The Agency You ‘Click’ With Isn’t Automatically the Right Hire
You walked out of the pitch round already knowing which agency you liked more. That feeling is real, and it is not the information you think it is. One team was easy to talk to. The other was stiffer, and pushed back on a line in your own brief. Pick the first one because the meetings felt better, and you are making a staffing decision on the wrong signal.
Chemistry is a real signal. It is just not the one you think it is
Rapport tells you how a group of people communicates day to day, how quickly you land on shared vocabulary, whether a call with them feels like a chore. Those are legitimate factors in a relationship that runs for months or years. An agency you dread emailing is a real cost, even with a flawless deck.
What chemistry does not measure is whether the thinking behind the deck is sound. A pitch collapses two axes, communication fit and strategic competence, into one impression because the same ninety minutes produces both. It is tempting to let the warmer feeling carry the verdict. It should not.
Why the easiest room to be in wins more pitches than it should
A pitch is a performance built for an audience. The agency puts its most client-facing, socially fluent people in the seats you can see, a different skill than the one that determines whether your account runs well six months in. The smoothest presenter is not necessarily the person who writes your monthly reports.
The team that pitches you is not always the team that runs your account, and this is where chemistry misleads most. You are usually bonding with a sales-adjacent version of the agency, assembled to be liked. That feeling tells you little about who will be in your inbox once signed, unless the agency shows real overlap between the two.
Five things that measure competence and cannot be faked by being likable
- How they handled a hard question. Competent: “I don’t know, let me find out by Thursday.” Charming: an improvised answer, since uncertainty feels like losing.
- Whether the recommendation was specific to your problem, or a repackaged standard deck. Competent: it references something you actually said. Charming: a deck that could go to the next prospect unchanged.
- Whether their questions were sharper than yours. A prepared team asks about your approval process or your last agency’s failure point. A likability-optimized team asks softballs that flatter and reveal nothing.
- How they handled pushback. Competent: they defend the reasoning or concede with a specific reason. Charming: they get more agreeable and soften the plan on the spot.
- Whether the pitch team matches who is proposed to staff the account. Ask by name and title who runs your account day to day. Vagueness on the question is telling.
A pitch-stage scenario: the agency that argued back
The following is hypothetical, offered to illustrate the pattern, not a claim about any real agency or client.
Picture an apparel brand choosing between two finalists. The first was warm, agreed enthusiastically with the brand’s existing strategy, and promised to keep amplifying what already worked. The second was more clipped, and said the brief had the wrong audience assumption, citing the brand’s own past post performance. It was an uncomfortable ten minutes.
The brand chose the first agency because the room felt easier and nobody wanted to defend hiring the team that had just told them they were wrong. Six months in, within this illustration, that agency was still amplifying a strategy that had quietly stopped working, because agreement had been the operating mode from day one. The second, in the same hypothetical, would have spent month one rebuilding the targeting the brief got wrong: an uncomfortable start that predicted a working relationship over one that drifted. The discomfort in the room was the more useful data, and the brand read it backwards.
The scorecard: separate chemistry and competence before you compare finalists
Score the two axes separately, in writing, before forming an overall impression. A blended read lets the likable team’s warmth quietly raise its competence score in your head.
| Result | What it means | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| High chemistry, high competence | A genuine tie | Chemistry is a fair tiebreaker. Proceed. |
| Low chemistry, high competence | Harder relationship, sound thinking | Manage with structured check-ins and one defined contact. |
| High chemistry, low competence | Easy relationship, thin thinking | The riskier finalist. Rarely improves once signed. |
| Low chemistry, low competence | No real case for either | Neither should win. Return to the shortlist. |
If the two scores point to different agencies, treat that as information, not noise to average away. A competence gap at pitch stage rarely improves once live. A chemistry gap can often be narrowed with structure, a process problem, not a judgment one.
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When chemistry should be the tiebreaker, and when it should not be
Chemistry earns its place only after two finalists clear the same competence bar. At that point, choosing the team you would rather spend the next year talking to is sound. What it cannot do is decide between a finalist who is more rigorous but less warm, and one who is more pleasant but less proven. That is not a tie being broken, it is a tie being invented so the more comfortable choice can be made without admitting comfort decided it.
What this does not mean
None of this argues for ignoring chemistry, or hiring whoever is most rigorous regardless of fit. A brand that cannot get honest, frequent communication from an agency will suffer for it no matter how sharp the strategy was. Competence is the gate, chemistry is the tiebreaker and the quality of life factor.
FAQ
Is it wrong to care about chemistry with an agency at all?
No. Chemistry is legitimate in a relationship that runs for years and affects quality of life. It answers a different question than competence, and the two should never be scored as one blended impression.
What if the most competent agency was also the least pleasant to deal with?
Distinguish two kinds of unpleasant. An agency that pushed back with substance shows a competence signal worth some friction for. One that was simply dismissive without substance is a legitimate reason to eliminate them, however sharp the strategy looked.
Sources
- The Team That Pitches You Isn’t the Team That Runs Your Account, fetched 2026-09-09
