Working with clients · Area 01
Winning Work · Rung 2 to rung 4

Stop spending pitch hours on work you were never going to win.

Use your own wins, losses and relationships to enter the go/no-go meeting with evidence instead of a blank page. People still decide. The system makes the decision less forgetful.

4:15RFP arrives

Twelve-day deadline. Healthcare. No obvious relationship.

4:18History checked

Five related opportunities found. One win. Four had no introduction.

4:22Brief is ready

44/100, leaning no-go. Reasons, unknowns and past examples included.

4:30People decide

The meeting still happens. It starts from evidence and protects the next several days.

Representative scenario. The times and score illustrate the proposed system. They are not a client result.

What gets built

Three plain tools. One better decision.

01

The Logbook

A running record of every opportunity, already loaded with the history you have.

Client, sector, relationship, source, estimated value, decision, outcome and the reason you won or lost.
02

The Analyst

A grounded way to compare a new opportunity with what your agency has seen before.

It returns a score, visible reasoning and the closest past pitches without pretending history can make the final decision.
03

The Score

A useful first read delivered where the new-business team already works.

When an opportunity arrives, the whole read lands in Slack: where it scores, what you already know, what's missing and where to start.
How it stays honest

A score is an argument. Not an oracle.

Your criteria

Fit, relationship, value, timing, capacity and category can be weighted around how your agency actually decides.

Your history

The system cites the similar opportunities and source facts behind the recommendation.

Your decision

A person can disagree, record why and improve the next recommendation.

Your boundaries

Client data, access rules and approved tools are defined before the history is loaded.

What gets measured

The cost of the decision before the win rate.

01Hours spent evaluating and preparing each opportunity
02Time from arrival to a documented go/no-go decision
03Percentage of opportunities with a recorded outcome and reason
04How often people accept, reject or override the recommendation
05Win rate by source, relationship and opportunity type over time

Win rate is directional and slow-moving. Decision time, pitch effort and recorded learning are the first useful measures.

What this area needs from a person

Someone has to write down what happened to each pursuit and why, whether you won or lost. Skip it and the scoring stops learning. It freezes on the day the tool was built and slowly drifts away from how you actually win.

The stepWrite the outcome and the reason onto the pursuit
How oftenWeekly
See how the Lookout works
Winning Work · Rung 2 to rung 4

Bring ten wins, ten losses and the messy spreadsheet.

The diagnostic establishes whether the history is good enough, what the current process costs and whether this rung move is justified.

Ask about this rung moveSee the Systems Ladder