Ask an agency owner about their win rate and you’ll get a number. Ask what a pitch costs to produce and you’ll get a pause.
That’s an odd gap, because new business is usually the largest single consumer of unbilled senior time in the business. Strategy, creative concepts, deck production, rehearsals, the travel. All of it done by the most expensive people, none of it invoiced.
The consequence isn’t just a cost nobody sees. It’s that the decision about which opportunities to chase gets made on instinct, when it’s the one decision that most directly determines whether the year works.
Unbilled hours in new business
Run through a mid sized competitive pitch and the hours accumulate quickly.
There’s the qualification stage, which should be short and often isn’t, because nobody wants to say no to a recognised name. Then the brief interrogation and the strategic work, usually involving a senior planner. Creative development, which tends to expand to fill whatever time remains. Deck production, which is its own discipline and takes longer than anyone allows for. Internal reviews, where three or four senior people spend an hour disagreeing. Rehearsal. The pitch itself, plus travel. And then the follow up questions, which arrive after everyone has moved on.
A pitch that feels like a week of work for two people is frequently three weeks of fragments across six. The fragments are the part that disappears, because nobody logs forty minutes spent reviewing a deck.
Why the cost matters more than the win rate
A win rate without a cost figure is a vanity metric.
Winning one in three pitches sounds respectable. If each pitch consumes 120 hours of senior time and the won account delivers a fee that takes eighteen months to recover that investment across all three attempts, the respectable win rate is masking a loss making activity.
Conversely, a lower win rate on cheap, well qualified pitches can be perfectly healthy. The number in isolation tells you nothing.
What you actually need is cost per pitch, by type, and cost per win. Those two figures change behaviour immediately, because they make qualification a commercial decision rather than a matter of enthusiasm. Agencies that have them decline more opportunities and win a higher proportion of the ones they enter, not because they got better at pitching but because they stopped entering the wrong ones.
Tracking non billable time without annoying everyone
The obstacle is practical. Logging time against client work has an obvious justification. Logging time against a pitch feels like bureaucracy on top of an already pressured process.
Two things make it survivable.
Keep the categories coarse. New business, split into qualification, strategy, creative and production, is enough. Nobody needs to log pitch time in fifteen minute increments against sub tasks.
And treat the pitch as a project with a budget, which is how it should have been treated anyway. Software for agency project time tracking handles this directly: set a budget in hours or labour cost for the pitch, watch consumption as time is logged, and get notified before the estimate is exceeded. Every entry is tagged billable or non-billable, so new business shows up as its own cost centre rather than vanishing into general overhead.
That notification is the mechanism that matters. A pitch budget with an alert at 80 percent forces a conversation while there’s still a decision to make, which is the opposite of what usually happens.
Choosing something to do it with
If you’re putting a system in for this, it’s worth choosing on the basis of the problem rather than the feature list. Agencies have three different bottlenecks and they want different things: billing accuracy, resource scheduling, or project management.
This comparison of agency time tracking software runs through the main options and what each is actually suited to, which is worth reading before putting a team through a migration. Whatever you pick, the practical test is entry time. If logging a pitch session takes more than thirty seconds, senior people will stop doing it within a fortnight and you’ll be back to guessing.
Measure three pitches
You don’t need a policy change. Take the next three pitches, have everyone involved log their hours against them in broad categories, and apply real cost rates for the people involved.
Then divide by the wins. The number is usually considerably larger than anyone in the room would have estimated, and it tends to settle a long running internal argument about whether the agency should be chasing a particular kind of business.
That argument is normally conducted with opinions. It’s much shorter with a figure attached.
