For me, it's when they can't explain the "why" behind a single decision. Not just the high-level "we need more traffic" - I mean the granular, tactical why. I've sat through countless pitches where someone shows me a keyword list they scraped from Ahrefs and says "we should target these," but when I ask why those terms matter for the specific funnel stage, they freeze. It's a dead giveaway.
A few things I look for:
No link between action and metric. If someone says "we published a blog post" but can't tell me whether the goal was top-of-funnel awareness (impressions, clicks) or bottom-of-funnel conversion (demand gen, LTV impact), they're either guessing or copying a playbook. In FinTech, where CAC to LTV is the only religion, that's a non-starter.
They treat tools as oracles. I once had a junior marketer run a Screaming Frog crawl, dump a list of 404s into a spreadsheet, and propose we redirect them all. When I asked why we should redirect a specific 404 - was it high-traffic? Did it have backlinks? Was it relevant to our ICP? - they had no answer. They just "saw the error flag."
They can't prioritise. Inexperienced marketers often think all data points are equal. But if you can't rank your actions by potential impact (e.g., "we fix this Google Search Console issue because it affects 15% of our organic traffic vs. that one which affects 0.2%"), you're just adding noise.
The real skill isn't knowing what to do - it's knowing why you're doing it, and being able to defend that logic with a funnel map and a calculator. If they can't, I assume they're operating on buzzwords and hope.
