The problem
New business pitches are existential to an agency's growth, but the preparation process is brutally expensive in time. A well-prepared pitch for a mid-sized prospect typically requires two to three days of effort: researching the company and its competitors, analysing their current marketing, developing a strategic perspective, building a deck, writing the narrative, and rehearsing the presentation. For a small or mid-sized agency, that is a significant bet — and one that often does not pay off.
The problem compounds at scale. If your agency is responding to three or four pitch briefs a month, the preparation overhead can consume the equivalent of a full-time employee just in research and deck-building. Most agencies respond by either cutting corners on preparation (and losing pitches) or assigning their best people to pitches (and neglecting existing clients). Neither option is good.
The deeper issue is that most pitch preparation time is not spent on the thinking that wins pitches. It is spent on the busywork: researching facts that could be found in ten minutes, reformatting information into a deck structure, writing slide headers, and populating sections that are largely the same across every pitch. AI tools can absorb nearly all of that busywork, freeing your strategists to spend their time on the things that actually win accounts: the unique insight, the surprising creative perspective, the genuine understanding of the client's specific situation.
The system
Step 1: Deep prospect research in 30 minutes (Perplexity)
As soon as you receive a brief or decide to pitch a prospect, open Perplexity and run a structured research sprint. Unlike a standard search engine, Perplexity synthesises information from multiple sources and gives you sourced summaries rather than a list of links to click through. Run the following searches:
"[Company name] recent news and announcements 2024 2025" "[Company name] marketing strategy and recent campaigns" "[Company name] competitors and market positioning" "[Industry] marketing trends and challenges [year]" "[Company name] CEO recent interviews or statements"
For each search, read the Perplexity summary and copy the most relevant facts and quotes into a working document. This takes 20 to 30 minutes and gives you the raw material for a credible, informed pitch without having to visit dozens of web pages.
Step 2: Develop your strategic angle (Claude)
With your research notes in hand, move to Claude to develop the strategic perspective that will anchor the pitch. This is the insight — the "we see something your current agency might be missing" observation that makes a pitch genuinely compelling. Prompt:
"I am preparing a new business pitch for my marketing agency to win [company name] as a client. Here is what I know about them: [paste research notes]. Here is their current marketing: [describe]. Their brief is: [paste brief if available]. Develop three potential strategic angles we could take in our pitch — each should identify a specific opportunity or gap in their current approach and position what we would do differently. Be specific to this company, not generic. For each angle, include: the core insight, the strategic implication, and one creative direction it could lead to."
Review the three angles and pick the one that feels most genuinely exciting and most aligned with your agency's strengths. This is the spine of the pitch.
Step 3: Write the pitch narrative (Claude)
With the strategic angle chosen, use Claude to draft the pitch narrative — the verbal story you will tell and the headline argument for each slide:
"Write a pitch narrative for a marketing agency presenting to [company name]. Our strategic angle is: [describe the chosen angle]. The pitch should follow this arc: 1) Opening hook that demonstrates we understand their business (2 to 3 sentences). 2) The market or audience insight that creates the opportunity (1 paragraph). 3) What most agencies get wrong in this space (1 paragraph). 4) Our approach and why it is different (1 paragraph). 5) What we would do in the first 90 days (3 to 5 specific actions). 6) Why us specifically (1 paragraph). 7) The close (2 to 3 sentences). Write this as spoken narrative, not bullet points. UK English."
This gives you the full story. The deck is then the visual translation of this narrative.
Step 4: Build the deck (Gamma)
Open Gamma and use the AI deck builder to create the pitch deck. Paste your narrative into Gamma's prompt and let it generate a slide structure:
"Create a pitch deck for a marketing agency presenting to a potential client. Here is the full narrative: [paste narrative from previous step]. Build a 10 to 12 slide deck with a title slide, one slide per narrative section, and a final slide with our contact details. Use a professional, modern design with space for one key visual or data point per slide."
Gamma produces a complete designed deck in minutes. It will not be perfect — you will want to adjust the visuals, swap out any stock images for more relevant ones, and add your agency branding. But the structure and the headlines are done, which is most of the work.
Step 5: Add proof points and personalise
With the deck structure in place, go through each slide and add: one relevant case study or result from your existing client work, specific data points from your Perplexity research, and any personalisation that shows you have done your homework (a recent news story, a specific quote from the CEO, a reference to a campaign you noticed).
This personalisation layer takes 30 to 45 minutes and is what separates a good AI-assisted pitch from a generic one.
The results
A pitch that previously took two to three days to prepare now takes a morning: 30 minutes of research, 30 minutes of strategy development, 30 minutes of narrative writing, and 60 to 90 minutes of deck building and personalisation. Total: three to four hours.
Agencies using this workflow report that they can pitch twice as many opportunities without increasing headcount. Win rates are comparable to or better than before — because the thinking is sharper and the preparation is more thorough per unit of time spent, not less thorough overall.