We posted a small freelance job online recently and I spent a couple of hours reviewing the submissions. The job was too small for lead scoring and sophisticated analysis. I used three criteria
- price
- location (time zone to align with our client)
- did they answer the RFP questions
Easy.
How did I choose you?
So the sifting begins… and the first thing that went out the window was anyone who couldn’t or didn’t answer the RFP questions.
For a simple job, not offering all the information requested in the RFP meant immediate exclusion. Reason: it’s not a multi-thousand dollar contract – why do you need to speak to me?
Price was the second criteria for exclusion – our client had a budget and we needed to stick to it. Reason: We decided to keep a margin above the quoted price so that if needed, there was slack in the quote to put right errors or get a second or third draft design within an acceptable price.
Location was the third reason – timezones and availability during our working day matter to us. Reason: If we can never speak to you because of the timezone, it’s a no-go for working successfully together.
Lastly, the message in the covering letter counts. In fact, it is probably more important than you think. When two or more providers are very similar on all other assessments, this is the ONLY thing that serves to differentiate your offering.
Show me your personality
What can a covering letter show or demonstrate that engages…. take these extracts. Which turns you on?
I’m sure it’s a bit surprising to get a simple letter, instead of a portfolio — but as I’m currently employed, I had set aside freelancing. Your project, however, has inspired me to reconsider.
and this one
After reading your posting for the need of someone with great English speaking and writing skills to 1) design a template from scratch using the client’s logo style and branding and 2) add new content to the existing HTML template on a monthly basis, I feel confident that I am the person for the job.
and another
Our Concern is currently located in Tamil Nadu in India; we are interested in applying for this project. We have deep Knowledge (More than 7 years of IT experience)in web design.
finally
I’ve created numerous email-templates in the past, my 2 favorite clients were 412media.com and bakertravel.com. I thoroughly understand the limitations email-delivery impose on design.
So check out your prose and take our advice:
- Make yours stand out
- Show off the “special ness” of your firm
- Add ‘personality’ by being personable, friendly and telling me something unique
Go knock their socks off.
Getting fabulous creative work from your marketing agency depends on the brand team giving the best possible brief to set up the work. Writing down what you want from your campaign and collaborating with the agency to agree the full terms of reference for the work you are commissioning is of the utmost importance.
You may be finding a new marketing agency to work with or briefing in new campaigns for your existing agency.
Both require communication of the utmost clarity.
And so whether you are a brand who uses agencies; a brand who has an internal marketing department or an agency wanting to use best practice with your brand clients, here are two slide decks and a blog post which will help you to write the best possible creative brief.
Thanks to Dare who created this slide deck as a training event for their internal staff.
How to write the brief
- Brand Proposition – what is it?
- What do we want to achieve?
- What is the one key insight?
- What do we want people to do?
- How should we tell them?
- Why would they?
In the deck the authors show good, mediocre and poor ways
B2B marketing briefing rules are different
Image by imjustcreative via Flickr
Sometimes it’s nice to be on the receiving end of some in-bound agency marketing. There’s a nice branding agency we have been following based in Birmingham, UK. They sent us a little slide deck.
It had some background slides about the company and some case studies of client work. All very nicely presented.
BUT
There was no apparent purpose to the communication. The deck arrived with a nice covering letter but no call to action, no reason for the email except to say they had some ‘exciting news’.
So we launched in to a critique and sent them this email
That’s a very interesting slide show you’ve presented. Thanks for sharing it.
However, you really do sell yourself short in an email shot like this – what would a prospective client like myself think after reading it…… “Nice slideshow. What was the ‘exciting news’ anyway? What now? Back to my work.”
Using some direct response copywriting in the covering letter/email can you provoke me to deliver a response? For example – get an answer to questions like ‘what did Rebecca think?’ and ‘could they do this for my brand?’ Both questions that will help to narrow down your list of ‘suspects’ and take them one step closer to becoming prospects and then clients.
What about building on the campaign like this?
- Having a special website landing page just for people who got the email?
- Use the landing page to measure click throughs and get a poll / survey / comments / discussion going?
- Sharing the slides on slideshare / docstock so others can embed them and let them go viral
- Putting them up on your website for others to ‘like’ on Facebook / Twitter
- Asking for a meeting in the email text so you can show your credentials in more detail
- Asking questions about my brand so I can see if I ‘suffer’ from the same problems you solved for your clients
Anything but just sharing your slide deck…
So that’s just my two pennyworth suggestions for you – free of charge.
You can take them and put them into practice yourself.This is an unsolicited approach offering you some free advice on how to improve your marketing. I just happen to be on your mailing list and so hope I’m trusted.
And they replied
Thanks so much for your thoughts.
This soft launch does indeed have a plan underpinning it, with more activities to come.
That said your passionate response is appreciated. We will keep you in mind for future activities!
What would you do in response to an unsolicited email?
Image via Wikipedia
Imagine you have launched your business and the brand is up and running. You are receiving enquiries but not enough are converting to paying customers.
Even though you may be the genius behind the business idea, you have no idea how to successfully pitch your business to potential clients and convert them.
Why not hire a professional to pitch for you?
Successful Marketing agencies know how to pitch a business/ brand. Full stop. That’s what makes them successful.
So why not pitch your business/ brand to an agency in a relaxed environment where your pitch won’t matter and let them transfer it into the professional and suave format needed to win you new clients?
It’s as easy as choosing an appropriate agency and filling them in on your business/ brand, the goals of the pitch and background information on who they will be pitching to. If they are good at what they do, they will do their own research and put a creative agency swing on things.
Choosing an agency
When choosing an agency to pitch for your business you will be faced with the choice of an agency that has previous experience in your industry sector or an agency that doesn’t. Although this seems like an obvious decision, don’t write the latter off straight away, everybody needs to start somewhere and often an agency new to your industry sector will have fresh ideas and be able to think outside the box, which is often a key trait of a successful pitch.
Shortlist and meet with a couple of agencies, keeping in mind that you will have to work with these people and rely on them to secure your business. Your aim from these meetings should be to work out if the agency is as motivated about your business as you are.
Filling them in
Provide the agency with all the information necessary to make a winning pitch including;
- Names of the clients they will be pitching to
- Background relationship between your business and the potential client
- Outcomes you hope to achieve with the pitch – remember credentials meetings and chemistry meetings should still have stated outcomes planned in advance.
Related articles
- How To Fix A Broken Pitch Process (adpulp.com)
- Winning pitches is fun! (creativeagencysecrets.com)
- The Art of Pitching (creativeagencysecrets.com)
- Cynicism, duplicity and institutional incompetence (stephengreensted.wordpress.com)
- The Unspoken Evil Of The RFP (socialmediaexplorer.com)
- RFP Hell (kula partners)
Pitching is a very important tool for generating new business, but certain aspects of a successful pitch can sometimes be overlooked. When approaching a pitch with a prospective client, try to imagine you are pitching yourself to someone you would like to have a long relationship with.
How can you come across as the kind of person they want in their life?
What should I always do when pitching?
Of course there are obvious things which should be commonplace every time you make a pitch:
- Dress Snappy – better to be over-dressed than underdressed; research your prospect company’s dress code to make sure
- Arrive early to the meeting and familiarise yourself with the environment – this will allow you to be more relaxed during the pitch. If possible scout it out a week in advance. Check power socket locations and AV equipment.
- Always be grateful for the opportunity – if the pitch doesn’t go the way you wanted it to, thank them for the chance. Never cut ties with anyone in business. You never know, they may recommend you to someone else or ask you back for another chance
Recently I have been a part of two creative agency pitches to two very different businesses. The first was a gas fire manufacturer and the second, a real estate agent. Although both pitches went well, what quickly became apparent to me was that having the confidence and public speaking skills to pitch your business is only half of what is required for a successful pitch.
The first pitch
I entered the first pitch knowing very little about the gas fire manufacturer and the meeting quickly became a one-way flow of information on who the company was and what they did. This was possibly time wasted. They wanted to tell us about themselves and if I had prepared properly for the meeting I would have known all this and the time could have been spent on discussions on what we could do for them as a creative agency.
The second pitch
Taking this into account, I prepared for the second pitch and did deep research on the prospective client. This not only impressed the client but it saved us time where we could get down to the nitty-gritty on how we could help his business. This pitch went well and there was agreement on a further meeting to discuss our proposal.
What should you do
Below is a checklist on what sort of research should be done for any public relations project, which translates very well to pre-pitch research. Click here to see the full checklist and article. Work through this checklist to ensure you have done all you can to research a prospective client before entering that all important first pitch
- See what’s being said on social media - This can be a great real-time window into what others know and think about your client and a great way to make sure that your pitch will go over well.
- Spend time with your client – Set their expectations that you want more than a one-hour meeting. You want a few hours to mine them for any and all information.
- Spend time without your client – Ask them to put you in touch with people from other areas of their company: sales, customer relations and even those on the floor (front desk personnel, those at the cash register, tour guides, etc.).
- Get on site! – If your client is a hotel, be a guest. Spend the night, try the food, and ask for suggestions of surrounding things to do.
Rob Lane
Rob is Marketing Assistant at Creative Agency Secrets.
Related articles
- Cynicism, duplicity and institutional incompetence (stephengreensted.wordpress.com)
- Knowing Your Client Inside and Out: A Checklist For Client Research (dontdrinkthekoolaidblog.com)
- How To Lose A Pitch When You Thought You Were Winning (stephengreensted.wordpress.com)
How much do marketers and their agencies need to know about technology. Code is now on a par with content.
- Allison Mooney, head of trends and Insights, Marketing Google
- Ben Malbon, Director of Strategy, Creative Lab Google
- Matt Galligan, SimpleGeo
- Rob Rasmussen, Tribal DDB
- Rick Webb, The Barbarian Group
#agileagency
How much do marketers and their agencies need to know about technology. Code is now on a par with content.
Rasmussen - campaigns aren’t dying but seasonal work continues. Campaigns work on top of the platform of engagement. We try to do it backwards – all the funding is against campaigns especially media buying not spend on platforms.
Webb - Platform = brand; Campaign = products
Malbon - at BBH we tried to dismantle the “masterpiece mentality” of it had to be perfect before we show it to colleagues let alone clients. Tech companies are better at killing stuff that doesn’t work.
Webb - campaigns are humdrum.
Malbon - Tech companies make things that last much longer than a campaign, which lasts 5 minutes
Mooney – creative is being tested on YouTube by BMW.
Rasmassen - it’s almost backwards to create it and later push out to channels… reverse the order the core idea rather than individual executions.
Galligan - FourSquare and Amex combined deals so Amex built a tech platform to enable this it’s more than a campaign because it uses multiple platforms and FourSquare happened to be launch partner – they’ll extend it to others later. It was an experiment the first implementation. Take interesting bits and remove the poorly performing parts and go on. Software companies have one core concept we stick to one thing that we do.
Webb - software companis need marketing and Brands can’t take it back like software can.
Galligan - Marketing is every aspect of what you do as a tech company. E.g. Twitter began as Twittr and was a hideous purple website. Someone turned that brand round. The danger is to think the core product is what matters. We market as a consumer internet comp[any even though we don’t deal with consumers
Malbon - Three things in summary
- Software companies need agencies to capture and distill the culture. Because inside tech the world is your company. Agencies can do this and understand who you’re designing for.
- Importance of having untethered creatives around the place inside tech cos. The best agencies have random crazy people who think Tech has too many people who are samey.
- Agencies push tech companies in directions we could never have thought of. Brining the two worlds together is great. Tech can be used to create magic plus agency crazy thinking person.
Also covered by RachCreative
Related articles
- Do Agencies Need to Think Like Software Companies? (adgeek.us)
- SXSW Day One Delivers…Everything (adrants.com)
- Hashem Bajwa – Director of Creative Strategy Droga5
- Nick Parish – Contagious Spirit a consultancy for non-traditional marketing
- Ty Montague – Co-collective a story-led innovation collective
- Alessandra Lariu – Creative Director McCann Ericson NYC
- John Wimsatt – the CLIENT! Verizon for wired line residential business
#sellideas
How do you sell
Wimsatt: Motivation – if you have an idea does it solve a business need? does it fit, does it work? As well as the pitching person. I have 12 agencies on our rsoter and they are different. Some agencies have a big idea and it’s always a big increase of scope and reach and it affects my view of risk…. even if the best intentions are there.
It’s a handful of people only 5/6 people can win the business and you know who they are. We listen when they come to talk to us – show over time they have our best interests at heart. Beware self-serving recommendations.
With certain agencies it’s always about new business – but credibility should find solutions to fit the business challenge. The pitch is very important – for an unsolicited idea – the power of the individual needs to be considered. Who has the passion for the idea? It’s not necessarily about the team. The owner of the idea should pitch it.
Montague: I was involved in some innovation and it was ‘nice to have’. But now the past is discontinuous with the future so innovation has changed – it’s now a must-have. Clients of scale must now innovate. This was what motivated me to jump out.
Bajwa – clients are still asking their agencies the same questions. You do want great ideas – but that’s a mixed bag. Even if clients really believe in that it doesn’t always happen.
Wimsett – who said, what did they say and why did they like it? that’s what Verizon needs. Should your house internet always be high speed? Is it on demand or on delay? If we can solve this is creates a huge lift in sales. Change the metrics.
Parish – agency people continue to make traditional work and I felt “Do not give us another 30 second commercial”. These solutions are no longer as right for business.
Question: how do clients deal with collaboration with multiple agencies?
Winsatt – we have a lot of specialist agencies – for me it’s the idea that matters. I can work out who does the work and how we exercise the idea. When we do the briefing exercise it’s for everyone. I keep track.
Montague – there is a confusioin between on and offlien. So we built a platform that helps clients create collaborative work groups to get the job done.
Bajwa – so many agencies pitch using powerpoint. We worked with the Bing product people long before we pitched the project and we’d already worked out how to make it before they signed on the dotted line. The process of making something is really key to selling it.
Parish – how much would you spend on speculating something like that?
Bajwa – we have a portfolio of people and we ‘cast’ the right people to make the project work. Sometimes a simple prototype will be enough and othertimes it’s a complex one.
Wimsatt – we had different agencies doing different things and we centralised our agency resources, site, search, usability, media planning – it’s made a huge difference to our business online. Our business challenge was accountability. Bringing the people together meant that new targeting – pushing personalisation right now. It’s not a project it’s a strategy cos it feeds back to creative development, how you purchase media. We have a bonus structure based on quantitative business objectives for our agencies.
Laria – some briefs reflect a media buy rather than solving a problem. How do you start right?
Parish – there’s a difference between unsolicited ideas and solicited briefs.
Bajwa – JayZee wanted to launch a book in a big way. The brief was how to meet his target of young people who generally aren’t interested in books. The other half of the programme was unsolicited and MS are asking their agencies what they wanted – we took JayZee to them that we thought was the right thing for them. Two different clients that together we made a new programme to suit both of them.
Parish – “cockroach ideas” that don’t die. Get them in and create tangibility.
Montague – I find ideas like that unsatisfying (Nike’s chockpot?). It’s important to go in through loopholes at clients. Stop always going in through the marketing door to get innovations to occur inside corporations. They are struictured for a non-networked world – the process of getting new structures born inside clients and getting in through the design, R&D doors alongside the marketing department but outside the marketing department’s critical path. Tenacity drives innovative ideas through – they are relentless about making it happen.
Would JayZee’s book have done well without the campaign?
if doing something in a new way is a behaviour that we want to promote and reward people for. Inside organisations this is true too.
Bawja – risk – in agencies there is often a recognition of risk. Smaller thoguhts, cheaper and quicker and it may surprise you that later becomes a bigger thing. We are not good at that.
This was a lazy panel, not chaired well and just worked off questions from the floor. It felt too unprepared. Alessandra Lariu – Creative Director McCann Ericson NYC was not a good chair -she waffled her questions and they were vague and too long-winded. I find it hard to believe she’s a creative director as she’s very inarticulate.
Had a great start to the week in the agency – two new clients.
One came from an introduction – thanks Chris – and the other is a longstanding client who just ‘jumped’ big time into the online world for their marketing and chose us to implement. All very flattering.
But, cognisant of the cockiness that can follow a big win, I decided to be ultra-cautious with an other client to whom we’ve proposed a new website and content marketing programme.
Three reasons to be cautions
- He’s never been online independently before
- Times are tough and spend is carefully managed – we need to prove value fast
- He stuck his neck out to get us in after we made a successful cold call and we need to ensure what we propose is capable of being bought and will back up his career progression.
Many times after a big win, I’ve seen clients get too confident and think they have acquired the midas touch only to quickly move onto a ‘losing streak’ when pitch after pitch is lost or ‘come second’ – which is lost but worse.
So things to look to when you think you might be in the same place.
Exercise high caution
First, secure the new clients you have won. Bed them in, ensure you’re on brief and delivering what they expect and when they expect it. Make sure that income stream is confirmed and on the books.
With other proposals that you have in the pipeline, be very cautious
- Check your wording is not arrogant, over-confident or cocky. I think a quiet degree of suppliance to the client’s will and a slightly servile approch to ensure that your words are correctly conveying the offer works quite well.
- Before delivering the final pitch document – phone and meet the prospective client and all the influencers in order to double-check your understanding of their needs. I usually try to talk pricing as well as deliverables at this time so when they get the document / presentation there are few financial surprises
- Follow up in a very timely manner and ensure the trail doesn’t go cold. Check they received the document; ask when they’ll have had a chance to review it and you can speak to them about what they think; find out decision dates and key decision triggers.
Go for it – winning streaks are fantastic when you get onto them. Stick to your guns and ensure you are the agency of choice for that brand who wants you to do their marketing.
Related articles
- There’s More to Pitching Than Doing Killer Work (thedenveregotist.com)
- How To Fix A Broken Pitch Process (adpulp.com)
Peter Bregman writes on the HBR blog about the importance of correct interpretation of communications – the message versus the “package” [or medium IMV].
Helpfully he gives four steps to follow which will help you to make the best of poor communication situations:
1. Notice. Anytime you feel a negative emotion about something said or written to you, it’s a warning sign that you might get distracted by the package. Anger, sadness, frustration, disgust, and disbelief are all good prompts to go to step 2.
2. Pause. Take a deep breath. Then recognize you’re vulnerable to reacting emotionally to how something was communicated. And remind yourself that communication is hard and often done poorly. Cut yourself, and everyone else, some slack. Don’t assume malicious intent. Don’t take it personally. Resist the urge to be offended.
3. Interpret. Now reread what was written, or think about what was said, and unscramble it. Think about what the person was trying to convey. Search for value. Strive for understanding.
4. Respond. A good rule of thumb is to use a different medium than elicited your emotional response. If a text upset you, don’t text back. If an email set you off, pick up the phone. And when you do reply, ignore the package and focus on the message.
I add a sub-step between 3 and 4.
Time.
Leave some time (overnight is good) for you to reflect on the anger the message created in you and whether your reply will communicate the right message in the manner you intend.
When you read the article, reflect on the male : female responses to the same message. They matter a lot in business and if you’re a woman working in a male environment, you may find you get a better outcome if you use male messaging mores.
The same rules apply when pitching for new business – when you receive a message back from your prospect, can you correctly interpret what they mean?
Related articles
- Don’t Let the Package Distract You from the Message (blogs.hbr.org)
Paul Foley runs Noodle Coaching. He gave this talk to the London Communicators and Engagement Group last month. We were so impressed we asked him to write some expert articles for us. The first one publishes on Monday.
Enjoy.
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