How to choose a LinkedIn Ads agency for enterprise B2B: 10 questions and a scorecard

What LinkedIn does for you, and what it does not

LinkedIn gives enterprise marketers targeting no other platform matches: company lists, job functions, seniority and matched audiences from your CRM. It also lets you spend a large budget quickly on people who will never buy. The platform optimizes toward the objective you choose, inside the audience you define. It does not know which accounts sales wants, which deals are open or which leads became opportunities.

That gap is what you are hiring an agency to close. For enterprise deals, Gartner reports buying groups of six to 10 decision makers, so the agency also needs to plan messages by role across the committee, not by one job title.

Partner status: useful, but not the decision

LinkedIn runs a Marketing Partner program for third-party providers that offer integrated solutions and managed services, with specialties such as campaign management, lead generation, and B2B attribution and analytics. LinkedIn says partners go through a review process, and that 1 in 3 advertisers use partners to manage their ads.

Partner status tells you an agency has been vetted. It does not tell you whether the team on your account understands enterprise sales cycles, your CRM or your buyers. Use the directory to build a list, then judge on the questions below.

The question that separates agencies fastest is what happens after the click: how lead gen forms sync to your CRM, and how quickly sales sees each lead with its account and campaign.

Ten questions to ask every LinkedIn Ads agency

1. How will you build our account list with sales, and how often will it be refreshed?
2. Which exclusions will you set on day one: customers, partners, competitors, open opportunities, job seekers?
3. Will Audience Expansion and the LinkedIn Audience Network be on, and how will you decide?
4. How do lead gen form leads reach our CRM, and how fast does sales see them?
5. Which CRM stage will you report on, and how will offline conversions flow back to LinkedIn?
6. How do you plan messages for each role on the buying committee?
7. How do you test creative and audiences so results are not noise from small samples?
8. What would you cut in our current account, and why?
9. Who on your team runs the account day to day, and how senior are they?
10. What will we know at day 30, 60 and 90, and what decision do we make at day 90?

A weighted scorecard

Score each agency from 1 to 5 after a working session on your account, then apply the weights. The weights are our view of what predicts pipeline on LinkedIn for enterprise B2B.

Red flags

• Success reported as click-through rate, cost per click or cost per lead only.
• Broad job-title targeting with no account list and no exclusions.
• Lead gen form leads exported to spreadsheets instead of syncing to the CRM.
• A new creative test every week with no written hypothesis or readout.
• The agency, not you, owns the ad account or the Campaign Manager access.

Run a pilot before a long commitment

Pick one segment, such as one product line, one region or one account tier, and give the agency 90 days. Agree the metric before launch: target accounts engaged, meetings and opportunities from the CRM, at a cost per opportunity you can afford. At day 90, either scale, change the plan or stop.

Before the pilot, a LinkedIn Ads account audit shows where the current budget leaks. Our checklist covers targeting, exclusions, bidding, lead forms and reporting.

If you only fix one thing first, fix exclusions. Our article on exclusions explains the settings that keep the wrong people out.