Pitches aren’t the problem… they’re a symptom

At first glance, Teamleader’s Agency Benchmark 2026 paints a reassuring picture. Overall sentiment in the sector is stable, most agencies rate their own success a solid 7 out of 10, and on average about 70% of revenue comes from existing clients. That suggests maturity and control. But if you look a little longer, what you mostly see is how fragile that stability really is.

Because at the same time, nearly half of advertisers ran a pitch in the past year, and in two thirds of those cases it resulted in an agency switch. That’s not an isolated event or cyclical noise. That’s structural behavior. And above all: it’s rarely sudden.

Trust without a yardstick

What stands out most in the Benchmark is not so much what agencies measure—margins, billability, EBITDA, project profitability—but what they consistently don’t measure: the relationship with their clients. That’s striking, because client satisfaction is routinely cited by the industry itself as one of the most important KPIs. Yet only 14% of agencies measure that satisfaction consistently after every major delivery. That’s not a detail; it’s a paradox. We say trust is crucial, but we treat it as if it’s self-evident.

In practice, many agencies rely on conversations, informal signals, and the famous gut feeling. As long as things go well, that seems sufficient. Until they don’t. And then the story is almost always the same: “We didn’t see it coming.” Which is true. If you don’t measure, you can’t see anything coming.

The pitch as an emergency exit

Many pitches are therefore not a rational search for better creativity or sharper strategy. They function as an emergency exit—a way for clients to leave a relationship that has been rubbing the wrong way for a while, but was never discussed in a structured manner. The Benchmark shows that stability and dependency sit dangerously close together: on average, the biggest client accounts for 24% of revenue. That’s not comfortable loyalty; that’s vulnerability.

In that context, it’s downright remarkable how little agencies invest in detecting relational signals early. When expectations start to diverge. When collaboration becomes more difficult. When trust slowly gives way to irritation. Those signals are almost always there. They’re just not recorded, not compared, and not taken seriously as long as the numbers still look fine.

Data for everyone—except ourselves

Ironically, agencies are masters of measurement—as long as it’s about their clients. KPI dashboards, performance reports, and evaluations are everyday business. But as soon as the lens has to turn inward, the discipline disappears. The Benchmark explicitly calls this the sector’s biggest blind spot: only one in three agencies systematically monitors its own operations, and even fewer do so at a relational level. The problem isn’t that there are no tools; it’s that relationships are too often seen as “too human” or “too complex” to measure—until they suddenly become very concrete, in the form of a pitch.

A mature sector, childish behavior

A mature sector doesn’t allow itself to be blindsided by its biggest risk factor. And let there be no misunderstanding: today the greatest commercial risk for agencies is not creativity, AI, or pricing, but the lack of structural insight into how clients truly experience the collaboration. Anyone who continues to ignore that is choosing reactive work by design. And reactive work leads to defensive pitches, panic responses, and creeping margin erosion.

Pitches are the symptom

The Benchmark’s conclusion is clear and uncomfortable: if you want to survive, you need disciplined ways of working—and you need to measure what matters. Not afterwards, but beforehand. Not on gut feeling, but on data. As long as agencies keep treating the client relationship as something you can simply “sense,” pitches will keep taking them by surprise—not because clients are unpredictable, but because agencies refuse to measure themselves.