Winning new business takes a lot of time and effort. There are a number of ways to make sure that you lose it, including not doing enough research into the people and the business, ignoring the brief and budget constraints, and lack of preparation for the pitch meeting.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been working on a number of reviews of pitches and tenders that have been lost by agencies and professional services firms. There has been a common theme that has contributed to all of these, and that has been the perceived quality of the operational or day to day teams that were proposed to work on the business.