What makes a great agency pitch, from the other side of the table?

We’ve found ourselves around more pitch tables lately.

For bigger projects, meatier problems and briefs where the challenge goes well beyond making something look good. Brand strategy. Transformation. Campaigns. Complex business problems that need thinking before they need designing. And it’s got us thinking.

The best pitch processes we’ve been part of have a few things in common: clarity about the challenge, trust on both sides, a focus on making progress and, importantly, a bit of humanity.

So, from our recent Pitching Era, here are a few things we’ve learnt.

Budget isn’t just a number. It’s part of the brief.

“There’s no budget” rarely means there’s no budget. More often, there’s a budget you’re not quite ready to share yet. We understand why. But clarity helps everyone.

A budget helps us shape the scope, decide where to go deep, where to be pragmatic and where your investment can create the most value.

How much goes into the thinking? How far do we push the creative? How broadly does it need to come to life?

Without a budget, three agencies can come back with three wildly different scopes and price points. That doesn’t necessarily help you compare value. It may just mean we all made different guesses.

Brief us on the problem, not just the deliverables.

A new brand. A campaign. A website. A messaging framework. They’re outputs. We want to know what’s happening underneath them. What’s changed? Where are you trying to go? What’s getting in the way? What do your customers think today, and what do you need them to think tomorrow?

Give us access to the people who really know too. A conversation can uncover the nuance that never makes it into a brief. And sometimes the most useful thing you can tell us is, we’re not entirely sure yet.

That takes a little trust. But it gives us something much more interesting to solve.

Test the thinking, not just the answer.

We understand the temptation to ask agencies to show you what they’d do. But a polished concept developed during a pitch doesn’t necessarily tell you what it will be like to solve the real problem together.

Ask how we interrogate the brief. What questions we’d ask. What we see that you might not. Ask us to explain why, not just what.

A pitch shouldn’t be about proving we already have the answer. It should give you confidence that we know how to find the right one, together.

Leave room to be surprised.

The best briefs have boundaries, but they also leave some space. Tell us what you know. Tell us what’s fixed. Tell us what absolutely isn’t. Then give us enough room to bring something new to the table.  After all, if you already knew exactly what the answer looked like, you probably wouldn’t need us.

And don’t underestimate chemistry.

For all the scorecards, scopes and credentials, pitching is still a very human process. Capabilities matter. Experience matters. The work absolutely matters. But so does whether you actually want to spend the next six months in a room with these people.

Chemistry isn’t the soft stuff.  It's what makes the hard stuff easier — the ideas come faster, the honest conversations happen sooner, and the hard work feel worthwhile. Get it right, and it shows up in the work.

Ultimately, the best pitches aren’t necessarily the biggest or most elaborate. They’re clear, open and human. They create enough trust for both sides to challenge each other, enough focus to keep things moving forward, and enough space to work out whether you could make something great together.

Got a meaty brand or business challenge coming up? We’re always up for a good conversation. Pitch deck optional.