Nine kinds of agency pitch process and counting

TrinityP3 manages all kinds of agency search and selection reviews for clients. In the last year alone, we’ve helped clients find agency partners in digital, search, media buying, advertising, direct, shopper, event, media planning, post-production, PR, technology, research, social media, and call handling. We’ll no doubt add more to that list this year.

Such diversity means that it’s vital to remember the basic objectives of any review. It’s also important to tailor the process to ensure that the big things remain the big ones. It’s about that constant imperative in any pitch—making sure content matters more than form.

Based on our experience and the ongoing research into The State of the Pitch, we have collated some of the many ways you can pitch your business to select an agency.

This is not a comprehensive list of options, but it offers the main structural options for an agency review, tender, or pitch. An extensive range of hybrid variations builds on these themes.

How do they compare to how you manage a pitch to select a new agency? If we have left one out, please let us know by contacting us here.

1. Full Creative Review

Also known as the creative pitch, creative tender or the creative beauty parade, this is possibly the most common pitch process currently practised widely.

Typical Process—A consideration list of agencies is asked to submit the agency credentials. From this, a shorter list of agencies is invited to attend a ‘chemistry’ meeting, typically an hour-long meeting with the client team. From these meetings, the client team briefs a few agencies for a creative response to the brief. The agency is also asked to provide a financial and resource proposal for the business.

When to use it: When searching for a lead agency or creative partner agency. It is best applied when the client wishes to select a specific creative concept and not appoint a long-term agency partner.

Why it works—The ‘stage and gate’ process means the client can filter through many agencies to find the preferred agency partner based on their ability to interpret and respond to a creative brief.

What can go wrong – If clients do not filter using the agency credentials and chemistry and simply include many agencies for a creative response, it increases the difficulty in choosing the right agency from too many options. It is also focused on the outcome and not the process of getting to the solution in circumstances highly compromised by the pitch process. This is fine if you are selecting a one-off creative solution but flawed for a longer-term relationship.

2. Full Media Review

Also known as the media pitch or media tender, this is possibly the most common and widely practised pitch process.

Typical Process – Much like the Full Creative Review, a consideration list of agencies is asked to submit the agency credentials. From this, a shorter list of agencies is invited to attend a ‘chemistry’ meeting, typically an hour-long meeting with the client team. From these meetings, the client team briefs a few agencies for a media strategy response to the brief and undertakes a media buying exercise to determine a media rate against several investment options. The agency is also asked to provide a financial and resource proposal for the business.

When to use it – When searching for a media planning and buying agency.

Why it works – The ‘stage and gate’ process means the client can filter through many agencies to find the preferred agency partner based on their ability to interpret and respond to a media brief and offer a competitive media buying positioning.

What can go wrong – Again, if clients do not filter using the agency credentials and chemistry and simply include many agencies for a creative response, it increases the difficulty in choosing the right agency from too many options. Also, the focus on the media buying rates means that the agency is being locked into a price position that may not be either deliverable or beneficial to the client in the medium to long term and, at worst, is a lack of time and effort.

3. Strategic Workshop Review

This is an improvement on the Full Media Review and the Full Creative Review, with the focus moving from testing outcomes to process and creating opportunities for clients and agencies to test how they would work together.

Typical Process – Much like the Full Media and Creative Review, a consideration list of agencies is asked to submit the agency credentials. From this, a shorter list of agencies is invited to attend a ‘chemistry’ meeting, typically an hour-long meeting with the client team. However, from these meetings, the client team briefs a few agencies to participate and manage a half-day or full-day strategic workshop with the client team to address a brief on a specific strategic challenge. This replaces the speculative creative work and the media buying exercise. The agency is also asked to provide a financial and resource proposal for the business.

When to use it – When searching for a long-term media or creative agency relationship.

Why it works—Rather than having the agencies prepare a response in isolation and present it to the client, the client team and each agency work together in the workshop, allowing them to assess the calibre of the team and test drive the way they will work together. This overcomes two shortcomings of the full review: 1. You are more likely to see the working agency team and not the presentation or sales team, and 2. There is less opportunity for the agency to present freelance work outside the agency.

What can go wrong – It requires the client team to participate in the workshops and not simply be an audience to the agency presentation.

4. Project Agency Review

Increasingly, clients are looking to appoint an agency for a one-off project rather than a long-term contract. For these requirements, the current Full Creative or Full Media Review is time-consuming and labour-intensive, and the Project Agency Review is more appropriate.

Typical Process—A consideration list of agencies is asked to present their credentials at a ‘chemistry’ meeting, typically an hour-long meeting with the client team at the agency premises. The agency provides the contact details of three or more of its existing clients to the client, who undertakes reference checks with the agency’s incumbent clients. Two shortlisted agencies are provided with the project scope and asked to provide a financial and resource proposal.

When to use it – This is ideal when selecting an agency for a one-off project with a specific requirements and scope.

Why it works – The process is commensurate with the task and allows the client to quickly assess many agencies for their suitability and ability to deliver.

What can go wrong? The most valuable part of the evaluation is the references from the existing clients, and therefore, time and effort must be invested in ensuring the right clients have in-depth conversations with the agencies’ current clients.

5. Qualification Based Selection

QBS is a well-established procurement process for selecting professional services. This is the preferred agency selection process for the Institute of Canadian Agencies.

Typical Process—The QBS uses Performance-Framed Case Studies (PFCS). There is no request for speculative insights, strategy, or creativity. The client must provide a defined budget and requirements. The QBS uses interviews to dive deep into the agency’s capabilities and scores the agencies on a simple, prepared rubric. The client enters into negotiation with the preferred agency only.

When to use it – To select a creative agency.

Why it works—The QBS process can be easily implemented into an organisation’s current procurement process. It will ultimately help client organizations buy critical, complex, and customized creative services. It will also allow you to source the best agencies to provide solutions for your unique challenges effectively and efficiently while encouraging agencies to provide the most innovative solutions.

What can go wrong? This is not a widely used approach, but the Institute of Canadian Agencies provides support with consultation and training to cover the full spectrum of your team’s needs with ongoing guidance, workshops, or boot camps.

6. Technical Specialist Partner Review

Increasingly, there are requirements to go beyond the creative and media agency and select a supplier or vendor with a more technical or specialist service. This requires a more nuanced approach to the pitch.

Typical Process – This includes the standard credentials, financial proposal, benchmarking stages, site visits, and specialist technical assessments of the proposed capabilities.

When to use it: When searching for a technical agency partner, such as a call centre, digital development specialist, adtech or martech provider, data analytics and econometric modelling, print supplier, mail house, post-production house, etc. The list goes on and is growing.

Why it works—The review is all about the candidate’s technical abilities, so industry experts assess and compare those abilities as part of the process and compare them against the financials to identify value.

What can go wrong? It’s always tempting for an agency to claim the technical solution is the best, whereas the ‘best’ solution will always depend on the brief. If the client team loses focus on this, things can get expensive and useless fast.

7.  In-House Services Provider Review

While in-house agencies are the flavour of the century so far, there is an increasing trend for clients to appoint external agencies to build and manage their in-house capabilities on their behalf.

Typical Process – Consider this a cross between a creative and media pitch with a labour-hire firm. Credentials focus on their experience and expertise in providing these services to other clients. HR and process capabilities and logistical considerations are paramount. Creative ability and/or media expertise are essential, but long-term success comes from the ability to manage the team’s performance. Therefore, the procurement process focuses on credentials, capabilities, and processes first. 

When to use it: When you want all of the benefits of an in-house agency without the headcount, HR, and other issues and the flexibility to shape and change the in-house offering as a budget consideration and not an Op-Ex issue.

Why it works: The process focuses on the agency’s ability to manage processes and human resources, the two essential capabilities required for a successful in-house agency model.

What can go wrong – Many agencies think that because they can run an agency, they can run an in-house agency for their client. However, there is a growing number of specialists in this area, and they have developed deep and broad knowledge, leading to successful outcomes. Therefore, demonstrable ability is essential.

8. Procurement Tender

Also known as an RFP, RFT, or RFQ, it can start with an EOI or RFI. While RFPs are perfect for sourcing direct, commodity, benchmarkable goods and services, they are not effective for creative and strategic professional services.

Typical Process – A client procurement team generates an RFP bigger than a Tolstoy novel, includes a brain dump of all research material and a prescriptive creative brief, and then invites all the competing agencies to a collective Q&A session. The agency team gets a meeting slot at the end of the process to try and win the business from a client team they hardly know.

When to use it – When you want a supplier rather than an agency when you want to waste lots of people’s time and effort.

Why it works – The clients feel very powerful and important.

What can go wrong – Sometimes, the client team doesn’t get the agency it deserves.

Look. It’s a blog, so I’m being a little facetious with those last points. We help and advise on many procurement-led reviews, and they can often work brilliantly and are run professionally and fairly.

As an agency’s new business director, I remember exactly what it was like to complete a 90-page tender document in 3 days, all because the MD thinks it’s a ‘really big opportunity’ (even if it’s been sent to another 15 agencies).

Now, if you’re an agency person reading this, you might be forgiven for thinking all of these processes fall into the ‘busy work’ category. And if you’re a client, you might be rolling your eyes at the time commitment required. This is why TrinityP3 is also working with this last process…

9. The A Pitch In A Day

This is a pitch process pioneered by ISBA and other IPA in the UK as part of the Good Pitch Initiative.

Typical Process—A very tight shortlist of agencies is invited to answer some quick credentials questions. Then, a single day is set up where each agency works with the client team on a business problem, with the aim of solving it within that day (maybe with creative work, maybe not). Once the financials are agreed upon, the business is awarded.

When to use it – When the client team is focused, empowered and clear about what it wants from an agency partner of any description.

Why it works – It condenses weeks of preparation for the agencies and hours of meetings for the client team into a short, intense session where each side finds out how it thinks. And it’s great fun.

What can go wrong? It’s a higher-risk approach, certainly. But that usually concentrates the minds on both sides. And if the shortlist is anything less than up-to-date and properly informed, then there is a danger that the process yields no suitable solutions.

There is a tenth one, the composite pitch, which you can learn more about here. There are also three Composite Pitch Case Studies here.

So, which process is right for you? Well, I guess you have to ask yourself: Do you feel lucky?

Learn more about how to search and select the right agency with The Pitch Consultant’s Definitive Guide. Or if you are about to go to market, enquire about our Pitch Power Coaching.