Methods, systems, and devices for wireless communications are described in which one of multiple transmission-reception points (TRPs) may be identified for beam failure procedures in a secondary cell (Scell). Reference signals of the different TRPs may have a different control resource set pool index values, and a user equipment (UE) may monitor such reference signals as part of a beam failure detection (BFD) procedure. The UE may identify one or more beams associated with a particular pool index value that has a degraded channel quality, and may determine to declare a beam failure. The UE may transmit a link recovery request to a serving cell that requests uplink resources for a beam failure recovery message. The UE may receive an uplink grant and may transmit a beam failure recovery message that indicates the Scell and TRP with the beam failure.