When to fire your marketing agency (and when it's not their fault)

You run a SaaS or tech scale-up, and you signed the agency on a promise of results in 3 months. It's now month 9. You’ve faithfully been handed weekly activity reports filled with promising-sounding buzzwords, but the pipeline looks the same way it did before they started. 

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When it comes to B2B, patience is a requirement. With longer sales cycles, and complex technology, a three-month delivery promise isn’t a realistic goal. But reaching month nine without any kind of result is a leadership and accountability problem…for both parties. Either way, it’s usually fixable in 30 days. 

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Our team have held CMO seats at Starling, Skype and Yolt. We know the view from the client's chair. This is the guide we'd give a founder who can't judge a Google Ads account but needs to make a call on their strategy by the end of the month.

What's a realistic marketing agency results timeline for B2B?

We can’t give you a definitive answer, but let’s just say it takes longer than most agencies are willing to admit during the pitch. 

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Organic search is the clearest example. Ahrefs' latest study found only 1.74% of newly published pages reached Google's top 10 within a year, and 72.9% of pages in the top 10 are more than 3 years old.

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The nature of B2B buying adds even more complexity.  Gartner describes buyers "looping" across the purchase, revisiting each of 6 buying jobs at least once. Your prospect might read your content in March, go quiet, and then complete a demo form in September. 

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The upshot here is that you can’t judge an agency on pipeline at the 3-month mark, but you should (at the very least) be able to see the right leading indicators moving in the right order. 

What results should look like at 3, 6 and 9 months

• Month 3: Foundations and early signals. You should have a documented strategy with a named ideal customer profile (ICP), clear positioning, tracking that works, and agreed KPIs. Early signals include rising branded search and engagement from target accounts.
• Month 6: Qualified interest. Leads should now come from the right companies and job titles. Sales should say the conversations they’re having has improved, even if deals haven't closed. Cost per qualified lead should be trending down.
• Month 9: Pipeline you can trace. You should be able to point to opportunities in your CRM that marketing sourced or influenced, and have a good sense of their value. If a single deal has a clear marketing fingerprint on it, the agency is progressing. 

But if month 9 looks like month 3, you have a problem on your hands. The next question is whose problem it is.

Signs it's the agency

Some failures sit with the agency. Watch for these:

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• Reports full of activity with no link to revenue. Your reports are filled with vanity metrics, impressions and clicks with no mention of leads or pipeline.
• No written strategy. If you asked for the plan and received a content calendar, there isn't one.
• A different team from the one that pitched. Agency staff turnover in the UK ran at 24.1% in 2024 according to the IPA Agency Census. The senior people in the pitch often hand you over to juniors by month 2.
• Autopilot. The Marketing Watchdog documented a business that paid £1,200 a month for 12 years, over £170,000 in total, on ads running with the wrong business details. Nobody at the agency checked.
• Tactics that could belong to any client. If the recommendations would fit your competitor word for word, they weren't built for you.

Signs it's the setup

We've sat on the client side of these relationships, and most agency failures at scale-ups trace back a missing senior owner in the business.

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Agencies are hired to execute. They need someone in your business to tell them who the customer is and which deals matter. Without that, they fill the gap with guesses, and guesses produce generic work.

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Ask yourself these 4 questions:

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• Is there a written ICP and positioning that your agency and sales team would describe the same way you do? (If not, our Audience Insights & Game Plan work starts exactly here).
• Does anyone in the business push back on the agency? Someone who challenges weak ideas and can sign off work within days.
• Are sales and marketing working from the same definition of a good lead? Only 8% of companies report strong sales-marketing alignment, according to LinkedIn research. If sales ignores marketing leads, the agency's results will look worse than they are.
• Have you given them what they need? CRM access, customer interviews, win-loss data and budget clarity.

If you answered no to most of these, firing the agency won't fix anything. The next one will hit the same wall.

How to hold your agency accountable: questions to ask on Monday

As a tech founder, you can hold an agency to account without any marketing expertise. It takes specific questions and the patience to wait for specific answers:

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1. Who is our ideal customer, in your words? A vague answer means they're guessing.
2. What are the 3 numbers you'd use to prove you're working, and where are they today? They should answer without checking a deck.
3. Which deals in our CRM did marketing touch? If they can't see your CRM, the setup needs to be addressed. 
4. What have you stopped doing because it didn't work? Good agencies kill underperforming tactics quickly.
5. Who on your team works on our account, and how many hours a month? Compare the answer to the people in the original pitch.
6. What do you need from us that you're not getting? This one tells you whether the problem is on your side.

Write the answers down; you'll use them in the 30-day plan.

Fix, restructure or exit

Once you've run the questions, you have 1 of 3 options:

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• Fix: The agency is capable and has been working without the inputs it needs. They answered the questions well and asked for things you haven't given them. Give them the ICP and a named owner, then reset the KPIs for the next 90 days.
• Restructure: The agency executes well enough, with nobody in your business steering the strategy. This is the most common scenario we see. The fix is senior strategic leadership above the agency, whether that's a hire or a fractional marketing team that owns strategy and holds the agency to it. It's often cheaper than a full-time CMO and faster to put in place.
• Exit: The agency couldn't answer the key questions, the team has churned, the reports hide the numbers, and there's no sign of change after a direct conversation. At that point, loyalty is costing you money. Check your notice period and confirm you own your ad accounts and data before you plan the handover.

Your 30-day plan

Week 1: gather the facts. Run the key questions and compare the last 6 months of reports against the benchmarks above. Confirm who owns your accounts and data.

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Week 2: fix your side. Write down your ICP and positioning, even roughly, and name 1 person who owns the agency relationship. Get sales and marketing to agree on what counts as a qualified lead.

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Week 3: reset expectations. Share the ICP with the agency and agree on 3 leading indicators plus 1 pipeline metric, with 90-day targets. Ask for a written plan against them.

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Week 4: decide. Judge the plan they send back. If it's specific to your business and tied to the numbers, keep going and review it in 90 days. If it's generic or late, you have your answer.

By the end of the month, you'll know whether to keep them.

How to stop it happening again

Agency relationships don't last long. Average UK agency tenure is 3.8 years, and retainers can last as little as 18 months, according to WinmoEdge UK 2025. You'll probably work with several agencies as you scale, so the protection has to sit inside your business.

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That means a senior marketing owner who sets the strategy and knows when an agency is coasting. For most scale-ups, a full-time CMO is too early and too expensive. A fractional marketing team gives you that leadership for a fraction of the time, and makes whichever agency you use better at its job.

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If you're about to bring in outside help, our guide to how much time to spend onboarding a fractional marketing team covers what the first few weeks should look like.

FAQ

How long should a B2B marketing agency take to show results?

Expect leading indicators, such as better-fit leads and rising branded search, within 3 to 6 months. Traceable pipeline usually takes 6 to 9 months or longer, depending on your sales cycle. SEO-led programmes take the longest, often more than a year.

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When should a founder fire their marketing agency?‍

When you've fixed your side of the setup and they still can't show movement. That means you've given them a clear ICP and a named owner, and after 30 to 90 days they still can't tie their work to the numbers you agreed. High team churn and reports that hide results are also strong signals.

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How do I hold an agency accountable without marketing expertise?

Ask direct questions, such as which deals the agency influenced and what they've stopped doing. Agree a small set of numbers upfront and make 1 person in your business responsible for reviewing them monthly.

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Not sure whether it's the agency or the setup? The Scale Up Collective works with founders to diagnose what's actually broken, then build the strategy and leadership that make marketing accountable. Talk to us.