most. It shows whether your best clients came from referral, search or content. It shows the seasonality you have stopped noticing.

Every strategy built without it is built on your memory of your business, and your memory is biased toward the last three deals.

Recordings of real sales calls

Five is enough. The ones you lost matter more than the ones you won.

Sales calls contain the actual language your buyers use, the objections that come up every time, and the moment the call turns. That is the raw material for ads, landing pages and content, and it cannot be invented.

An agency writing copy without hearing you sell is writing what they think your market sounds like.

The list of clients you want more of

Name five. Then say why for each one.

Vague versions of this ("SMEs in construction") produce vague targeting. Specific versions ("builders doing eight to fifteen million, owner still runs the sales, three to five site staff") produce campaigns that find those people.

What you have actually tried

Every channel you have run, what it cost, and what happened.

Half of what an agency proposes in month one is something you tried in 2023 and it failed for a reason. Sometimes that reason was the channel. Usually it was the offer or the follow-up, which means the channel is still viable and needs a different approach.

Without the history, you pay to relearn it.

Access, on day one

Ad accounts, analytics, search console, the CMS, the CRM, the domain registrar.

This is the single biggest cause of delay and it is entirely administrative. Getting access sorted before the kickoff call saves a fortnight, and it costs you twenty minutes.

The constraint nobody mentions

Capacity. How many new clients can you actually take this quarter.

Marketing that works will break an operation that cannot deliver. If you can service six new accounts and the campaign brings in twenty, you will burn the reputation you spent years building. Say the number up front so the plan matches the business.

What this buys you

Handing over those six things turns a four week ramp-up into a few days, and it changes what you get. The plan is built on your data instead of on a category assumption.

That is the difference between a partner working on your business and one working on a version of it they assembled from your website.