Any B2B marketer and any creative agency who works with business to business clients must be using email as part of the marketing plan.  Business needs to add new customers to mailing lists and drive outbound messages for new products and services on a regular basis.  We listened to a great seminar hosted by the UK’s B2B Marketing magazine and have written up the notes for you to download.

Listen again using this link (you have to register with BrightTalk)

Read the slide notes below and if you like them; share with colleagues:

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Welcome to Blog number 14  in the List Building for Bloggers guest post series by Feedblitz founderPhil Hollows.

Phil writes about the essentials of building a mailing list around your blog.  If you have been following our content marketing discussions, you’ll know that any brand that can consistently deliver excellent content online needs to distribute it to the audience.  And your most captive targets are those who subscribe by email.

During the series you will learn how to build your B2B brand using content marketing underpinned by a growing mail list of email subscribers.

To purchase the List Building for Bloggers E-Book, Click here to visit FeedBlitz.

In this issue of List Building for Bloggers you will learn:

• Boosting relevance: why you should learn more about your subscribers.
• Risks and downsides: why you should think twice about custom fields.
• Alternatives to custom fields.
• Custom field usage.
  • Planning.
  • Collection.
  • Reporting.
  • Personalization.
  • Segmentation.
• Thinking outside the demographic box.
• A quick “how-to” for FeedBlitz users.

[This is the latest article in the List Building for Bloggers series – Click here to read all the recent #LBB posts]

Why learn more about your subscribers

The ability to customize your mailings to subscribers (and, via segmentation, which subscribers you mail in the first place), is a more advanced part of email marketing than most casual bloggers will typically reach.

That said, the more you know about your subscribers, the more you can tune your interactions with them, and so the better your results will be. Think for a moment how you might be able to improve your interactions with your readership if you knew more than their email address:

• If you knew buying history you can offer you best / newest customers early bird discounts or special packages;
• If you knew location you could invite people to your next training course, tweet up or conference in that city;
• If you knew their names you could make your mailings more personal;
• If you knew their gender or age range you could write more articles that appealed to that group;
• If you knew their Twitter account you can follow them in social media.

It’s possible to do all of this without having this extra data – typically known as custom fields – but when you can’t target content to the right people at the right time then you’re losing relevance. Relevance is the core benefit to using custom fields: it allows you to really get very focused with your content (especially non-automated delivery), which means greater relevance to your target audience. That in turn leads to better response rates.

Risks and downsides

Before diving into custom fields, however, my advice to bloggers is to think twice about it. As bloggers we’re typically content marketers, and our focus is that content and our audience. One of the benefits of using email marketing (and, specifically, fully automated email marketing like FeedBlitz delivers) is that it’s easy. You can do a really good job with some up-front work and let the automation take care of getting your word out.

This is less true with custom fields. Custom fields take work; it’s going to take more time from you to set up, use and manage them. You need to determine whether that time’s worth it.

Secondly, collecting that data from subscribers when they sign up will reduce your list growth rate, simply because any extra friction in the process reduces your growth rate. Even asking for basics such as a first name or the recipient’s gender will increase the bounce rate from the form. The more you ask for, the greater the hit. Again, up to you if that hit is worthwhile (you can test it, of course!).

Also bear in mind that, unless the extra data is coming from you (e.g. purchase history), user entered data can be unreliable. People lie. They type badly. There may be several ways to enter the same information e.g. in the US, they might report their state as “MA”, “Mass” or “Massachusetts”! That makes extra work (yet again) for you in terms of trying to prevent that or bearing it in mind when you come to use your custom fields.

Finally, various jurisdictions have laws about user data and privacy. If you collect custom data and the user demands you change it, you pretty much have to change it. More work there as well.

So it’s perfectly OK to say, like the idea, I have better things to do and my results are great as is. That said, the larger your list becomes, the harder it is to back fill custom field data if you have a change of heart or hire someone (e.g. a VA) to help you with your blog or list.

Custom field alternatives: Multiple Lists

If you want to segment your audience, bear in mind that there are simpler alternatives to using custom fields on a single list. Use multiple lists! Have one list for group A, another for group B etc., and power both from the same blog using tag filters. Easy to set up, the subscribers self-select into the right list at subscription time, much less work all around for you. For basic segmentation I would recommend this approach for bloggers instead of custom fields.

Basic custom field usage

A primer on jargon

• Custom fields – Data you associate with a subscriber, such as their name, location or birthday.
• Personalization – Using that data to modify the content of your mailing.
• Segmentation – Using the data to select individuals from a list for a mailing instead of mailing the whole list.

Planning

So you’re ready to take the plunge? OK, first you need to do a little planning. Think about:

• What do you want to do with the extra data?
• Where is the data coming from?
• What about existing list members where you didn’t collect the data?
• Is all the data going to be required or optional?
• What data will the user add, and what will you add yourself?

Say you’re running a mommy blog. Most of your readers are going to be, by definition, women. It makes little sense to use gender as a custom field. So don’t ask for it. Make a “Just For Dads” list instead.
You may also have data that you want to associate with a subscriber instead of having them add it themselves. Say you’re a gym and you want to give everyone a special offer on the anniversary of their membership – you can add their “Member since” or “Month Joined” data yourself. You don’t want to ask subscribers when they joined on the subscription form, since they might not be members (yet!) or they might not remember. If subscribers have to start thinking as they subscribe then they’ll lose momentum, and list growth will suffer.

This is also an example of data you might want to hide from a user. Others might include whether the user is a prospect, customer or partner – data you might use to tune a mailing later.

Decide, too, which data is essential to your plans. Name? Gender? Location? Job title? Experience level? Make essential data required, and the rest optional. But be really brutal on prioritization; remember that the more friction you add (required fields) the lower your growth rate will be. On the other hand, the more friction you add, the more committed the subscribers are who join your list. If you’re getting a lot of “tire-kickers” adding themselves, extra friction might very well be a Good Thing. Extra friction (in the form of extensive required fields) is also very useful if your list is being used as a lead generation tool for your business. You want the leads to be as pre-qualified as possible.

Some of the biggest challenges with custom fields, though, come from back filling data from existing subscribers, and what to do when that data (or optional fields) isn’t there. There’s nothing worse than a mailing that starts “Dear Valued Customer” since that actually shows the very opposite. What are you going to do if you don’t have the subscriber’s first name? Can you find a decent default? Can you conditionally exclude personalization elements if there’s no data? Is there a form or link you can mail out to have the older subscribers add their data? Think, too, about segmentation. If you’re going to segment by state, say, what do you do with users for whom you have no state data? Always mail them, just in case? Or never mail them?

Planning is essential. Whatever you do, don’t skip this step.

Collection

For new subscribers, this is pretty easy: ask for the data they can supply at subscription time. If you want to restrict choices to a few, make the field a choice field (such as a list box or radio buttons) to avoid the MA / Mass / Massachusetts issue.

For data, you provide, e.g. a link to your contact management or CRM system, you’re going to have to sync the email database with your CRM’s data. That requires manual or automated import / export – more work.

For the old list, you’re going to have to ask them to add the data. You’ll need a link to your form from your provider and you’re going to have to send them to your readers. Since there’s no real incentive to having existing subscribers tell you more about themselves (they’re already on the list; they’ve done the hard part), don’t expect great results from this. You can offer incentives and prizes to help, but be prepared to live with data gaps. Since you’ve done your planning up front, this won’t be an issue, right? Right! But you can add a link to the form in your template, so you can give readers a chance to provide or update their data with every email.

Reporting

One use of custom fields is not to use them in your outbound mailing at all. You can think of them as simply a one-time survey. Looking at the data can be interesting, though, so don’t neglect reporting once you’ve set up your custom fields. You may well be surprised at what you learn, and that in turn can lead you to produce better, more relevant content, or enable you to reach out to your subscribers in other ways.

Personalization

Not just “Dear Jane” instead of “Dear jane@example.com” (although that’s good too). You can personalize based content based on customer status (regular / preferred), gender and more. So with FeedBlitz, for example, you could conditionally include (or exclude) content from a different feed in your mailings based on the subscriber’s status.

Also understand that “content” isn’t just what’s in your post. It can also mean the HTML you format the post with. So you can change, for example, an image or color scheme based on custom demographic data.
There are dangers here, though. Beware customizing the subject line, as that looks really spammy. Test for cases where the data is missing or defaulted, so that the email still looks good. If you use conditional substitution, test again. If you want to test design changes “safely”, clone your list, place test addresses in there with the test cases you want to use, and test using that list before moving your design into production.

Did I mention this was work?

Segmentation

A great example for segmentation is going local. Say your blog is really focused on events in your area. You can collect the ZIP code from subscribers, and then mail only people in the relevant zip code for info on that area. From a monetization perspective, you can start to sell sponsorships and advertising into your segments once your list gets big enough (but keep the messages relevant else you’ll lose people). Once you get good with targeting and customization you can really make every email work much harder for you.

Again, however, there are traps for the unwary. Segmented mailings are typically slower than “all readers” mailings simply because your email service has to figure out whether each subscriber qualifies; personalization (if you’re using it) adds to the load too. It may not be significant but you should test using a non-time critical mailing to understand the difference.

Secondly, a botched segment mailing can be downright embarrassing. Make sure you have tested / evaluated the segment before you use it with the tools your email service provides; you don’t want to send a blast about an upgrade discount to people who’ve already paid full freight. And it doesn’t take much imagination to envisage even worse scenarios.

If you have a segment you like, save it if you can to make it easy to reuse in the future; it’s both a real time-saver and SNAFU risk reducer.

Thinking outside the demographic box

Demographics – broadly speaking: name, gender, location – are the typical use for custom fields, especially for personalization and segmentation. But you can do more than this. I’ve talked about using internal data (customer class or purchase history, for example) as one type of data. You can use activity stream information (did they click or open an email recently) as another. If you collect twitter, facebook or web site links, you can use that too. In fact, simply knowing a subscriber has a website or twitter account may be enough to work with - you may not need to know the details to get a good segment going.

You can also get completely obsessive about this stuff too, so beware the law of diminishing returns. For example, you can make smaller and smaller segments to get more precise, but if you get to the point where it would be faster to use your personal email app to do the mailing, you’ve gone too far. As with most things in marketing, your mileage may vary. Test, measure and update.

Ultimately, remember that custom fields and the benefits they bring are only really good at optimizing your existing list. If you’re not getting the basics right – subscription form positioning; compelling and relevant content; gripping subject lines; effective calls to action – then you’re missing a bigger opportunity. Plan for custom fields up front if you have the luxury to do so, but I’d recommend that you make sure you’re well past square one with your blog and basic email marketing before you start digging into custom fields and the work they add. Your time is limited and precious; be sure you’re spending it wisely.

A quick “how-to” for FeedBlitz users

Custom fields are a lot of work, but they can be excellent tools for making better use of your list. The features are complex and can be found under the Newsletters tab at FeedBlitz; click the “Custom Fields” button in the left side bar. Since there’s a lot of ground to cover, there is also a sequence of FeedBlitz-specific tutorial posts on using custom fields and entries in the FeedBlitz knowledge base – click here to start.

Next week we will have  Blog 15 – HTML Email Design Tips

To purchase the List Building for Bloggers E-Book, Click here to visit FeedBlitz.

Reproduced by permission, all rights reserved, read the original post here

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Image by glennharper via Flickr

Do relationships matter more than marketing or advertising for B2B?

There is some truth in this but it is often over-stated.

Many web experts talk about the glorious ‘free’ things that come to them  just because of their relationship and web presence – but we believe that without a proven track record in the area of expertise – this is all wishful thinking.

Srini Rao wrote a nicely titled post about how relationship marketing helped him to land a dream client – read it because it sounds awesome.  The plot line goes something like this – you hang out in a surf bar and drink a beer / shoot the breeze  and at the end of the night the owner hires you to promote his surf travel brand.

Wow – the good life just arrived.

How did he make it happen?

I have no doubt that this really happened.  Sometimes serendipity is just there for you and good things happen.

But there were several pre-conditions needed for this beautifully desirable outcome:

1. Track record expertise in marketing brands
2. A clear understanding of the surf marketplace (and involvement as a consumer)
3. The client was ready to buy
4. Give away some free advice over a couple of beers to demonstrate expertise / build the relationship
5. Right place, right time, friendly fellow, made friends and KAPOW – new client.

Except for the last, every other one of these is a deal enabler.

Missing any one of them, it would have been virtually impossible for Srini to close this deal.  Take our expertise in the rowing marketplace.  We now have three clients who sell into the space and proposals out to two more.  The last proposal happened because we were at a regatta and got chatting… in fact, read steps 1 through 5 above – that’s EXACTLY what happened.  Now we’re waiting for the client to decide to hire us.

Why did this new client relationship happen?

Because of the four points listed above.

So take your business development plan and check out the steps in our biz dev methodology

1 – state your business

4 – profile raising

5 – relationship development

Each will help you position yourself appropriately to be in the right place for those relationships to blossom and hopefully you’ll also land your ‘dream’ client!  Well done Srini, we applaud you.

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How big does your company need to be before you use marketing professionals?

For brands who are growing  and becoming profitable there comes a time when you choose to professionalise your marketing.  Many businesses decide at this point that they have two choices: to hire a staffer or to buy in expertise from an agency.

Why you need better marketing

The needs are clear – you want more traction with your marketing, you suspect that there are better ways of doing promotion and marketing to get inbound leads and you can afford a budget just for marketing.  These are good signs.

You have identified clearly that your brand has a need and the possible shortcomings of your current set-up.

Hire versus buy: the dilemma

There are advantages and disadvantages – the internal member of staff will need to have well-rounded skills in a range of marketing disciplines (web, advertising, PR, copywriting, print design) and therefore a senior hire with this range of skills is more expensive than a junior.

Using an agency also requires decisions about their skills and area of expertise compared with the type of marketing and communications activity your brand has done in the past or plans to do in the future.

Costs are usually the determining factor

It may be less costly to hire external advisers compared to the cost of a senior member of staff – compare the full cost of hiring and paying (including office costs) a new senior marketer with the price an agency would charge you.

Have a couple of ‘chemistry’ or getting-to-know-you meetings with local marketing agencies and ask their advice.  Also ask to speak to a couple of their recent clients to see if they also made the same transition.

A third option worth reviewing is using a freelancer.  You don’t have the full hire costs of a full time person but can often get very experienced people at lower fee rates.  Check out the freelance hire websites like eLance.com and Freelance.com, Freelancer.com and guru.com.  I’ve successfully hired people for my agency and for clients using eLance.

Creative Agency Secrets has two current clients who use us for mentoring work.  They hired a junior marketer and we speak weekly to review their work, priorities and give guidance.  Could this work for you?  Give us a call – we always offer a free 20 minute first call.

In the meanwhile here are a few other articles that may help you figure out what to do

• Advertising – do it yourself or hire
• Hire a PR firm or do it yourself?
• Do it yourself internet marketing, or hire
• Hubspot offers inbound marketing tutorials for people using its website / content marketing system.
• Read Creative Agency Secrets’ assessment of Hubspot and how to do it yourself
• SEO do it yourself or hire a professional
• Small Business marketing – DIY or hire a pro?
• Web design – do it yourself or hire someone
• DIY or hire a market research company?

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Getting awesome marketing campaigns for your brand is your aim.  Getting the right agency and the right brief is key.

In our experience, time and again, we find that a poorly executed campaign can be traced back to sloppy agency selection and poor briefing.  Any time invested up front at the beginning of the campaign will be repaid many times over in a successful outcome.

So we’ve done some research for you and here are our top 5 steps for selecting an agency

1. Write a short list – yes we mean a short list.  That means fewer than ten names on it – preferably five.  When compiling your list have about three criteria that are critical and each agency must have.  These could relate to the type of work (SEO, content marketing, direct mail); the location of the agency (geography) or the industry sector in which they are experienced (B2B, food and drink).  Some people also put emphasis on not having conflicts of interest.
2. Reduce your short list to a VERY short list.  This is the group you will interview:  Now prepare for the interviewing stage
3. You may want to set out an RFP if that  is the way your industry works or your prcurement department insists on competitive tendering.  Otherwise, set out your campaign plan and what you want your new agency to do with your brand.   Get internal sign-off for the briefing document.  Be sure you’ve thought of everything up front.
4. Call each agency on your list.  Introduce yourself and your company, and tell them you’d like to include them in your agency selection process.  Three reasons to do this 1. it allows any agency to opt out of the process right away. 2.  It enables you to speak directly to an appropriate individual at the agency and begin establishing a rapport. 3. It assures that you will be sending your agency selection document to the right person.

Part two of this post will publish tomorrow.

With thanks to Webbiquity for giving us the idea for this post.

If you are an agency looking for more leads take a look at Brands Seeking Agencies – the weekly marketing leads service for creative marketing agencies.

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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?

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A guest post by Jason Falls

The RFP must die.

Or at least the way the process has evolved in today’s marketing world should. On the surface, it seems innocuous. A company or organization issues an request for proposal (sometimes masked as a ‘request for quote’) to several agencies, consultants for firms. They sometimes include ridiculous assignments jammed into even more ridiculous time frames and even sometimes have the audacity for the responder to commence work on creative concepts and ideas that solve the prospective client’s communications problem.

Then the company collects the RFPs, steals the ideas and doesn’t even change the account from the agency they were working with.

If you work in advertising and this hasn’t happened to you, how’s day three on the job?

RFPs from government agencies have spiraled out of control to a level that’s beyond even discussing. I recently received an RFP from a government agency that was 58 pages in length and somewhere along page 29 mentioned they wanted ideas to activate around (and I quote), “so-called social media.”

While I resisted the urge to reply to the contact person with a loud and swift, “Go to hell,” I didn’t respond.

The Problem With RFPs

Agencies want new business. Clients know this and have learned over the years that agencies will jump through crazy hoops to get it. Clients want fresh ideas. Agencies know this and will sometimes undercut their own value by sharing some of those in an RFP or pitch for new business. Clients have learned over the years that there are more agencies in need of new business than there are great ideas, so they use the imbalance to their advantage.

The majority of RFPs, in fact all but one that I’ve ever seen, require creative concepts in order for the agency to be in consideration. The one that I saw that didn’t, I wrote for a client.

This is nothing short of extortion. Especially when the RFP stipulates (which it normally does, or the agency is dumb enough to) the ideas are transferred and owned by the client regardless of the agency’s win or loss of the business.

So clients take advantage of agencies. Agencies know if they don’t adhere to the idea giveaway, their competition gladly will, so they have little choice but to participate.

The brand is to blame for asking for work without pay. The agency is to blame for giving away work without demanding compensation.

But neither side is likely to take the high road on the ethical side of things, so we have ourselves a Catch 22.

The Only Hope

All that an agency can hope for is market share or diversification of revenue that is so overwhelming they don’t need the new business bad enough.

In early 2009, while still working with Doe-Anderson, a great full-service advertising agency in Louisville, I had the task of putting together a digital marketing dream team of partners for a major brand. I hand-picked several of the top boutique firms specializing in social media, email marketing, search engine optimization, mobile marketing and design and called them each to talk about participating in my little RFP process. I clarified that I would not ask for their creative work, that I only wanted to hear how they would approach solving the communications problem at hand and how they would fit in with a large, multiple-agency team to work on behalf of the client. From that information, I would ask them each several questions and then choose the firm in each category I felt was the best fit for our needs.

When I called one of the companies I was told, “I’m sorry, we don’t respond to RFPs.”

Half of me screamed, “WHAT? DO YOU KNOW WHICH BRAND YOU’RE PASSING ON?” And the other half screamed, “GOT ANY OPENINGS?!”

It turns out that particular firm had developed several products around its niche and had the advantageous position to only work with companies they wanted to work with. They told me they don’t respond to RFPs because if the client in question wants the best in the business, they don’t need to compare and contrast, they just hire them. They only wanted to work with people who wanted to work with them. Period.

On one hand, it reeks of arrogance. Here’s hoping they never fall off that pedestal and need clients. On the other hand, it’s where I would want my agency or consultancy to be and I admire the hell of them for taking that stand.

If only everyone did.

The Solution

Like any long-standing, traditional process that has morphed into a problem (i.e. – health care, government bureaucracy, doctor’s visits) there’s no one solution to the RFP problem. It will take a combination of a lot of things to fix:

• Companies and brands need to recognize that creative concepts are an agency’s bread and butter and shouldn’t be asked for without compensation
• Agencies need to place a better value on their work and either ask for compensation, ownership or refuse to provide creative concepts
• Agencies that undercut competitors by violating that stance should be penalized somehow

Will any of that happen? Probably not. Ad agency and PR firm creative concepts aren’t exactly earth-shattering utilities that need some sort of regulation.

But sooner or later agencies are going to realize the cost-benefit of the dog-and-pony show isn’t in their favor and stop responding. If you think the current state of marketing is bad now, just wait until the crappy firms get all the business.

In that scenario, everyone loses.

Mitch Ditkoff has some more rational ideas for improving the RFP process over at The Heart of Innovation I hope you brand-side folks will consider as well.

This article was written by Jason Falls and can be viewed in full here

About Jason Falls

Jason Falls is the founder and editor of Social Media Explorer and its companion learning community Exploring Social Media. He is a leading thinker, educator, speaker and consultant in the world of social media marketing, public relations, digital marketing and communications. Please connect with him on Twitter (@JasonFalls).

Related articles

• Negotiating the RFP Process – Advice for Communicators from Robert Udowitz (prconversations.wordpress.com)
• 6 Powerful Questions Every RFP Needs (hyperdiskmtkg.wordpress.com)
• The Art of Pitching – Preparing for a Business Pitch (creativeagencysecrets.com)

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Engago technologies have created an application that allows you to gather information about customers that visit your website. Their application helps reveal which companies visit your website, what they’re looking for and their buying intentions. With necessary actions, this information can be used to generate potential leads.

To summarise their web service we have made a short overview outlining the major steps.

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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)

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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)

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