By Laureen Peck
If you work in the dog-eat-dog world of the advertising agency business and your job includes hunting for and closing new business, chances are that at one time or another you will have to decide how much work you and your pitch team are willing to do for free in order to win a new account.
As a smart Adman or Adwoman, you understand that your primary loyalty is to the agency that employs you. Working in the best interest of your agency means you need to know when to reject a prospect’s demands for spec work. It also means that sometimes you will have to stick your neck out to convince your boss and your co-workers that it would be worth developing something for free even though you know that if the pitch fails, you will be the one who will end up with mud on your face. Conversely, if the pitch succeeds, the creative director or some other person on your pitch team will get most of the credit for the win. That’s just the way it is. You have accepted this truth and have learned not to worry about it.
Big Dogs
Let’s say you are a big dog, meaning you are a new biz leader at a huge, worldwide, advertising conglomerate. We all know that you work very hard during those three-hour lunches at five-star restaurants to get your dining and drinking companions to wag their tails and accept you as the alpha, but you probably don’t have to worry as much about hunting for business, because it usually comes to you.
Most likely you work within a separate group inside your agency whose sole purpose is to develop new accounts. The RFPs and AOR reviews come your way fairly regularly. Your division/group/team has been allocated a healthy annual budget to be used specifically for building new business. Often this budget is considered a standard part of doing business and will go into the sales costs column in quarterly and annual reports. You also have countless other resources available that you can use to analyze the risks against potential rewards to determine how much to invest in a new business pitch. You throw away quite a few proposal requests because the treats they offer look too small and it would not be worth your time and effort to chew on these tiny tidbits.
If this sounds like your job description, this article is not for you. In fact, please don’t read any further. You already have enough food to gobble up.
Smaller Dogs with “Heart”
I wrote this article for the rest of us in Biz Dev. We are the marketing services pushers and pitchers who work for small to mid-size firms or smaller subsidiaries of large agencies. We have to fight our way through the corporate jungle every single day just to get a chance to pitch.
We designated hunters run as fast as we can from morning to night because it is the only way we can possibly pass the jackals, wolves, wild dogs and hyenas to get to the prey first. Not only are we expected to hunt down a juicy beast and bring it home to the tribe for dinner; we are required to keep smiling the whole time we are doing it. But we thrive on stress, so that’s OK by us.
How We Roll
If you are a New Business Developer and Pitch leader at a small to mid size agency, generally, you have to do all of the following:
1. Find prospects. You do lots of online research, review lists, read your news feeds, go to networking events etc., etc, etc.
2. Determine what prospects meet your company’s qualifications and start knocking on their doors.
3. Get some of those qualified prospects to open their door to you for a first meeting. Often, you had to make numerous calls and/or send several emails or letters to get them to open the door a crack. You did this because you know that most of the time, getting that first meeting takes unrelenting tenacity.
4. Once in the door with a qualified prospect, you build rapport with them. You discuss their preferences and needs. You find out what they won’t like and what they will like. You do your best to diagnose their pain so you will know what to prescribe. You make them tell us what they are willing to invest in the campaign or project. (Of course as everyone knows, getting a prospect to reveal a budget range to work with is really, really easy to do. LOL)
5. Congratulations. Now It’s Crunch Time! Assuming that you have done a good job building rapport, you have been invited to participate in a pitch. It is now time to focus on the presentation and/or proposal development stage. You develop the pitch strategy and persuade your team to support it and help make it work. Together, you develop an appetizing proposal that you know will be perfect for your prospect’s tastes and preferences. You assign roles and rehearse the pitch team.
If you do not manage the pitch preparation process in step 5 carefully, it can lead to internal discord that will come back to bite you in the buttocks in the future. If you manage this process well, you will know precisely when to tell your boss and your team that doing spec work is worth everyone’s time and energy. If you ask for spec work needlessly on a continuous basis, you will use up your team’s good will and your boss will stop liking you. On the other hand, if you keep turning-off prospects that would have made perfect clients for your agency because you did not ask enough of your team, you will stop liking yourself.
Below, I have identified some of the most common factors that lead to a poorly managed pitch development process. These include; poor prospect qualification, lack of direction, unrealistic expectations and lack of appreciation. I have attempted to define these pitfalls and to offer some suggestions for how to avoid them.
PART 1: PITCH KILLERS YOU CAN AVOID
Poor Prospect Qualification
It may seem like common sense to only go after qualified prospects, but it is surprising how many pitches are lost by Business Developers, who should have known better, because they did not qualify the prospect. If you are pitching an unqualified prospect, it means you did not do your job properly from the beginning.
Avoid this by making sure the prospects on your “hit list” are really the right fit for your agency before you start contacting anyone on it. Also, please stop yourself from getting too excited when you meet someone at a networking event who acts like they want to work with you. No matter how happy this makes you feel, make sure the company they work for is on your qualified company list, and that he or she is the correct decision-maker before putting any work into a proposal or pitch for them.
Nothing deflates a team more than pitching their heart out and then finding out that their hard work was done for someone with no decision-making authority. They learn that the real decision-maker either had no idea there was a pitch at all or has already chosen to work with someone else.
It is also just plain stupid to pursue a target with a budget that is way too small to be profitable for your agency or to run after big accounts if you know that your agency won’t have the resources to do the pitch properly or won’t be able to actually manage that account if you get lucky and win it.
If your shop is more focused on new brand development or brand-building, it probably doesn’t make sense go after accounts that spend most of their budget on direct marketing programs, unless your agency is trying to build a new, direct marketing department.
If you consistently pitch to the wrong prospects, co-workers will start to think of you as “the kid who cried, wolf.” Eventually no one will want to be a part of your pitch team even when you finally have the right prospect tweaked and ready.
Lack of Direction
If you cannot clearly pitch your pitch strategy to your pitch team, you shouldn’t be in new business development. If you are good at what you do, it means you have already developed a preliminary pitch strategy, before you bring in your team. You have done all your homework and have most of the information on your prospect’s pain. You are ready to lead.
Being a good leader includes asking your team for input, ideas and help on your strategy and making sure opposing ideas are heard and considered. As a good leader, you will have no problem going back to your prospect with questions your team has asked you that you don’t have the answers for.
If you don’t have any preliminary strategy or direction to give to your team and you are counting on them to come up with something anyway, you aren’t leading. Your lackadaisical approach will drive your team crazy and the results will be unsatisfying for everyone.
Unrealistic Expectations
Please do not promise the moon to your team even if you are 99% sure you and they will nail the pitch. Over-confidence ends up killing morale.
Of course you need to get your team excited, but if they are too sure that the prospect will love everything you are going to present to them, and you lose the pitch, their disappointment in the pitch process could last a long time. This will make it harder for them to get behind you the next time.
Conversely, be careful not to underestimate a prospective account’s potential. Making the assumption that it will not be worth it to go the extra mile to win that new account, without careful investigation and verification of your belief, could lead to throwing away what could have been an excellent opportunity.
Lack of Appreciation
Make sure you praise and thank every individual on your team for the contributions they are making to the pitch as they make them. If you expect them to work without thanks and make unrealistic demands of them, don’t expect them to perform optimally.
Find little ways to show them that you respect and appreciate the work they are doing. If you know your team is working late, order pizza for them without being asked or bring them coffee. Better yet, praise their contributions to agency principals and make sure they are aware you have done this.
If the pitch fails, as the pitch leader, you need to take responsibility for the loss and analyze your mistakes so that you can avoid making them in the future. Do not tell your boss that it was a co-worker’s fault you lost even if it is the truth. This makes you look like an ineffectual weakling. It is also is a sure way to create enemies.
If there is a junior-level person on the team who didn’t perform that well, but still has good potential, set up a private meeting with him. Make sure any criticism you give is constructive and offer advice and suggestions on how to help him improve his performance. This way he will feel supported instead of torn down.
Whether you lose or win, the end result should be that your co-workers will be happy to be invited to be on your pitch team the next time you need them.
FINAL STEPS:
Assuming that the pitch preparation has gone smoothly, the process continues;
6. You and your team progress to the dog and pony show. Your well-rehearsed team presents the proposal to the prospect.
7. Your carefully prepared appetizer has pleased the prospect so you get them to sign an agreement to purchase a scrumptious project and/or an inspired feast of a campaign, and they become a new client for your agency. You have once again proved to your co-workers and boss that you can bring home the bacon so account services can fry it up in a pan. Everyone eats that day and you are a hero… for a few minutes anyway.
Now that I have shared some tips for what new biz pitch leaders should and should not do in step 5, I would like to give you some examples of the types of pitch preparation fiascoes that are outside of your control. Rest assured that it is not always your fault the pitch went down the toilet. So, if you have been beating yourself up over losing a pitch and the reason you lost it is listed below, stop banging your head against the wall and give yourself a hug instead.
PART 2: IMPOSSIBLE OBSTACLES YOU NEED TO STOP OBSESSING ABOUT
Internal Sabotage
Your boss has instructed you to only go after big game because he is tired of road kill. You do as he asks, and finally manage to get invited to participate in a pitch for a bigger account where it is understood that you will be competing against much larger agencies.
After making it through all the preliminary hurdles, you learn that your boss never intended to give you the resources required for the last hurdle, the final presentation. When you find this out, you wonder aloud why he instructed you to spend all your time chasing after big game when he knew his agency was not really able to invest the necessary amount of time and effort needed to be a real contender. He tells you that you should be able to win the pitch without using additional resources and if you don’t win it then it means it just was not the right fit. The pitch you end up making is embarrassingly inadequate, you lose and your boss berates you for it.
In another scenario, your agency definitely has enough resources to do things the right way, and you have expressed logical reasons for why the team needs to do the extra “thing” to win the pitch. However, the agency principal does not trust your rationale, mainly because she is a micro manager who usually doesn’t respect anyone’s judgment but her own. Your team will not put any effort into something the boss clearly isn't supporting. Of course you lose because the winning agency went the extra mile.
If this kind of internal sabotage happens often, it might be time for you to look for a new job.
External Sabotage by Peons
Your agency has made it to pitch phase because you have carefully courted and won over the VP of Marketing or Advertising. The VP is a big-picture type. You build rapport with him and he decides he likes and trusts you so he invites you and your agency to participate in an upcoming agency review.
However, the person who is the designated agency review coordinator is not your friend the VP. Instead you find yourself dealing with someone lower on the food chain. This person won’t return your calls or answer your repeated emails asking for answers to your pitch team’s questions.
Although this review coordinator has been instructed by the VP to include your agency in the process, it is obvious she is indifferent towards you and doesn’t want to help. You can’t go over her head even though you want to, because, guess what? She is also the person who will be working directly, on a day-to-day basis, with the winning agency. Tattling on her to her boss could lead to future, unwanted repercussions.
So your team has the choice of moving forward without having the best information, or dropping out of the pitch. Of course, you won’t drop out because you have been pursuing this company for almost a year and you are not about to give up now.
Why does this manager person appear to hate you? It could be that she has a friend at the competing agency and only wants her friend to have all the information so he will win. Or she could resent being ordered to include you in the review instead of choosing you herself. It could be that she’s overworked, hates her job, and never has enough time to get back to everyone. Maybe she’s just a nasty person with a personality disorder. It doesn’t really matter what her problem is. You and your team will do the best they can, but you are still going to lose the pitch and your friend the VP is going to think you weren’t as good as he hoped you would be.
Inconsiderate Liars
Your agency has been invited to participate in an RFP process just so the Marketing Director or Brand Manager can show their boss that they had a comprehensive selection process. You don’t know that you’re a patsy because your charming prospect has assured you that your agency is a serious contender. However, secretly he has already made his decision to hire someone else. This kind of subterfuge happens so often it is maddening, but if you decide that in the future you will not trust anything that any prospect says, you will never pitch again.
The Decision-maker’s Incompetence
The prospect has given you and your agency one set of specs and requirements to be used to build your proposal but then has a completely different set of needs and criteria when you go back to present it. He never made an effort to give you an update ahead of time or offered to postpone your proposal presentation until he could provide you with more information so you could rework your proposal. This is because people who are disorganized or disengaged run this company and he is one of them. NOTE: You still can win this one if he gives you a chance to come back … that is if you really want to come back after that.
NEXT?
If you have recently experienced any of the “Impossible Obstacles” listed above, go somewhere safe and lick your wounds. Soothe yourself with the fact that you cannot control every aspect of every pitch all the time. Also, be reassured that you may not win every pitch, but it is possible to win more pitches more of the time if you make the effort to learn from and understand past mistakes even when they are someone else’s.
After you finish your comforting cappuccino, put your “happy face” back on and return to the jungle to hunt. Your tribe is still hungry and they are depending on you to feed them.
END
If you have any questions or comments on this article, or you have an agency pitch story you wish to share, please do so.
