Ask four things before you sign: how the list gets built, which numbers get reviewed each week, what happens in month two if results are flat, and who runs your account day to day. The best questions to ask a lead generation agency are the ones a pitch deck cannot answer for them.
You probably have two or three proposals open right now. Every one says LinkedIn outreach. Every one promises booked meetings. The reply rates quoted sit within a point of each other. So you are about to choose on price, or on whoever sounded most confident on the call.
This is for coaches comparing outbound providers. It covers why the sales call is the weakest signal you have, then the questions that actually separate agencies: list building, reporting cadence, contract terms, and the person doing the work.
None of this needs technical knowledge. You ask, then you listen for whether the answer has numbers in it.
Sales calls are the weakest signal you have
A sales call measures one thing well: how good the agency is at selling. Delivery happens later, with different people. Every outbound agency runs more or less the same stack, LinkedIn, Sales Navigator, a sending tool and a CRM, so the walkthrough looks identical no matter who you call.
The numbers get recycled too. Reply rate ranges and "typical" meeting counts are easy to quote and impossible to check on a first call.
One number almost nobody volunteers is connection acceptance rate. Ask for it. Low acceptance is a root problem, because fewer accepts means fewer people who can ever receive your offer. That means fewer conversations, fewer meetings and fewer signed clients.
LinkedIn also caps invitations at roughly 100 per week per account. That ceiling applies to every agency equally. So the real question is not how much volume someone can push. It is what they do with a fixed number of requests.
Questions to ask a lead gen agency about the list
Ask who builds the list, which filters they use, how many separate lists run inside one campaign, and what they change when a list underperforms. The list carries most of your result. Across 1000+ campaigns across all industries, Coaching Accelerator sees the list drive roughly 70% of outreach results and the copy roughly 30%.
That ratio should shape your questions. Copy can follow a tested framework. The list is the variable a good team moves first when meetings slow down.
Listen for testing, not building. One list running untouched for six months is not a strategy. Ask how they split a campaign across two or more audience segments, and how they compare accept rates between them.
Then ask about screening. Coaches who build their own Sales Navigator lists often find students and junior staff inside them, because a title filter catches anyone whose headline uses the right words. Ask how seniority and company size get filtered, and who reads the list before it goes live.
Reporting cadence shows who is watching
Ask how often stats get reviewed and what triggers a change. Weekly is the floor. With monthly reporting, a weak list can run for four weeks before anyone looks at it, and you pay for all four.
Ask which numbers appear in the report. The useful ones are specific:
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Accepted connection requests per 100 sent
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Replies per 100 accepted connections
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Meetings booked, and meetings actually held
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Which list and which message version produced each meeting
Now the harder question: what were the last two changes you made on a live account, and why? A real answer names the metric that moved and what they rewrote. A vague answer about ongoing optimization usually means nobody is reading the data.
Ask to see a sample report with the client details removed. If that request causes friction before you have paid anything, you have learned something useful.
Contract length and guarantees need definitions
Ask what the notice period is, what the guarantee actually promises, who decides whether a meeting counts, and what the remedy is if the number is missed. Get all four in the lead gen agency contract, not in an email.
A promise of qualified leads is not a promise of meetings. A lead can be a reply that says "send me info". A meeting is a time on your calendar with a named person. Those two words sit next to each other in proposals and mean very different things.
Check the remedy as well. More outreach at no charge is weak compensation if the offer or the audience was wrong. A credit or a free month is concrete.
On length, a twelve month lock with no performance clause puts all the risk on you. An agency that is confident about its first month will let you start short and decide later.
Finally, ask what happens to the assets. Who keeps the prospect list, the message history and the conversation data when the engagement ends?
Who runs your account day to day
Ask for the name and role of the person doing the work, how many accounts they carry, and whether you speak to them directly or only through the salesperson. Then ask how quickly replies get handled. A warm reply left sitting for two days is usually a lost meeting.
Ask who writes and approves copy changes. If a writer who has never spoken to you controls your messaging, your positioning gets flattened into something generic, and your reply rate shows it.
Ask about your profile too. In outreach, a LinkedIn profile has one job: getting the connection request accepted. Credentials and social proof, no pitch. If an agency wants to turn your headline into a sales page, that tells you how they think about the top of the funnel.
Your website still matters. The profile generates the lead, and the site helps you close it later. An agency that dismisses either one is only looking at half the process.
What good answers still do not guarantee
Strong answers to all of these do not fix a weak offer. Market fit comes before volume. If your market does not want what you sell at the price you charge, outbound only tells you that faster.
No agency produces signed clients in month one. Month one produces conversations and booked meetings. What turns those into clients is your call structure, your follow up and your pricing.
If you are early stage and still shaping your positioning, do user interviews and go to market work before you buy volume. Coaches with an established offer and a proven price can skip that step.
Expect uneven weeks as well. Booking rates move with holidays, hiring cycles and your buyers' own calendars. A flat week is not a failed campaign, and a great week is not proof of a system.
Judge the cost against a closed client, not against a single meeting. For most coaches, one closed client covers a full year of outreach spend. That is the comparison worth running when a monthly fee looks high.
Ask every provider the same questions
Use one script across all your calls and write the answers down. Differences surface quickly when the questions are identical. The agencies that track stats, test lists and rewrite copy will answer with specifics. The rest will answer with adjectives.
Coaching Accelerator answers these on the first call. We build and test the lists, review the numbers every week rather than at month end, book meetings straight into your calendar, and guarantee meetings every billing cycle. We also work with you on closing what comes in, using sales frameworks tested across 300+ coaching businesses.
If you want to hear those answers in detail and compare them against whoever else you are considering, book a call with Coaching Accelerator. You can start with a first month trial and decide from the numbers, which is how 95% of our clients end up renewing.