Close-Up: Live Issue - Never mind the pitch, it's post-pitch what counts.

Pippa Considine discovers that agencies will go to virtually any lengths to steal a march on their rivals and land an account.

The presentation has finished and the client has left the agency, but there are still precious hours, days, even weeks left before the marketing team decides the winner. It's a period in which it's still possible to influence the outcome. 'The real pitch doesn't start until the official pitch is over,' one agency chief says.

In the recent BBC review, both winning agencies - Fallon and Rainey Kelly Campbell Roalfe/Y&R - continued a conversation with the client well after the official pitch had ended.

The BBC is one of Fallon's oldest clients, so some degree of contact seemed natural. 'There were inevitably questions after the pitch, largely about people, logistics and procurement,' Helen Weisinger, Fallon's new-business director, explains. RKCR/Y&R took the opportunity to send over its new Virgin Trains ad, which hadn't been released when the pitch was held.

When it comes to unsolicited contact after the pitch, the AAR's director of advertising, Martin Jones, has some advice: 'There's a very simple rule that you are not going to persuade someone who doesn't want you that you are the agency for the business by badgering them. If they like you and you send them things, they will see you as hungry. If they don't like you, they'll see you as being annoying.'

'There's an agonising wait when you've done your pitch and you're waiting for a decision,' Judy Mitchem, the chief marketing officer at Lowe London, says. 'If your work goes into research for three weeks, there's only so much you can do, and there's only so much dialogue you can have with your prospective client. You can't ask them what they want for Christmas or parade up and down outside their office dressed as a banana.'

That said, there are a number of smart, enthusiastic and helpful follow-up moves that agencies can make. Most are discreet and above-board, although it has been known for agencies to go for an in-your-face stunt or a bit of skullduggery.