Learning From Loss: How to Move on From Losing a Pitch

Many of the world’s biggest success stories were rooted in failure: J. K. Rowling received twelve rejections before the first Harry Potter book was published while the inventor Thomas Edison famously said: “I have not failed 10,000 times—I’ve successfully found 10,000 ways that will not work.”

 

Losing a pitch is also a key part of agency life and while it can be disheartening, it’s also an invaluable opportunity for a team to learn from their mistakes and make improvements to proposals and pitch processes.

 

Here’s how to transform a lost pitch into a positive experience:

 

Ask For Feedback And Use It Wisely

Make it a point to request feedback at the very beginning of the pitch process, add it to you critical path and nail the date. During those initial stages, potential clients are more invested in your participation and therefore more likely to be up for providing valuable insights. Get the post pitch meeting in the diary so the client knows that, win or lose, you want to find out how to improve and share that feedback with your team. Let them know that their feedback is crucial for you.

 

At the end of the process, it’s tempting to send an email requesting feedback and then move on, but a face-to-face or virtual meeting can often provide more nuanced insights than a written response.

By collecting feedback consistently over multiple pitches, you can look for recurring themes and identify actionable areas for improvement, whether it’s training your team or bringing in specialists for specific aspects of the pitch.

 

Engage a Third Party for Honest Insights

Clients may sometimes be hesitant to share critical comments directly with the pitching agency; introducing a third party to gather feedback can lead to more candid responses. If you used an intermediary, their perspective can be incredibly valuable. They respect agencies that seek to learn and improve, and their insights can help you understand how to refine your approach by asking tough questions, such as:

 

• What were our key strengths and weaknesses?
• What could we have done differently?
• How much of the decision was based on the strategy – and how much on the creative?
• What did the winning agency excel at?
• How did our pricing and commercial terms compared to the winning bid?
• How was the overall process, beyond just the pitch session?
• How did our team / chemistry come across?

 

Having a third party to do that meeting removes the emotion from the decision and means you’re not putting pressure on the client. All you want is honest open feedback that you can learn from and having an unbiased view means clients can be speak more freely – something we do for all of the clients that we work with.

 

Stay Connected & Maintain the Relationship

 

The end of a pitch process needn’t be the end of the relationship with the client. In fact, the insights gained from a pitch can be valuable for future opportunities so keep them close and ensure they stay in your marketing funnel. Ask if they would refer you to a peer or someone else within their organisation?

 

Reflect with Your Team (and Be Kind)

 

Pitching is an exhausting process, involving significant effort from your team. Sharing that you were a close second – or worse still, lost to the incumbent agency – isn’t useful unless it comes with constructive feedback. By ensuring they feel heard and appreciated, you can understand their perspective on what worked and what didn’t – crucial for morale and ongoing improvement.

 

As disheartening as it is, losing a pitch can also mean ‘dodging a bullet’ and ending up with a mismatched client. By gathering feedback, analysing it and applying the lessons learned, your team will feel more motivated to do more great work.