Sanjan Sharma · Founder & Director
Sanjan Sharma is an entrepreneur and technology and digital growth professional with 8+ years of experience across digital marketing, technology, SaaS, education, BFSI, banking, B2B sales and business growth.
Hiring a LinkedIn marketing agency is unusually easy to get wrong, because the work happens on profiles you can see but cannot audit, and the reporting is built from metrics that move whether or not anything useful is happening.
These five questions separate a LinkedIn marketing agency that will build something durable from one that will rent you volume for six months. Ask them before the contract, not after the first quiet quarter.
1. Whose profile does the outreach run from, and what happens at the end?
LinkedIn outreach runs on personal profiles. If the agency sends from accounts it controls, the connections and conversation history belong to them, and you cannot take any of it with you when the relationship ends. That is a meaningful cost nobody mentions at the proposal stage.
Consequently the right arrangement is usually that the outreach runs from your people’s profiles, with the agency operating them. Ask explicitly who holds the credentials, what happens on the last day, and whether you receive the full message history as an export.
2. Who actually writes the messages and the posts?
This is where most of the value sits and where most agencies are vaguest. A LinkedIn marketing agency that writes in your founder’s voice needs to have interviewed your founder, and will need to keep doing so. One that generates posts from a content calendar will produce something your market has read a hundred times.
Therefore ask to see three posts and three outreach sequences written for current clients, and ask who wrote each one. Furthermore, ask how much of your team’s time they need every month; an honest answer is an hour or two, and anyone claiming zero is not writing in your voice.
3. What exactly is automated?
Nearly every LinkedIn marketing agency uses software, and the ones that deny it are usually the least careful. The useful question is which parts. Automating the schedule, the list and the record-keeping is sensible. Automating the words is where accounts get reported and reputations get spent.
Automation of any kind breaks LinkedIn’s User Agreement, so ask how they manage that risk rather than whether it exists. A good answer covers daily limits, account warm-up and what they do when acceptance drops. A bad answer is that their tool is undetectable.
4. What will the monthly report contain?
Ask any LinkedIn marketing agency for a real example from another client, redacted. If the first page is connections made and profile views, you are being sold activity. The numbers that matter are positive replies, meetings held, opportunities created and pipeline value, with the previous months beside them.
Moreover, ask what they will tell you when a month goes badly. An agency that has a ready answer has had the conversation before and survived it, which is a better signal than a case study.
5. What happens in the first thirty days?
A competent LinkedIn marketing agency spends the first month on positioning, list definition, profile rewriting and warm-up, and sends relatively little. One that starts sending at full volume in week one is burning your account to show early numbers.
So ask for the thirty-day plan in writing, and treat a slow, specific one as the good sign it is. In short, the pace of the first month tells you how they will treat the asset for the rest of the engagement.
When you do not need a LinkedIn marketing agency at all
A LinkedIn marketing agency is not always the right purchase. If your market is a few hundred named accounts, a founder posting weekly and sending twenty thoughtful messages a day will beat most retainers. Agencies earn their fee on breadth, consistency and the writing, not on access to anything you cannot reach yourself.
For an example of what the reporting should look like, our four LinkedIn outbound accounts are reported per account, with invitations, connections, replies and calls booked shown separately.
If you want that built properly either way, our B2B lead generation service covers the sequencing and the content together, and our piece on spotting a real lead generation company applies here almost word for word.