If an example comes to mind easily, we assume it is common or likely.
More quotesAgencies rage about free pitching as if clients invented it during a particularly cruel procurement away-day.
The rage is understandable. A pitch can consume nights, wreck morale and transfer months of useful thinking to a buyer who never intended to appoint anyone. The problem is that moral outrage has dreadful margins. If the market can demand free work and suppliers keep providing it, a speech about respect changes remarkably little.
Suppliers helped. Five firms arrive with the same adjectives, the same diagonal-arrow framework and the same claim to combine creativity with commercial rigour. Presented with interchangeable cleverness, the buyer asks each contestant to prove itself by giving away more of the cleverness. That is unpleasant. It is also rational.
Then the agency emails its answer in a document labelled “initial thoughts” and complains that ideas are undervalued. If thinking is the product, scattering it around reception like supermarket cheese cubes is a peculiar pricing strategy.
Evidence still matters. Show outcomes. Reveal enough of the method to demonstrate that you understand the problem. Diagnose the knot without handing over the scissors and an illustrated cutting guide. When diagnosis itself requires serious work, sell it as work.
That may mean losing prospects who were shopping for unpaid answers. Excellent. A boundary that never costs a sale is usually a poster, not a boundary. The remaining clients learn that thought has a price because the supplier behaved as if it did.
A NO FREE PITCHING badge will not rescue a fungible offer. Specificity might. Become famous for solving a particular expensive problem. Hold a view that excludes the wrong clients. Develop proof that cannot be swapped with another logo and remain unchanged.
If the proposal survives a find-and-replace on the agency name, the client did not commoditise you. You arrived pre-commoditised.