Your Agency Doesn't Want to Pivot — They Want to Be Right

You've been with your agency for six months. Maybe a year. The campaigns are running. The reports are coming in. And every month, your agency walks you through a deck full of charts that all seem to point in one direction: things are working.

But your revenue hasn't moved. Leads are flat. Your sales team is still complaining about quality. And that nagging feeling in your gut keeps getting louder: Is any of this actually working?

Here's the uncomfortable truth most business owners learn too late: your agency has a vested interest in proving their strategy is right. Not in making sure it is right.

The Incentive Problem Nobody Talks About

Think about how the traditional agency relationship is structured. You hire an agency. They pitch you a strategy. You approve the strategy. They execute the strategy. Then they report on the strategy.

Notice who controls the entire narrative? The same people whose revenue depends on you staying happy enough to keep paying. This creates a structural incentive to frame everything in the best possible light, even when the data is telling a different story.

It's not that most agencies are dishonest. It's that the model itself encourages a very specific behavior: defend the strategy at all costs.

Here's what that looks like in practice:

• Cherry-picked metrics. The report highlights impressions and reach because those numbers went up, even though conversions and revenue are flat. They show you the numbers that make the campaign look good, and bury the ones that don't.
• "It takes time" as a shield. Every underperforming campaign gets the same excuse: "We need more data." "These things take time to ramp." "We're still in the optimization phase." Sometimes that's true. But sometimes it's a way to buy another month of retainer without being held accountable.
• Reframing failure as learning. A campaign that didn't generate a single lead becomes "a valuable test that informed our next move." There's a difference between a genuine learning cycle and a retroactive justification for burning budget. Agencies blur that line constantly.
• Moving the goalposts. When the original KPIs don't look great, the conversation subtly shifts: "Well, the real goal here was brand awareness." "We're building long-term equity." Suddenly, the metrics you hired them to move aren't the ones they're measuring anymore.

Why Agencies Won't Pivot (Even When They Should)

Pivoting is hard. It requires admitting that the original plan wasn't working. And for an agency, that admission carries real risk. If they tell you the strategy they pitched three months ago was wrong, you might wonder what else they got wrong. You might question their expertise. You might fire them.

So instead of pivoting, they optimize. They make small tweaks around the edges. They adjust the targeting. They change the creative. They test new ad copy. All of which lets them say they're "iterating" without ever confronting the fundamental question: Is this strategy the right one?

There's a critical difference between optimization and pivoting:

• Optimization means making the current approach work better. It's adjusting the knobs and dials within an existing framework.
• Pivoting means stepping back and asking whether the framework itself is right. It might mean scrapping a channel entirely. Rethinking the audience. Rebuilding the funnel from scratch.

Agencies are good at optimization. They are structurally allergic to pivoting. Because pivoting means the strategy they sold you was wrong, and that's the one thing they can never say.

The most expensive marketing decision isn't a bad campaign. It's a bad strategy you keep running because no one in the room has the authority or the incentive to kill it.

The Real Cost of "Stay the Course"

When your agency defends a failing strategy instead of pivoting, the damage compounds over time. It's not just the money you're wasting on campaigns that don't convert. It's the opportunity cost of everything you're not doing while your budget is tied up in the wrong approach.

Consider what happens when you spend six months running the wrong strategy:

1. Wasted budget. Every dollar that went into a campaign that wasn't going to work is a dollar that could have been testing something better. Over six months, that adds up to tens of thousands for most businesses.
2. Lost market share. While you're "optimizing" a strategy that isn't working, your competitors are out there finding what does. They're capturing the customers you should have reached months ago.
3. Team morale erodes. Your sales team sees the leads aren't coming. Your CEO starts questioning the marketing investment. Internal trust in the marketing function breaks down, and it takes months to rebuild even after you fix the strategy.
4. Compounding delay. The sooner you pivot, the sooner you find what works. Every month you delay that pivot is another month before your real growth engine starts running.

What Accountability Actually Looks Like

Real accountability in marketing doesn't mean someone sends you a monthly report and walks you through the highlights. Real accountability means someone in the room has the authority, the expertise, and the incentive to say: "This isn't working. Here's what we're going to do instead."

That's what a marketing leader does. Not a vendor. Not an agency account manager. A leader.

Here's the difference between agency reporting and genuine marketing accountability:

Five Questions to Ask Your Agency Right Now

If you're working with an agency and you're not sure whether you're getting genuine accountability or polished reporting, ask these questions at your next check-in:

1. "What's not working right now, and what are you doing about it?" If they can't name a single thing that's underperforming, that's a red flag. Every marketing program has something that could be better. If they can't tell you what it is, they're not looking hard enough or they're afraid to tell you.
2. "If you were starting from scratch today with our budget, would you do the same thing?" This forces them to evaluate the strategy on its merits rather than defending a decision they already made. If the answer is "no," you need to talk about why nothing has changed.
3. "What have you killed or paused in the last 90 days?" Great marketing teams are constantly pruning. If nothing has been cut, it means either everything is magically perfect or nobody has the courage to stop doing things that don't work.
4. "Show me the trend line on the metrics that matter to our revenue." Not impressions. Not website traffic. Not social engagement. Show me leads, pipeline, conversion rates, and revenue attributed to marketing. If they can't connect the dots, the strategy isn't accountable to your business.
5. "When was the last time you told us something we didn't want to hear?" This is the big one. If your agency only brings you good news, they're managing the relationship, not managing your marketing. You need a partner who tells you the truth, even when it's uncomfortable.

Why This Problem Disappears With a Marketing Leader

The reason agencies struggle with accountability isn't because they're bad at marketing. Many of them are quite good at execution. The problem is structural: they're vendors, not leaders. And vendors don't pivot. They protect.

When you have a marketing leader embedded in your business — someone who sits in your leadership meetings, understands your revenue goals, and has their reputation tied to your growth — the incentive structure flips entirely.

A marketing leader doesn't need to defend a failing strategy because they didn't sell it to you. They built it with you, and they'll tear it down the moment the data says it's not working. They don't cherry-pick metrics because they're sitting in the same room as your CEO, your sales team, and your board. There's nowhere to hide.

That's the difference between hiring an agency and hiring a leader. The agency's job is to make marketing look good. The leader's job is to make marketing work.

And when something isn't working? A leader doesn't optimize around the edges and hope you don't notice. They walk into the room and say: "This isn't delivering. Here's the data. Here's what I recommend we do instead. And here's what I expect it to produce."

That's not a comfortable conversation. But it's the only conversation that drives real growth.