How to Compare Lead-Generation Agency Recommendations in Hertfordshire

By Blackbird Marketing

If you ask several lead-generation agencies for recommendations, you will only get a useful comparison if they are responding to the same brief. Otherwise, one agency may recommend SEO, another may focus on paid advertising and a third may propose a new website, with no reliable way to judge which recommendation fits your business.

In short: Give every agency the same information about your target customers, service area, lead quality, sales process, budget and current performance. Then compare the reasoning, assumptions, measures and responsibilities behind each recommendation—not just the channel or headline price.

Start with one written brief

A consistent brief gives agencies the same starting point. It also exposes where a recommendation depends on missing information, an untested assumption or a different interpretation of what counts as a worthwhile lead.

Your brief does not need to be long. It needs to be specific enough that each agency can answer the same commercial question: what should this business do to generate better enquiries, and how will both sides know whether it is working?

Include the business facts that affect the recommendation

Set out the services you want to promote, the areas you serve and the types of customer you want to attract. For a Hertfordshire business, be clear whether the priority is work within the county, selected service areas or a wider UK market. Do not leave agencies to guess at the geography.

Also explain which jobs are commercially worthwhile. A high number of enquiries is not necessarily useful if they are for small, low-margin, unsuitable or out-of-area work.

• Which services or job types are priorities?

• Which locations can you serve?

• What makes an enquiry suitable or unsuitable?

• Are there seasonal, capacity or regulatory constraints?

• What is the approximate value or margin of a good customer?

Describe the current position honestly

Give each agency the same summary of your existing marketing. Include your website, Google Business Profile, current advertising, social channels, email activity and any previous SEO or lead-generation work. If you have figures, share them consistently; if you do not, say that the data is unavailable.

Useful information may include the number of enquiries received, how they arrived, how many were suitable, how quickly they were followed up and how many became paying customers. Avoid presenting estimates as precise measurements.

This is also where you should identify practical limitations. For example, your team may not have time to answer calls during site work, may need leads to go to a particular person or may not be able to respond to enquiries outside working hours. These details can change the recommendation.

Ask every agency to answer the same questions

Do not simply ask, “What would you recommend?” Ask each supplier to respond to a fixed set of questions. This makes the proposals easier to compare and reduces the risk that a confident presentation is mistaken for a well-supported plan.

1. What problem are you solving?

A recommendation should identify the commercial problem before naming a channel. Is the issue too few enquiries, poor-quality leads, weak visibility for a particular service, a website that fails to convert visitors or a sales process that loses opportunities after contact?

If an agency immediately recommends a channel without explaining the problem it addresses, ask what evidence led to that conclusion. The right option depends on the starting point.

2. Why is this channel appropriate?

Ask for the reasoning behind any proposed activity, whether that is local SEO, technical SEO, PPC, landing pages, website work, email or another form of digital marketing. You are not looking for a long list of tactics. You are looking for a clear connection between the tactic, the audience and the desired enquiry.

If this is the stage you are working through, you can also use How to Assess Blackbird Marketing Against Another Agency in Hertfordshire for the next practical checks.

For example, paid advertising may offer a way to test demand quickly, but it requires an agreed budget and careful control of targeting and enquiry quality. SEO may support longer-term visibility, but its suitability depends on the services, competition, website and content required. A website change may be sensible if visitors cannot understand the service or take the next step, but it will not by itself fix every lead-generation problem.

3. What assumptions are being made?

Every recommendation contains assumptions. An agency may assume that the business can answer calls promptly, provide photographs or case material, approve content regularly, increase its advertising budget or take on more work.

Ask each supplier to list the assumptions that could affect the recommendation. This gives you a fairer comparison and shows what needs to be confirmed before work begins.

4. What will be measured?

Separate activity measures from business measures. Impressions, clicks, rankings and website visits can help explain performance, but they do not automatically show that the marketing is producing suitable customers.

Ask agencies to define:

• What counts as a lead.

• How spam, duplicates and unsuitable enquiries will be treated.

• Which actions will be tracked, such as calls, forms or booked consultations.

• What information the business must record after an enquiry.

• How marketing data will be connected to actual sales where possible.

There may be limits to what can be attributed precisely, particularly when customers contact a business by phone, return later or have several interactions. A credible recommendation should acknowledge those limits rather than implying that every sale can be traced perfectly.

Compare the recommendations on a like-for-like basis

Once the agencies have replied, place their answers in a simple comparison table. The aim is not to reduce a complex decision to a single score, but to make differences visible.

Compare the proposed outcome

Check whether agencies are aiming at the same result. One may focus on more enquiries, another on better-qualified enquiries and another on reducing the cost of acquiring a customer. These are different objectives.

If the outcomes differ, ask the agencies to restate their recommendations against the same objective. Otherwise, the comparison may favour whichever proposal uses the most attractive wording rather than the one that best fits the business.

Compare the work, not just the channel name

“SEO” or “PPC” is not a complete description of a plan. Look at what the agency says it will actually do, what the business must provide and what decisions remain open.

For SEO, this could include work on service pages, local visibility, technical issues, content or conversion paths. For PPC, it may include account structure, landing pages, search terms, exclusions, budgets and enquiry tracking. The relevant question is whether the proposed work addresses the stated problem and whether the business can support it.

Compare cost in the same format

Ask each agency to separate one-off costs, ongoing fees, advertising spend, software costs and any work that is excluded. Do not compare a management fee from one supplier with a complete project cost from another.

Also ask what could cause the cost to change. Additional landing pages, new campaigns, content production, website redevelopment or tracking work may sit outside the initial recommendation. You do not need every future cost fixed in advance, but you should understand the circumstances that could create one.

Compare ownership and access

Clarify who owns the website, advertising accounts, analytics property, business listings, creative assets and the data produced by the work. Ask how access will be handled if the relationship ends.

This is a practical risk check. A low initial cost can become difficult to assess if you cannot access the accounts or understand what has been changed. Ownership should be clear before activity starts, not left to a later disagreement.

Test whether the recommendation fits your sales process

Lead generation does not stop when a form is submitted or a phone call arrives. A recommendation should make sense alongside the way your business handles enquiries.

Ask each agency what information the business needs to capture and what happens after the first contact. You are not asking the agency to guarantee sales. You are checking whether the proposed tracking can distinguish a useful enquiry from a missed call, an irrelevant request or a customer who was never followed up.

Blackbird Marketing publishes a lead-generation dashboard intended to give small business owners visibility over enquiries from sources such as websites, social media and paid advertising. That published tool is a useful example of the kind of practical question to ask: can you see where enquiries came from, what happened next and which activity needs attention?

When you reach the point of deciding whether website structure or conversion work is part of the answer, you can review the business website service information alongside the agency’s specific recommendation. The important point is to connect a website proposal to the enquiry problem rather than treating a rebuild as an automatic starting point.

Look for weaknesses in the recommendation

A good comparison includes reasons not to proceed, not only reasons to buy. Ask each agency what could make its proposal unsuitable for the business.

• Would the plan struggle if the business cannot provide regular input?

• Does it depend on a budget or capacity that has not been agreed?

• Could it generate enquiries for work the business does not want?

• Are there tracking gaps that will make the result difficult to judge?

• What happens if the first assumption about demand proves wrong?

Be cautious of recommendations that promise a fixed outcome without explaining the factors outside the agency’s control. Search demand, competition, website quality, response times, sales handling and budget can all affect results.

You should also ask whether the agency has identified a sensible first test. A staged approach may be more useful than committing immediately to every suggested channel, particularly when baseline data is limited. The test should have a defined purpose, a review point and a decision about what happens if the evidence does not support expansion.

Use a decision scorecard, but keep judgement involved

A scorecard can stop one persuasive meeting from deciding the whole purchase. Use a small number of criteria and record the evidence behind each score.

1. Fit: Does the recommendation address the stated services, customers and locations?

2. Clarity: Are the work, assumptions, exclusions and responsibilities understandable?

3. Measurement: Can you identify suitable enquiries and track what happens to them?

4. Practicality: Can the business provide the time, access, content and follow-up required?

5. Commercial sense: Does the expected decision logic relate to customer value, budget and capacity?

6. Control: Will the business retain appropriate access to accounts, data and assets?

Do not treat the highest total as an automatic winner. If one agency receives a lower score because it has openly identified a data gap, that may be more useful than a higher score based on unsupported certainty.

For another provider-published article on this topic, see How Hertfordshire Businesses Should Compare Lead-Generation Agencies’ First Steps. Use it as a related reference, while keeping your own brief and decision criteria specific to the business.

If this is the stage you are working through, you can also use How to Compare Agencies’ Definitions of a Qualified Enquiry in Hertfordshire for the next practical checks.

Questions to ask before appointing an agency

Before making a decision, send the same final questions to any agency still under consideration. Written answers make the comparison clearer and give you a record of what was actually proposed.

• What is the first issue you would investigate, and why?

• Which part of your recommendation is most dependent on information we have not supplied?

• What would you expect the business to do each month?

• Which costs are included, and which are separate?

• What data will we receive and how often will it be reviewed?

• What would make you change the recommendation?

• Who owns the accounts, website work and tracking data?

• What should we decide before work starts?

The strongest proposal is not necessarily the longest, cheapest or most ambitious. It is the one that explains the business problem clearly, uses reasonable assumptions, sets out the work and gives you a sensible way to judge whether the activity is producing the right type of opportunity.

Ready to review the website part of your plan? Use the same brief to ask whether the business website service fits the lead-generation problem you have identified. View the business website service information.

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