Somewhere in the building you’re pitching, there’s a person who will not sleep well the night before they present your agency’s name to their boss.

That’s not paranoia on my part. It’s the whole story behind evidence-based agency selection that I wrote about a year ago.  Since then, we’ve released some evidence-based agency selection tools to members but I think the topic is worth a deeper dive here in the newsletter.  If you’re a Mercer Island Group fan or have attended any of their workshops with us — you know they preach this every day.

Over the next few months, I am going to keep pulling at this thread so as you prep for 2027, you’re thinking like your prospects are.

Picture agency shopping like picking a seat on a long flight. You want legroom, you want the aisle, and more than anything you want to know you’re not about to spend three hours with a toddler kicking the back of your seat. Nobody buys a seat hoping for the worst. They buy insurance against it.

That’s your prospect. Every single time.

The truth is, the person sitting across the table from you in a pitch isn’t really asking “will this agency do good work.” They’re asking a much scarier question: will this agency get me a raise, a promotion, or a bonus — or will it get me fired. Every slide you show, every case study, every “here’s how we think about strategy” moment gets filtered through that question, whether they say it out loud or not.

I get it if that feels unfair. You didn’t sign up to be someone’s career insurance policy. You signed up to do great creative and build things that work. But here’s the thing — the agencies winning right now aren’t the ones with the best swag or the slickest presentation. They’re the ones who figured out, a while back, that they’re not selling work. They’re selling safety.

Let’s be honest about what that means for you:

  • Your prospect has a boss, a board, or a CFO they have to justify this decision to, and your pitch needs to hand them ammunition for that conversation, not just impress the room in front of you.
  • “Trust us, we’re good” stopped being evidence a long time ago. Case studies, references, and real numbers are the currency now, and if you don’t have them ready, you’re sending your champion into battle unarmed.
  • Sizzle still matters — nobody wants a boring pitch — but sizzle without proof reads as risk, not creativity, to a buyer with something to lose.

I’ve built agencies. I’ve pitched plenty of business myself over thirty+ years, and I can tell you the pitches that won weren’t always the most brilliant ones in the room. They were the ones where the client walked out thinking, “I could defend this decision to anyone in my building.”

Over the next five articles that I’m going to share, I want to walk you through the five things decision-makers are actually scoring you on, and the nine quieter factors that can still sink you even after you’ve nailed the big five. Consider this your evidence-based selection field guide, the long version of the topic we’ve been discussing for years. Your prospect already has the scorecard. The only question is whether you know what’s on it.