Three agencies in the building. Three pitch slots of forty five minutes each, with fifteen minutes of questions. Eight hours from arrival to handshakes. By the end of the day, the partners will have decided who’s getting the contract.
The most common way to waste this day is to let the agencies pitch their RFP responses again.
You’ve already read those responses. You’ve already scored them. You’ve already had a partner meeting about which three to invite. The agencies are in the room because their written answers stood up. The pitch day is for the questions their written answers didn’t fully address.
Build the question list from the lowest scores
Before each agency arrives, look at their column in the scoring matrix. Find the questions where they scored a 3 instead of a 4 or 5. Those are the gaps. Those are the questions you ask.
If an agency was vague on how they’d integrate with the firm’s CRM, that’s a pitch day question. If their reference list was thin, that’s a pitch day question. If their CMS recommendation came with a caveat, that’s a pitch day question. If their timeline didn’t quite match the firm’s required dates, that’s a pitch day question.
You don’t need to ask all the gaps. You need to ask the three or four that would have been the difference between a 3 and a 4. The agencies will sense what you’re doing. Good agencies will respect it. The agencies that resent being asked specific questions about their own weak spots are telling you something about how the working relationship will go.
Use the debrief slots properly
Between each pitch, schedule a thirty minute debrief with the partner team. Don’t let it become a coffee break.
The debriefs are the part of the day that most marketing leads under invest in. What you remember at 6pm about a 9am pitch is much less precise than what you remember at 9.45am about a 9am pitch. Twenty minutes of structured conversation immediately after each pitch, with the questions ready in advance, gives you a record of the day that’s actually useful.
The questions worth asking in the debrief, in order. What did we learn that we didn’t already know from the response? Did the answers to our specific questions hold up? Who would I actually want to work with next Tuesday? Where would this agency frustrate us six months in?
By the time the third pitch is done, you’ll have three structured debriefs in front of you. The decision call the following morning becomes a conversation about the three debriefs, not a re-litigation of the pitches.
The partner panel will surprise you
Marketing leads sometimes worry about partners hijacking a pitch day. In my experience, the opposite happens. Partners who’ve been briefed on the scoring matrix tend to ask sharper questions than the marketing lead does, because they’ve spent their careers cross examining people in writing and in person.
The partner question that tends to land hardest is the one that’s not in your script. Something about a specific case study reference, or a passing comment in the agency’s deck that didn’t quite ring true. Let the partners do that. The pitch day works better with two or three sharp partner questions per slot than with twenty marketing questions.
What the pitch day is not for
It’s not for evaluating the pitch deck. The deck is a artefact. Agencies put their best designers on it. The deck doesn’t tell you whether the work will land.
It’s not for assessing the personalities of the people in the room. Those are the senior people the agency is showing you. The people who’ll actually do the work probably weren’t invited. You can see the team properly in week three of the project, not on the pitch day.
It’s not for renegotiating the brief. If a third of the way through the pitch day you realise the brief was wrong, stop the process and rewrite the brief. Don’t ask the agencies to bend their proposals to fit a moving target.
The pitch day is for probing the gaps in answers you’ve already evaluated. Run it that way and you’ll know who you’re appointing by the end of it. See the full case study