Evaluate every new opportunity

Your prospective clients will evaluate which agencies to send their requests for proposal to, and then they will formally evaluate the proposals they receive.

Yet it's surprising how few agencies also properly evaluate the clients and their projects to decide whether they are a good fit.

This lack of evaluation by agencies has many downsides:

• Wasting agency time on proposals you probably couldn't have won anyway, and maybe shouldn't even want to win! (If your lost-bid wash-up conversations include things like "It was probably a lucky escape anyway" then you just wasted a whole lot of time bidding and should have filtered it out earlier with proper evaluation)

• Degrading the agency's confidence, from "we get to choose which clients we work for" to "we'll bid for anything that comes up"

• Setting new client relationships off in a master/servant mode of imbalance, instead of as equal partners.

This gets even worse in downturns, when agencies become a bit desperate for work. They start being even less choosy, spreading themselves across pitching for dozens of opportunities at once — when they would be better off investing the extra time into being sure they win just the great ones.

Healthy agencies are very selective about the work they take on. And that selectivity happens before they do anything towards the pitch, so they don't waste time and energy.

It's important to have a structured evaluation process as part of this.

Then, when each new opportunity comes up, you can see how it measures up, and decide whether to proceed with it.