Ideally, you want an agency partner that is much a partner of the marketing team as it is the sales team. You want the agency to actively integrate content and video into the sales process through an assignment selling approach. And you will want your digital marketing agency to converse with your sales team across the sales process to drive significant improvements in close rates and revenue.

Ensuring that your sales team is included in campaign planning, execution and review with your agency, is critically important given the sales team’s wealth of customer knowledge. Sales teams are rarely, if ever included and this leads to missed opportunities to create shorter sales cycles and higher close rates.

Your digital marketing agency should also be highly capable in the provision of sales services. These sales services cover strategic to executional services across CRM implementation and training, sales enablement and automation and finally, coaching sales and marketing teams to work on alignment and singular campaigns.

If you can find an agency that actively helps your team members grow so you don’t have be dependent on them forever is an ideal worth reaching for. Traditionally agencies of all shapes and sizes have either consciously or sub-consciously created a cycle of dependency, in order to make it difficult to “churn” and therefore are in a best position generate the largest possible retainer from their client.

An agency that actively trains your team should have evidence of this in action and be willing to articulate how they can implement such a program for your business.

The agency that creates content in a silo, often ends up missing the tone and expertise contained within your business. Co-creation of content can take numerous forms however, at its core should be a process of content creation from the initial research into keywords and topics through to the content plan, calendar and individual content creation.

A collaborative agency partner will be ‘grown-up’ in relation to the disclosure of the partners it brings in and demanding on the client when it comes to their contribution to content creation.

Don’t hire a ‘yes man’ agency. You want and require a trusted advisor, who you believe in and has the confidence to push back when necessary. It’s often this tension that generates the best thinking and actions which drives you on to achieve your greatest business success.

Of course most agencies say they provide strategic consulting services. However, do they understand how to conduct market research? Do they have access to insights beyond the norm? What are their workshop facilitation skills like? And are they passionate, articulate writers of great sales and marketing strategy? Given all of this, it is best to test it out, either in the pitch process itself or via discrete projects that a separate from executional projects.

This kind of seems obvious. However, it is often the case that the client prioritises knowledge of their business and or category over the competency of the agency to execute its digital sales and marketing campaigns. It might take a month of immersion to master the legal restrictions or technical competencies of a client and category. Not much time at all when considering the many years of study and experience most agencies have expended to achieve their position.

So test of the capabilities by briefing a content pillar creation or a video marketing strategy. See how they respond and assess the quality and how they went about the project rather than their ability to describe a distribution channel or an obscure legal restraint.