When you sit down with a CEO for the first time or meet a start-up, pitching their precious project to a cast list of thousands, you are unconsciously making some decisions over which you have little or no control, based on ‘chemistry’ (or a lack of it). That feeling that says yes or no.

Chemistry is an ingredient vital to all relationships, business or otherwise, especially at the start, before the relationship has properly begun. It’s the internal human buzz that makes you feel good about the people you may be about to spend time with, or makes you want to run for the hills.

Ask any intermediary of the traditional relationship between clients and agencies, like the AAR or Oystercatcher and they’ll tell you chemistry makes or breaks the potential for a positive engagement, within the first minutes of a meeting/presentation. Chemistry decides whether you feel you could work with someone, spend time with someone. Its instinct at the sensing end of the spectrum. It’s the hidden early-warning system and radar that lets you decide to shoot someone down or let them land on your front lawn.

That chemistry exists and is critically to potentially winning client business is obvious. But what is less obvious perhaps is the need for chemistry to exist for both sides of a potential commercial relationship.

If you are about to give counsel to a business and its people, about something as fundamental as their shared sense of identity and purpose, it’s pretty essential you have as much good chemistry for them as they might have for you.

Traditional agencies pitching for business can ignore this chemical reciprocity. They’ll often accept the unilateral demands of a client RFI (request for information), as a blunt means to initially assess an agency’s chemical suitability for engagement, without thinking to issue their own, similar RFI in reverse. That’s like speed dating where one party is mute.

When you meet a client, who may engage you on a project to help them define themselves and their brand, you’ve got to be motivated and willing to go the extra mile, to work hard to go deep to ‘get’ them, in order to be able to articulate them brilliantly well. The projects I work on with clients demand utmost cerebral input, commitment and creativity.

To make it work, when you’re mapping culture and values, defining their essence and helping people find a true north to follow, you and they have got to feel good about the other party, at a deep and intuitive level.

You need chemistry to spark a belief that you can achieve what you both need to do together. So, next time you’re looking for help to define your brand or find an agency to develop your communications, think about whether you’re feeling the chemistry?

And ask them if they feel it too?