Why the real work in a new client–agency relationship begins after the pitch, with early foundations shaping everything that follows.
The honeymoon period after a pitch win is meant to be exhilarating. New partners. New energy. Big expectations. Yet, in reality, this is often where things quietly start to unravel.
It's the quiet irony of most new client–agency relationships: everyone is busy, but no one is aligned. Once procurement wraps up the technical details and the champagne glasses are cleared away, marketing teams are left to manage the partnership without a shared playbook. Agencies dive straight into delivery, keen to prove their worth. Clients let them, desperate to get work out the door. The result? Momentum without method.
In a market where budgets are tighter, pitch cycles are shorter and internal teams are stretched thinner than ever, there's even less room for missteps. Yet proper onboarding—the unglamorous work of aligning on ways of working, decision-making processes and what success actually looks like—remains the thing most often skipped.
"You can't build a strong creative partnership if you haven't agreed how you'll work together, how decisions get made and how success will really be judged," says Nikki Munsie, Business Director at Independent Agency Search and Selection (IAS). With over 25 years in the industry, she has seen how easily good intentions derail without proper foundations.
The gap widens when pitch processes are rushed or lightly managed. Chemistry meetings are skipped. The pitch team disappears, replaced by an account team the client hasn't met. On the client side, new stakeholders enter the room with different priorities. Suddenly, it feels less like a partnership and more like an arranged marriage.
Then there's the pitch work itself—the big ideas that won the business, now buried in a forgotten deck, overtaken by new urgencies and poorly sequenced briefs. It's a costly waste of thinking and energy on both sides.
Too often, relationships are assessed six or twelve months in, when frustrations are entrenched and trust is already dented. At that point, performance reviews become post-mortems. There’s no value in judging a relationship a year in if the groundwork was never done.
The smarter approach is to treat the early days as exactly that: early days. Contracts, handovers and inductions should run in parallel, not sequentially. Scopes of work need room to evolve, rather than being locked down before anyone truly understands the workload. A memorandum of understanding can provide structure while allowing space for reality to surface.
This isn't about bureaucracy. It's about creating conditions where creativity can thrive, rather than constantly firefighting misalignment. When ways of working are clear, agencies can focus on doing their best work, not on decoding internal politics. Marketers can get the best out of their agencies, not simply the most.
“The real opportunity lies in those first six to nine months, when expectations are set, trust is built and both sides learn how to make each other better,” says Johanna McDowell, CEO of IAS. “It's a process, because meaningful relationships take time to bed down. The goal is simple: ensure the foundations are solid long before anyone starts measuring outputs.”
Because when the foundations are right, the work tends to follow.