A first meeting usually covers their cases and your challenge, which produces two hours in which nobody learns anything new. Three questions do surface something.
The three questions
"Who works on my account day to day?" Ask for names and for how many other clients those people carry. Then ask whether they will be at the table next time. An agency that gets uncomfortable here is selling you a team it cannot guarantee.
"What share of your revenue is your largest client?" That number appears in no annual accounts and is the fifth of the five health checks. Above forty percent is a risk for them and therefore for you; below twenty-five you are fine. But the real signal is not the number: it is whether they answer. An agency open about this will also be open when something goes wrong on your account.
"Which assignment did you turn down this year, and why?" This is the question that yields the most and gets asked the least. An agency that never turns anything down takes everything, and is therefore either always overstretched or not selective. An agency with a good answer tells you in one go what it believes in and where its limit sits.
Three things you put on the table yourself
- Your budget, or at least the order of magnitude. Without a budget you get a proposal that proves nothing.
- Who decides on your side, and how many rounds that means. Agencies price rounds in, and a surprise afterwards gets paid by someone.
- What went wrong with your previous agency. It sounds awkward and it saves you a repeat.
Prepare with that agency's factsheet: the meeting then covers what you want to know rather than what is already public.
What to watch while they talk
Whether they ask questions. An agency that presents for the full hour does not need your assignment to tell its story, and that is exactly what you will get back later in the work.
See also: how to know whether an agency is good and who works at an agency.