BetterPitch Agency Operating Index
Is your agency operationally fit enough to win more business, more often?
The right questions aren’t about today’s performance, but tomorrow’s readiness.
And that starts with asking the questions that reveal hidden constraints, and the courage to face the answers.
- Where might your agency be underperforming operationally in ways you haven’t yet recognised?
- What disconnects exist between functions or decisions that should be more tightly linked?
- What gaps in visibility or understanding are limiting your commercial potential, well before a pitch is even on the horizon?
These aren’t just capability gaps, they’re opportunity costs. And in a market where clients are demanding more for less, those costs compound quickly.
The Agency Operating Index is designed to provide agencies with clarity on their true operational readiness, utilising market-backed benchmarks and a forward-facing diagnostic that reflects what clients now expect: operational clarity, commercial confidence, and structural maturity.
How to complete the Agency Operational Diagnostic
- Complete your details and make the payment by credit card.
- You will be redirected to the diagnostic survey, if any issue occurs please report it here.
- The diagnostic survey should be completed by an agency owner, managing director, or CEO
- It takes just 15 minutes and should be completed in one sitting
- Respond instinctively and honestly; your first answers usually provide the most accurate reflection of your agency’s reality.
This diagnostic is for agency leaders
Those who want to:
- Understand where hidden inefficiencies or disconnects may be quietly constraining growth
- Benchmark their commercial operations not only against evolving client expectations, but also against direct competitors
- Gain a clear, structured assessment across the four levers of agency operation: Performance, Pricing, People, and Product
- Identify gaps and vulnerabilities before they affect growth, client confidence, or pitch outcomes
It’s particularly relevant for:
- Agency leaders (CEOs, CFOs, COOs, MDs, Practice Heads) seeking operational clarity and confidence
- Growth-focused agencies wanting to know how they measure up before clients do
How the diagnostic is structured
The key sections of the diagnostic include:
- Performance – How effectively your agency delivers outcomes and creates value
- Pricing – Transparency, models, and commercial confidence
- People – Capability, culture, and leadership alignment
- Product – Market relevance, innovation, and scalability
The diagnostic is conducted through a structured online survey, completed by your leadership team. Each question is weighted by its relative importance to operational performance, ensuring the results reflect not just activity but its impact on growth and competitiveness.
This structure provides agencies with a balanced and weighted view of their operational maturity.
What you will get from the diagnostic
You’ll receive a confidential report mapping your agency’s strengths and vulnerabilities across the four weighted dimensions, with directional peer context.
The results are designed to:
- Uncover blind spots you may not have recognised
- Provide clear, actionable insights to tighten alignment across functions
- Give your leadership team a forward-facing view of operational readiness
- Highlight potential areas that may warrant deeper exploration beyond the survey results
- Support your agency’s positioning within the TrinityP3 Agency Register, helping marketers identify agencies best aligned to their needs.
Expert Coaches
At best, most marketers will be involved in selecting an agency once every two years. Procurement professions may manage more tenders, but selecting different types of agency vendors requires nuanced approaches. And while agency people may participate in many more pitches, this is a perspective that lacks the insider knowledge that provides due diligence and governance.
The TrinityP3 consultants manage dozens of pitches for our clients every year, providing a unique and powerful perspective on how to prepare and manage a powerful pitch process.
Book your BetterPitch Power Coaching session and be pitch prepared.
Related Reading:
In our unique role of identifying and solving the big challenges facing marketing management we create a huge catalogue of insights and build our knowledge and wisdom, which we share with the industry.
FAQs
First, we instigate discovery. We need to understand your needs and requirements in depth, before commencing. Second, we overlay process – a process refined over twenty years, using bespoke tools and data and designed to assess and evaluate the strength of supplier’s proposition, people and culture, financial and commercial competitiveness and sustainability, quality of tested outputs and potential value of those outputs to your organisation. Third, we utilise our deep experience. Decisions about which agency to select are yours to make, but we are here to listen and advise at every step of the way.
We can assess contractual documentation and provide change recommendations. However, we are not legal practitioners; any contractual negotiation or wording of terms requires the engagement of your legal counsel.
The aim is to construct a process so that conflict of interest is eliminated before we begin. We do this by ensuring that we understand exactly what the boundaries of conflict are, in your organisation. Every organisation has different compliance requirements. The first thing we do in any process is embark on discovery with you, including discussion and reverse briefing that enables us to understand what you can and can’t work with, including any specific agencies or individuals that are ineligible due to any past circumstance. We then tailor our search accordingly to bring you a list of candidates free of conflict. We also conduct due diligence checks with all candidates prior to presenting them to you.
You are critical to the process and are fully involved at every step of the way, including the choice of initial candidates selected for RFI, which we workshop with your team. An often misunderstood perception is that as pitch consultants, we are ‘making the decision’ about which agency you choose. We never make any such decision and we are always objective. Our process is designed for you to make decisions, with the benefit of our expertise and faciliation.
Yes, we can. Our consultants have extensive experience in international markets. We have on-ground presence in EMEA and North America, and can engage affiliates in other parts of the world as necessary. Our work has taken us everywhere from Britain, to Japan, to Canada, even to Iraq!
Yes, we do. You can choose to engage us in the immediate term to advise in account transition; longer term, additionally, we work with ongoing agency relationship assessment via our proprietary Evalu8ing tool, which measures multi-directional agency relationship and performance strength.
Our Latest Podcast:
