How to Evaluate an eCommerce Agency Pitch, From Someone Who Gives Them
I pitch for a living, so read this with that disclosure in mind. The pitches that win are not always the agencies that deliver, and after a thousand rooms I know exactly which slides mean nothing.
- Logo walls and percentage-growth case studies are decoration. Without base numbers, timeframes, and the agency's specific contribution, they tell you nothing.
- Ask who will actually work your account, what clients they lost and why, and what happens in the first thirty days. Weak agencies fail all three questions.
- A real proposal contains a diagnosis of your specific account, a sequenced 90-day plan, a named team, honest dependencies, and clean exit terms.
Here is my disclosure up front. I run sales for an agency. I have given more of these pitches than I can count, and I have sat through hundreds from the other side of the table, first inside platforms and then advising brands. So take this piece as what it is: the sales guy showing you the sales playbook. I am doing it because the brands that evaluate us hardest make the best clients, and because the weak pitches in this industry are so uniform that once you see the pattern you cannot unsee it.
The logo wall is the least informative slide in the deck
A wall of client logos proves an agency signed contracts, not that it delivered on them. Some of those logos ran a two-month trial that went nowhere. Some churned within a year. Some engaged the agency for something entirely unrelated to what you need. The logo slide is in every deck, including ours, because it lowers your anxiety. It should not lower your scrutiny. The only useful follow-up is specific: which of these are active today, which are older than two years, and can I call two of them.
Case studies without base numbers are decoration
A case study that says revenue grew three hundred percent is telling you almost nothing on purpose. Three hundred percent from what base, over what period, at what spend, during what season, and with how many other things changing at the same time? A brand that launched on a new marketplace grows enormously in percentage terms by simply existing. What you want from a case study is the shape of the work: the starting situation, what the agency specifically changed, the sequence it changed it in, and what happened to the numbers that matter, stated in absolutes, not just percentages. An agency that did the work can talk at that altitude for an hour. An agency that inherited a rising market cannot survive the third follow-up question.
Three questions expose a weak agency in fifteen minutes
The people in the pitch room are usually not the people who will run your account, and that gap is where most agency relationships die. Ask these three questions and watch closely:
- Who exactly works my account day to day? Names, roles, how many other accounts each of them carries. If the answer is vague, your account will be run by whoever has capacity that month.
- Which client did you lose most recently, and why? Every real agency has lost accounts. An honest answer shows you how they behave when results dip. A deflection shows you the same thing.
- What happens in the first thirty days? A strong agency describes an audit, a diagnosis, and a sequence. A weak one jumps straight to activity: campaigns, creatives, launches. Activity without diagnosis is how retainers get justified and budgets get burned.
A real proposal talks mostly about you
The strongest signal in any proposal is the ratio of your business to their credentials. A serious agency asks for data access before proposing anything, and the document it sends back is a diagnosis: what is working in your account, what is broken, what it would fix first and why in that order. It contains a 90-day plan with checkpoints, a named team, the dependencies it needs from your side stated honestly, and how success will be measured, agreed before the work starts. It also contains clean exit terms, because an agency confident in its work does not need a contract to trap you. If the proposal you receive could have been sent to any brand in your category with the logo swapped, it probably was.
Run the process like the purchase it is
Choosing an agency is a procurement decision, and it deserves procurement discipline. Give every contender the same written brief and the same data. Compare diagnoses, not design polish. Call the references they did not offer, not just the ones they did. Weight the team you met against the team you will actually get. And decide in advance what you will measure at ninety days, so the review is a comparison against a commitment rather than a mood. Brands sometimes ask us to help them structure exactly this evaluation before they commit serious budgets, which is a routine part of our Consultancy work, and yes, sometimes the honest output is that they do not need an agency yet. I would rather lose that pitch than win the wrong client. The good agencies in this market feel the same way, and this process is how you find them.