On Monday I'm going to give a digital marketing consultancy some details of my very small business in order to get a proposal for marketing for me next year. My business currently doesn't have the sales revenue to pay for it's own marketing so I'm going to invest more of my own money into it for that purpose. It's also not yet profitable, but of course the goal of doing proper, professional marketing is to become profitable - ideally next year! I know marketers kind of hate performance clauses or expectations because you can never really guarantee conversions will result from the campaigns, but I don't want to feel like I've flushed these thousands of dollars down the toilet. I can't afford that. But I want to be a reasonable client, so I want to set my expectations before I talk to them.

Is it reasonable to expect slow-but steady increase in sales/conversions over the first 3 months? 6 months? In terms of metrics, I'm talking modest, like 5% increase in sales volume over the first X months.