# Two Agencies, One Decision: What MSP Owners Should Compare Before Signing With Abstrakt Marketing Group or LeadPulls
Hiring a marketing agency is one of the few decisions that can quietly reshape an MSP’s revenue for years — or quietly drain a budget while the sales pipeline stays flat. When MSP owners narrow the field to firms like Abstrakt Marketing Group or LeadPulls, the temptation is to compare proposals line by line and pick the lower number. That approach usually fails, because proposals are written to look comparable while the actual delivery models behind them are not. What follows is a practical set of criteria and questions you can use to evaluate either provider on equal footing, without relying on anyone’s sales deck.
## Define the Market and the Meeting Before You Compare Anything
Before you ask a single agency what it can do, get specific about what you actually need sold. An MSP selling co-managed IT to 150-seat manufacturers in a two-hour radius has a completely different addressable market than one selling fully managed services to 20-seat professional firms statewide. Ask each agency to walk you through how they would size your total addressable market, how they would map the IT buyer journey from first touch to booked call, and how many accounts they believe genuinely fit your profile. If a provider skips straight to pricing without asking about your service area, seat count sweet spot, or vertical focus, that is a signal worth noting.
Then get to the most important definition in the entire engagement: what counts as a qualified meeting. Vague language like “leads,” “opportunities,” or “appointments” is where most MSP-agency relationships fall apart. Push both providers to put their definition in writing, including whether budget, authority, need, and timeline are confirmed before a meeting is counted. For context, LeadPulls states that a meeting counts only when BANT criteria are confirmed — a useful benchmark to hold up against whatever definition another agency proposes. Ask directly:
– Who confirms BANT, and at what stage — a setter, a BDR, or the closer?
– What happens if a meeting turns out to be unqualified or a no-show? Is it replaced?
– Is the meeting delivered on your calendar, or handed over as a contact record?
– How are cancellations and reschedules handled inside the commitment period?
Ask each agency to describe a recent engagement that looked similar to yours in size, geography, and service mix — not to name clients, but to explain the pattern of how the first 30, 60, and 90 days unfolded. The answers will tell you whether they understand MSP sales cycles, which routinely run longer and involve more stakeholders than a typical SMB transaction.
## Compare the Channels, the Territory Rules, and the Craft Behind the Outreach
Two agencies can both promise “lead generation” while doing entirely different work. One may lean on content and search visibility, another on outbound prospecting, a third on paid media and telemarketing. Ask each provider to itemize exactly which channels they would use for your account and why, then ask who actually executes each one. Google search and SEO, LinkedIn outreach, cold email, retargeting, and telemarketing all require different skills, and many agencies subcontract portions of the work. You want to know where the handoffs are.
Compliance deserves its own conversation. MSPs sell to businesses in regulated and highly relational markets, and outreach that ignores CAN-SPAM and CASL requirements creates risk that lands on your brand, not the agency’s. Ask how sending domains are set up, whether secondary domains are used, who owns those domains if the relationship ends, and how suppression lists and opt-outs are managed.
Visibility is another area where providers diverge. Buyers increasingly research vendors through AI assistants and AI-generated search summaries, not just traditional results pages. Ask whether the agency does anything to make your MSP discoverable in ChatGPT, Perplexity, or AI Overviews, or whether it only builds pages and hopes for the best.
Territory and exclusivity are frequently overlooked. If an agency works with several MSPs in your metro, you may find yourself competing for the same buyers through the same channels. Ask plainly: how many clients do you serve within 50 miles of my headquarters, and how do you prevent overlap? Owners who want a structured way to organize these answers often build a scorecard starting with a direct leadpulls vs abstrakt marketing group comparison of channel mix, territory rules, and meeting definitions, then use the same template for every firm on the shortlist. An H3 on your own document titled “who does what” is worth more than three reference calls.
## Scrutinize Accountability, Reporting, and the Exit Terms
The final filter is operational. Ask each agency to show you a sample of the reporting you would receive every month — not a mockup, but the real dashboard view. Check whether it reports activity (emails sent, calls placed) or outcomes (meetings booked, meetings held, opportunities created, closed revenue). Activity metrics are fine as diagnostics, but they should never be the headline. You also want to understand the optimization cadence. Who reviews performance weekly, what gets changed, and how are those changes communicated to you? LeadPulls describes sizing the TAM, mapping the buyer journey, running multi-channel outreach, then optimizing weekly — ask every provider to describe their equivalent rhythm and how you will see it in practice.
Commitments matter more than promises. LeadPulls, for example, states a written guarantee of eight to ten sales-qualified meetings in 90 days. Whatever figure another agency proposes, get it in writing with the same precision: what counts, what period, what happens if it is missed, and whether there are conditions attached. A guarantee you cannot compare is not a guarantee — it is a marketing line.
Then read the contract for the details that hurt later:
– **Data and asset ownership.** Who owns the prospect lists, the sending domains, the content, the landing pages, and the CRM records? Everything should transfer to you.
– **Term and termination.** Is there an initial lock-in? How much notice is required? Are there clawback or early-exit fees?
– **Ramp expectations.** Ask what a realistic first 30 days looks like and what they need from you to hit it.
– **Your internal workload.** How many hours per week will your team spend on call reviews, approvals, and strategy meetings?
– **Day 91.** Ask what the engagement looks like after the initial commitment period ends and how performance is re-forecast.
Finally, ask who your day-to-day contact will be, how quickly they respond, and whether that person has ever worked with an MSP before. A firm can have a strong process and still stall if your account is run by someone learning managed services from scratch. Compare the answers side by side, in writing, and the right choice for your MSP usually becomes obvious.
