What questions should I ask on the first sales call?

The difficulty with comparing link building proposals is that they are formatted differently, priced differently and scoped differently. A common question set fixes that. Ask all eleven of everyone, write the answers into a grid, and the shortlist sorts itself.

The eleven

1. What proportion of the links you build involve a payment to the publisher? The single most separating question. Only 21.4% of link builders used manual outreach as their main strategy in 2025, down from 38.2% in 2024 — so this is worth establishing explicitly. A number is a good answer. “They’re all editorial” without a number is not.

2. What disqualifies a site from a campaign? You want written criteria: minimum organic traffic, maximum outbound links, whether the site openly sells placements. “High DR” is a non-answer.

3. Show me five links you placed in the last 60 days for a comparable client. The only claim that cannot be argued around. An agency doing real work produces these in minutes.

4. What is your cost per link, and what is included? Prospecting, vetting, content, placement, monitoring — which of the five? A $450 link with all five beats a $300 link with two.

5. Will links point at pages I nominate, or pages you find easiest to place? The most common quiet failure. Domain-level growth with flat page-level growth means the authority went somewhere you did not choose.

6. How do you report referring domains at page level? Domain-level counts always rise. Page-level counts are the ones connected to whether you rank.

7. What happens when a link goes dead, and for how long? With 66.5% of links built between 2013 and 2024 now dead, a replacement window is not a luxury. Six months is a reasonable floor; one agency in this market offers twelve.

8. Who writes the content, and do I review it before publication? Particularly important if you sell into anything regulated. Review rights belong in the contract, not in goodwill.

9. What is the minimum term, and what notice ends it afterwards? Three months is normal and defensible. Twelve months with no break clause is worth pushing back on.

10. Who owns the content and prospect list if I leave? Live links stay live. The content you paid to have written and the vetted prospect list are negotiable, and many contracts are silent — which means you get neither.

11. What would make you tell me not to hire you? The most revealing question on the list, because it costs them the sale to answer honestly. An agency that has never turned work down is either very lucky or not being straight with you.

How to score the answers

Do not score on how confident the answer sounded. Score on whether it contained a number, a name or a document. “We vet everything carefully” and “we require 500+ monthly organic visits and fewer than 40 outbound links per page” are the same claim at very different levels of accountability.

Take the contract checklist into the negotiation that follows, and check the answers against the red flags.

Questions