There’s a great summary of the pro and anti arguments about the Belgian Agency strike over on e-consultancy’s site.
The comments are helpful including ones from client and agency side folk.
I particularly liked Neale Gilhooley’s comment
My career path has been 90% Agency and 10% Client, but the 10% has radically changed my views on how Agencies should service their Clients.
Agencies are not all the same and as a former Client I have seen many agencies presentations, largely falling into 2 categories:
A. Those that are professional, insightful truly creative (in strategy as well as the creative product) and added value to my business.
B. Those who displayed few or none the above.
In my view you Clients should do their job and sort these categories out before you ask them to pitch, thus saving you and them a huge amount of time and distraction. Allowing you to spend more precious time with the A’s and as little as possible with B’s. Not easy but that’s your challenge. Speaking to 2 x A’s is more productive than speaking to 6 x B’s.
Also to get the most value Clients should consider spending some of your precious budget encouraging a low number of A’s to spend more time on your needs. Don’t forget that it is your problem they are solving and the better the solution the more chance of you keeping your job.
And so different agencies follow different strategies for pitching.
What “Rules” should you have?
I’m tempted to say that it doesn’t matter what the rules are as long as you know what they are and stick to them.
BUT… there’s always an exception.
My ideal is to have one big pitch per month. If you are of a size to handle the work load.
Pros – focus work on one thing at a time, higher quality, more senior staff involvement
Cons – if you badly need more work the temptation is to take on more, if you want to grow fast you may need more and if your success rate is say one in four, it’ll be only three new clients per year that you will win.
What are the rules you follow?
Related posts:
-
nealegilhooley
