A PR pitch meeting is an agency's best work product. The deck is polished, the senior people are in the room, and the case studies are the three best results of the last five years. None of that tells you what Tuesday will look like once you sign.
These twenty questions do. Ask them in the second meeting, write down the answers, and pay attention to the ones that get deflected.
Before anything else: the red flag that ends the meeting
If an agency guarantees coverage, whether that's placements in named outlets, a number of hits per month, or a specific publication, you are being sold one of two things. Either it is paid placement dressed up as earned media (sponsored content, contributed posts on pay-to-publish sites, syndication counted as coverage), or it is a promise they have no mechanism to keep, because no agency controls an editor's decision.
Good agencies guarantee activity: pitches sent, angles developed, relationships worked. They forecast outcomes with ranges and caveats. An agency that promises Forbes is either lying or buying, and both are worse than no agency.
Secondary red flags in the same family: refusing to name which outlets their recent coverage was in, showing a "media reach" number in the hundreds of millions, and case studies with no dates.
Team: who actually does the work
- 1. Who will be on my account, by name and title? Worrying answer: "We'll assign the right team after onboarding." You are buying people. Get the names before you sign.
- 2. How much of the work does the senior person in this room do? Worrying answer: any number without hours attached. Ask for hours per month by role.
- 3. How many other accounts does each person carry? Worrying answer: above six or an evasion. Above eight, nobody is thinking about you between calls.
- 4. What happens when my lead leaves? Worrying answer: "That doesn't really happen here." PR turnover runs 25–30% annually. The right answer describes a documented handover and a named backup.
- 5. Who in your firm has actually covered my category, and what did they place? Worrying answer: a generalist claiming every category is the same. Ask for three specific stories in your space from the last 18 months.
- 6. Is any work subcontracted or offshored? Not automatically bad, but it should be disclosed, and you should know who is emailing reporters in your name.
Process: what the work actually is
- 7. Walk me through the first 60 days, week by week. Worrying answer: vague "discovery" and "strategy." A real answer includes list building, message testing, and a first pitch date.
- 8. How many pitches will you send per month, and to how many reporters? Worrying answer: "We don't work in volume." True quality shops still have numbers, they just keep them small and targeted.
- 9. Can I see a pitch you sent last month, with the client redacted? Worrying answer: refusal. This is the single most revealing question on the list. Read the pitch. Is it a story, or a company description?
- 10. Where do your media lists come from? Worrying answer: a database export with no filtering. Ask how they verify a reporter still covers the beat.
- 11. What do you need from us, and how fast? A good agency has demands: interview availability, data, customer references, approval turnarounds. An agency with no asks is planning to do very little.
- 12. What happens if an angle doesn't land? Worrying answer: "We keep pitching." The right answer describes a kill point, a debrief, and a new angle within a defined window.
- 13. Who writes what? Bylines, releases, messaging docs, and quote approval should all have an owner. If the answer is "collaborative," you will be writing it.
- 14. How do you handle bad news? Even without a crisis retainer, you want to hear a process (holding statement, counsel loop, spokesperson prep), not improvisation.
Measurement: how you will know it worked
- 15. What do you consider a successful first quarter? Worrying answer: impressions, AVE, or "media reach." Advertising value equivalency was discredited two decades ago and still shows up in decks.
- 16. What metrics will you report, and which ones do you control? The honest split: they control pitches sent, response rates, and relationships built. They influence coverage volume and quality. They do not control publication decisions or your traffic.
- 17. How does PR connect to our pipeline, in your view? Worrying answer: a direct attribution claim. The credible answer is a correlation story (branded search lift, sales cycle references, inbound quality) told with honest uncertainty.
- 18. When should we judge this program, and what would make you tell us to stop? An agency willing to name a point at which they would fire themselves is worth talking to. Most programs need two to three quarters, and we mapped the real timeline here.
Contract: the terms that cost you money
- 19. What is the term, the notice period, and the renewal clause? Your actual commitment is the term plus the notice period. Auto-renewal with a 30-day cancellation window buried in clause 11 is common. Read it.
- 20. What is billed on top of the retainer, and can we cap it? Wire distribution, media databases, awards entry fees, event fees, travel. Get a written cap above which they need approval.
Three more worth asking if you have time: What does an out-of-hours request bill at? Do unused hours roll over? And can we start with a paid project before a retainer? The structural tradeoffs behind that last one are in our retainer vs. project breakdown.
How to score the answers
You are not looking for perfect answers. You are looking for specificity and willingness to say uncomfortable things. The best signal in any PR pitch is an agency telling you what they cannot do: that your news is thin, that your category is hard, that the first quarter will be quiet.
Rank your finalists on three things: the quality of the redacted pitch they showed you, the number of hours of senior time you actually get, and whether they named a point at which the program should be judged. Price matters, but it matters less than those three. If you want to sanity-check the numbers you are being quoted, our PR cost guide has the real 2026 ranges.
And if the answers make you think you are not ready for an agency yet, that is a legitimate outcome. When to hire a PR agency covers the stage question honestly.
Prefer pricing you can read before a sales call? [Ours is public](/pricing).