Ellie Angell goes undercover to delve into the complexities of the agency pitching process. She discusses the challenges faced by agencies, including emotional tolls, the role of procurement, and the importance of clear communication and feedback.
The TrinityP3 State of the Pitch report has shone a light into the pitching process as it is practiced and revealed what many feel, but few could articulate. That is the problem with pitching is it is not broken as some maintain, but it is suffering often from poor management and even worse behaviour, particularly by a few procurement professionals and marketers.
But just how bad is this behaviour? Surely some of the reports of poor time management down to outright rudeness is a huge exaggeration. Ellie went behind the scenes to a few agencies who were in the pitch process to see first-hand and report back.
What she shares highlights the need for a behavioral reset in how agencies and marketers interact during pitches, emphasizing the necessity for a fair and reasonable process that respects the efforts of all parties involved.
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Transcription (Edited):
Darren Woolley:
Hi, I’m Darren Woolley, founder and CEO of Trinity P3 Marketing Management Consultancy and welcome to Managing Marketing, a weekly podcast where we discuss the issues and opportunities facing marketing, media and advertising with industry thought leaders and practitioners.
The Trinity P3 State of the Pitch report has shone a light into the pitching process as it is practised and revealed what many feel but few could articulate. That is that the problem with pitching is that it’s not broken as some maintain, but it is suffering from poor management and even worse behaviour, particularly by some procurement professionals and marketers. But just how bad is this behaviour? Surely some of the reports of poor time management down to outright rudeness are a huge exaggeration.
To find out the reality of pitches, we sent an undercover pitch consultant behind the scenes to a few agencies who are in the pitch process to see firsthand and report back. We’ve changed her name to protect the agencies and the clients involved, but she is here to share with us the good, the bad, and the ugly of agency pitching. Please welcome to the Managing Marketing Podcast, Ellie Angell. Welcome, Ellie.
Ellie Angell:
I feel like there’s been an error in that intro somewhere, Darren. You’ve kind of disrupted my undercover status there, but never mind.
Darren:
You’ve been unmasked, Ellie.
Darren:
It’s a terrific idea because there are a lot of stories flying around the industry. It’s amazing how many times you hear stories about pitches that you think just can’t possibly be true. And yet, actually going behind the scenes and being in these agencies when they’re in the middle of a pitch must have been incredibly illuminating.
Ellie:
Just to give some context, this idea came from the State of the Pitch survey that Trinity P3 does. We’ve seen the downward trend of those scores in those surveys. And those surveys are objective, looking at consultants running pitches, marketer-run pitches, procurement-run pitches. But of course, from our perspective running these pitches, we only run a certain amount in the market. So I wanted to go behind the scenes to see pitches that we weren’t involved in, to see exactly the kind of thing that was happening.
I’ve worked in agencies before, so I don’t think any of these stories are going to be new to anyone who’s worked in agencies, but they are quite profound in terms of the behaviours that we see and some of the massive hoops that agencies are having to go through more and more as time goes on.
Darren:
Just to be clear, the marketers that were running these pitches or the procurement professionals running these pitches would not have been aware that you were behind the scenes.
Ellie:
That’s correct, that’s exactly right. Of course there can’t be a conflict of interest, and these weren’t pitches that Trinity P3 had any involvement in. No one was aware that I was there other than the agency staff involved in the pitch itself.
Lack of Clarity: What Are We Pitching For?
Darren:
We need to protect the agencies because clearly in most cases of a pitch, there’s an NDA. So let’s have this conversation without identifying any of the agencies or the marketers. generally, what were these pitches like? Were they for agency of record? Were they projects? Or was it a real mixture?
Ellie:
It’s kind of an interesting place to start because one of the things I’ve heard consistently is that some of these clients just weren’t actually sure of the answer to that question. It seems like a basic question: What are you actually hiring for? But as some of these pitches progressed—and I’m not even going to divulge whether this was a media or creative agency—this question of “Is it project, retained, or AOR?” kind of fluctuated through the “process”.
There was a lack of process, a lack of briefing, and a lack of clarity. In at least one of these pitches, the goalposts were moved in that regard midway through the process. Which, after all of the effort that the agency puts in and the IP that the agency gives in a pitch, seems unreasonable at best. For God’s sake, let’s understand exactly what the outcome is supposed to be and not move on that midway through.
Darren:
I just want to pick up on the effort agencies put into responding. A lot of times I’ve heard marketers, and particularly procurement teams, talk about, “Well, it’s not that hard. You have to fill in some forms and do a presentation.” But there’s actually a lot of emotional energy put into these as well as the physical effort.
Ellie:
There’s a huge amount of emotional energy. It’s people who have invested their time and their expertise, and they feel that their expertise is being judged. They’re doing it on top of their day jobs. What I find a lot of marketers don’t necessarily take into account is when they give a brief that the agency has weeks to respond to, that agency is working from a base of zero.
When the client doesn’t have a Q&A session or a tissue session to guide the agency to make it more real life, they are working in a vacuum. That takes a lot of energy out of an agency, trying to get up to speed much quicker than they normally would, while trying to provide a silver bullet answer to a brief that is really difficult to grip.
Communication Breakdowns: The “Needy” Agency Myth
Darren:
There will be people listening saying, “Why didn’t the agency ask for more information or why don’t they just query the client more?” I recently interviewed a few senior marketers who ran their own pitch, and the first challenge they mentioned was, “My God, the amount of time and how needy the agencies are. They’re constantly coming back to you asking questions.” One actually said, “I just wish they’d take the brief, go away, solve it, and come back,” because of that demand on the marketer’s time.
Ellie:
Look, I think marketers need to take a leadership stake in their own pitch. I’m forever saying to clients that we want to run a positive pitch, not a negative pitch. A positive pitch is where you have two agencies left who are so good you find it hard to choose between them. A negative pitch is where you’re choosing the “least worst” agency based on the response they’ve given.
Marketers often fail to grasp that they enable that negative outcome via their own leadership. Agencies haven’t been furnished with enough information to deliver their best, or the briefing is bad. Asking questions of a brief should be a normal part of any process because, at the end of the day, both parties need to be set up for success and that dialogue is critical.
I’ve found that where there’s not a process in place, agencies are forced to call the client, ask questions on the fly, and have separate meetings. That’s where the client perceives they become needy. The obvious answer is to have a defined process, like an hour-long opportunity for the agency to ask all the questions they want and for that to be understood as a point where the client provides answers.
In one particular case I observed, there was no formal question process. The agency rang up one person, the main contact, for answers. They took those answers, got into the room with the rest of the client team, and were completely run over in the presentation because all the other clients had different opinions to the person they asked. They were scored down because the person who answered their questions didn’t have the same view as anyone else in the room.
Flawed Q&A Processes and Procurement Overkill
Darren:
I’m immediately thinking of the flip side—the procurement process where they ask for written questions and share all answers with everyone. They say it’s fairer, but it’s hard to get nuance from written questions, and you don’t want to reveal a unique benefit to competitors.
Ellie:
At the end of the day, you want to see the diversity of agency talent. Agencies should be rewarded for initiative or asking specific questions because that helps differentiate their solution. One pitch I observed had an all-agency Q&A session on a call. It was like tumbleweeds. No one wanted to ask any questions of real value; it was really surface level and a waste of time.
Regarding procurement and written questions: in one pitch, I saw a record of 148 written questions in an Excel template. It was hugely wide-ranging, repetitive, and quite derivative—like a laundry list. With six agencies in the process, of course things need to be in writing, but it was massive overkill in context of the detail we were being asked to go into.
Darren:
I once witnessed an open tender Q&A where the organisers said, “Clearly the RFP was well written because no one had any questions,” while all the agencies were sitting on their hands.
Ellie:
I can understand the motivation to save time and the concept of fairness. But you end up with the pitch version of an all-you-can-eat Las Vegas buffet. You just pile it all on, and it turns into this homogenous mass. You don’t get any kind of flex or diversity in the answers. That’s not in anyone’s best interest.
IP Theft and Unpaid Strategic Work
Darren:
In most cases, were the pitches still requiring the agencies to do largely unpaid work?
Ellie:
Yeah, it was unpaid work. Stress testing is important, obviously, but personally, I think that should be based on a sample of what the agency can do. Where I saw the worst practice was a brief that literally asked for the entire answer. “We’ve got a strategy for next year, we have these campaigns, we want you to provide answers to all of the campaigns across the entirety of the year, strategy and everything else”.
The agency responded to that brief. Then, when it came time to negotiate on fee, the client tried to negotiate strategy out of the fee because the agency had already provided it in the pitch. It’s just not professionally ethical. I was in the background going, “Don’t do this”.
Darren:
What message does that send? What was the feeling inside the agency?
Ellie:
The sentiment was a kind of weary resignation. They felt they had to negotiate on that basis; they couldn’t afford not to win the pitch. So they took the line of least resistance and accepted the bad practice. This contributes to the transactional master-servant dynamic that bleeds into day-to-day relationships, which at its worst is completely counterproductive.
Darren:
Marketers often talk about wanting an agency that will challenge them creatively. And then, unfortunately, through unintended consequences, they immediately demotivate the agency to do anything other than what they’re told.
Ellie:
When we run a pitch, we advise clients on the demarcation between a brief that allows latitude versus a completely directive brief. Often, a client will ask for a challenge but give a brief that says, “We want it exactly this way, these channels, this timing, this budget split.” You’re giving the agency no latitude to apply their own smarts. You get back three agencies who have all produced the same answer because they’re working in very narrow parameters.
Darren:
I remember years ago pitching for a retailer. They wanted a brand positioning plus their entire sales programme for the year. We did all the work, won the pitch, and almost none of that work saw the light of day because the information changed. It felt like a huge amount of work for very little result apart from winning the business.
Ellie:
It’s all about the balance. You need to see enough of a sample of the agency to understand that they’re capable. But overkill just leads to dead wood. It’s never really going to see the light of day, so what value does that add in a pitch process? None at all.
The Silent Treatment: Delays and Ghosting
Darren:
A thing that comes out of the State of the Pitch is timeliness. Often agencies feel like they’re left dangling. Is that something you observed?
Ellie:
It happened more towards the end. In pitches without a process, it was worse because they clearly didn’t have a defined timeline to make decisions. I witnessed one process where there were weeks of zero feedback. The agency was calling, but there was no decision.
Agencies put a lot of effort into the work and getting a team ready. Being left in limbo like that is really disheartening. Every agency I’ve spoken to would much rather be told “No” with clear feedback than be left hanging by a client who lacks the bravery to say no or simply can’t make the decision. If the process is elongated, just let the agency know. It’s basic professional courtesy.
Darren:
When agencies are left in that vacuum, their minds immediately go to catastrophe: “We haven’t got it,” or “What did we do wrong?” They immediately turn it on themselves.
Ellie:
It’s learned behaviour. The perceived wisdom is, “As soon as they go quiet, you’ve lost the pitch.” It makes you feel insignificant and lacking in importance. When you’ve put all this work in and don’t even get the respect of a phone call, it takes an emotional toll. Clients say they want partnerships, but for that to happen, agencies have to be treated like partners.
False Praise and Indecision
Darren:
What were the debriefs like? And how many times were agencies told they came a close second?
Ellie:
I didn’t really see any clear debriefs. But in every pitch room they went into, they got told at the end of the meeting how amazing they were: “You were so good, we really want to work with you.” And then either the goalposts would move, cost would come into play, or it would just go quiet.
Of the five or six I saw, two were definitively won. The remainder just had no conclusion after weeks. It was constant uncertainty.
Darren:
That would be so draining emotionally.
Ellie:
If you’re the lead of the agency, responsible for staff and money, it is incredibly draining. It could be so much easier and more equitable with simple process mechanisms and some courtesy.
Darren:
I know Adam Ferrier always says, “I’d rather come first or last in a pitch, as long as I know why.”
Ellie:
I counsel agencies on that. You want to be memorable—either you completely nailed it and came first, or you were true to yourself but it wasn’t a good fit, so you came last. Last isn’t necessarily about mucking up; it’s about staying true to who you are. But the agency needs feedback on that.
Darren:
Let’s go to the other extreme. What was the worst behaviour that caused the worst reaction?
Ellie:
There was one where the agency put a huge amount of work into the process, only to be told that the decision was going to be deferred for another 12 months. And they asked, “Can you hang on?” That was probably the most damning example. Before you go into a tender process, there should be surety that you are actually able to appoint an agency.
The Verdict: Don’t Ditch the Pitch, Fix the Process
Darren:
After this experience, are the stories legitimate?
Ellie:
Generally, the frustration is real. However, I’m not a believer in “ditch the pitch.” Pitches have a vital role to play in setting teams up for success. But the process has to be sustainable, the outcome commercially equitable, and there must be professional courtesies.
A fair and reasonable process is the most important thing. When agencies are left in limbo or not given proper feedback, the negative sentiment grows. Agency leads tell me that pitching, when done properly, can be incredibly motivating for teams. But that can be ruined when processes are untenable. I don’t think it’s hard to fix. It’s a cultural thing—learned behaviour about how agencies should be treated. It just needs a behavioural reset.
Darren:
It’s interesting that a lot of marketers don’t perceive that they need pitch coaching until they’re in the middle of a pitch and wondering what to do next.
Ellie:
Marketers are under more pressure than ever before, which exacerbates some behaviours. I’ve observed more reticence to take coaching on board, perhaps due to fear of asking for help. But when they do, there are definitely positive outcomes. Having a third party who can call stuff out with radical candour can really help correct a pitch process.
Mismatched Expectations: Right-Sizing the Pitch
Ellie:
One other thing I’m conscious of is when marketers who worked at huge corporations move to a much smaller organisation. They then impose the same huge pitch processes they used at the conglomerate on smaller agencies.
I went to a conference of small agency owners in Melbourne. They were complaining: “They are asking us for $300,000 worth of work for a $30,000 project,” because that’s the only way the client knows how to pitch. They’ve imposed that model, and it’s one of the biggest things affecting smaller agencies.
I stood up and said, “I want to congratulate every single one of you who said no.” There were people refusing pitches because they weren’t viable. The more you tolerate that behaviour, the more it gets perpetuated. I am hugely in favour of agencies saying no to pitches where they are unreasonable. It’s one of the only ways behaviour can be improved.
Darren:
Ellie, if there’s an agency out there coming up to a pitch, can you be encouraged to put on the fedora and trench coat and go back undercover?
Ellie:
Why not? If any agency wants to approach me, I’d be interested. That’s what I’m wearing right now; I just need my sunglasses and I’m good to go.
Darren:
Well, Ellie Angell, thank you so much. I’m sorry I’ve uncovered you as the undercover pitch consultant, but I’ve always practised complete transparency.
Ellie:
I love the attention, you know that. Thanks, Darren.
