Saying No on Paper: A Pre-Pitch Screen for UK Medical Communications Teams

Every agency of any age keeps a version of the same story. A prospective client makes contact in early autumn with what sounds like a modest piece of work: a single advisory board, perhaps, or a slide refresh for an established brand. The introductory call is warm. The brief arrives a fortnight later and has quietly trebled in scope. By the time the credentials deck, the speculative creative and the unpriced 'initial thinking' have been assembled, three people have lost the better part of a month, and the pitch is lost to an incumbent who was always going to win.

The problem is rarely the individual decision to chase a piece of business. It is the absence of a decision at all. Inbound enquiries are treated as opportunities by default, and the burden of proof falls on anyone who wants to decline. That default is expensive, and in a year when UK teams are being asked to do more with a stable headcount, it deserves to be challenged.

Why yes is the path of least resistance

Declining work feels counter-cultural. Business development targets reward activity, not selectivity. Account leads are reluctant to appear uncommercial in front of their directors. And there is a genuine fear — reasonable in a sector where relationships move between agencies — that a refusal today closes a door for a decade.

Yet the arithmetic of pitching is unforgiving. A competitive UK MedComms pitch typically absorbs between twenty and sixty hours of senior time before a fee is ever discussed. Where the brief involves promotional content, that figure rises sharply once medical and editorial review is accounted for. If a team chases six speculative opportunities a quarter and converts one, the five unsuccessful pitches are not free; they are paid for out of the margin on everything else.

The answer is not to become remote or unhelpful. It is to make the decision explicit, early, and recorded on a single page that anyone in the business can read in ninety seconds.

The one-page memo

The no-bid memo is deliberately short. It is not a business case for pursuing the work; it is a structured test of whether the work should be pursued at all. Six lines and a decision.

Therapeutic fit

Does the therapy area sit within work the team can credibly claim? Not 'could we learn it' — almost any competent writer can learn a new indication — but whether there is existing depth to draw on: prior experience with the class, familiarity with the relevant patient pathway, contacts among the treating specialists. A team entering an unfamiliar area at pitch stage is competing on enthusiasm against competitors competing on evidence.

Record the answer as strong, adjacent, or none. 'None' is not automatically disqualifying, but it should be visible before anyone commits time.

Evidence access

Can the team obtain the data it would need to write a defensible submission? This line separates the realistic pitches from the ones that will consume weeks in pursuit of a publication nobody will release. If the client cannot share the pivotal trial data, the relevant sub-analysis or the internal review history, ask why — and note the answer. A prospect who is unable to grant reasonable access at pitch stage will rarely grant it at delivery stage.

MLR and ABPI realities

What does the material actually have to pass through? Promotional content requires certification under the ABPI Code of Practice, with the associated timelines and the practical reality of the PMCPA's expectations on evidence. Non-promotional materials, advisory board arrangements and disease-awareness activity each carry their own constraints. Where a brief implies a timescale that cannot survive a certification cycle, that should be written down on day one rather than discovered after the contract is signed.

This line also captures the awkward questions: is the proposed programme genuinely non-promotional in character, or is it promotional content wearing a different label? A team that declines on this basis has saved itself a considerable amount of difficulty later.

Team capacity

Who would actually do the work, and what would they stop doing? Capacity should be expressed in named roles and weeks, not in optimistic generalities. If the honest answer is that the pitch would be staffed by the same two people already carrying a launch and a congress, the memo should say so.

Procurement red flags

A short, blunt checklist. Payment terms beyond sixty days. A requirement for unlimited revisions. Indemnity clauses that exceed the team's insurance. A master services agreement that must be signed before the brief is shared. A procurement portal that will consume a day of administrative effort before anyone confirms a budget. Any one of these may be negotiable; three together describe a client relationship that will be difficult to sustain.

Commercial value

The final line is not the fee. It is the fee relativised: against the estimated hours to win the work, against the hours to deliver it, and against the strategic value of the relationship if it develops. A small piece of work with a well-regarded sponsor and a clear path to a programme can be worth pursuing at a thin margin. A large piece of work with a procurement function that treats agencies as interchangeable commodities rarely is.

The decision line

Beneath the six lines sits a single sentence: bid, bid with conditions, or decline. Conditions matter. 'We will bid only if the client can confirm data access and a sixty-day payment term by 20 November' is a decision that protects the team and keeps the door open. A memo without a named decision is a discussion document, and discussion documents do not save anyone's time.

The conversation with the prospect

Declining well is a skill, and it is worth rehearsing. The account lead should be direct, unpadded, and should leave the prospect with something useful.

Thank you for thinking of us for this programme. Having reviewed the brief properly, we do not think we are the right partner for it, and we would rather say so now than three weeks into a process. Our strength is in [specific area], and this brief sits some distance from that. If it would help, we can suggest two or three teams who work in this space and who we would be glad to recommend.

Where the issue is timing or capacity rather than fit, say so plainly: 'We do not have the senior editorial capacity this brief needs before mid-January, and we would not want to commit to a timeline we cannot hold.' Where the issue is commercial, be equally specific without being adversarial: 'The payment terms your procurement team has indicated would not work for a team of our size.'

What the script should not do is apologise at length, imply that the decision is provisional, or leave the prospect believing that a further call might reverse it. Ambiguity is worse than refusal.

When to override the memo

There are legitimate reasons to chase work the memo discourages. A first engagement with a sponsor of genuine strategic importance. A brief that would build capability the team wants to hold. A relationship that a senior colleague has cultivated for years. These are decisions worth making — but they should be made knowingly, by someone with the authority to accept the cost, and recorded as an override rather than allowed to pass unremarked.

A quieter kind of commercial discipline

The teams that pitch best in UK medical communications are not usually the ones that pitch most. They are the ones that have made their selection criteria explicit, applied them consistently, and can explain to a prospective client — calmly and without embarrassment — why a particular brief is not for them. A one-page memo does not make that judgement for you. It simply makes sure the judgement is made at all, at a point when it still saves something worth saving.