Team chemistry and the pitch process

Team chemistry is a cornerstone of successful client-agency relationships.

UK creative agency Mother created a stir when it announced recently that if a new client agrees to appoint the agency after a team ‘chemistry meeting’ then the first-year profits from this relationship will then be donated to not-for-profit organizations that help young people get into a career in creativity.

Now, that’s the sort of fresh thinking you’d expect from a top creative agency.

But what it highlighted for me was that if one assumes that functional skills of top agencies are up to par, then the differentiating factor boils down to the relationship between client and agency teams.

To use the words of Chris Gallery, partner at Mother London, “The best work always comes out of strong relationships with clients, built on shared values, ambition and purpose”.

“The best work always comes out of strong relationships with clients, built on shared values, ambition and purpose”.

Chris Gallery, partner at Mother London

At Aprais, we encapsulate these three elements in what we call ‘behaviours’. There are seven of them and through analysis of more than 24,000 evaluations we’ve conducted globally, we have found that they help differentiate the best teams from the rest.

We have long argued that unless failures in relationships are identified and corrected at the team level, the problems will eventually recur making pitches an ever more futile, stressful and wasteful way to resolve issues.

Mothers’ argument is that by checking team chemistry together with their prospective client earlier in the pitch process, they should aim to build strong relationships and the basis for a successful partnership.

We couldn’t agree more. Clients and agencies could even use our ‘seven behaviours’ as a checklist.