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)

It was by accident – part of my job is letter writing in a creative way for all our clients. The medium doesn’t matter, the creative idea behind it is the bit that’s important.

My idea was to write a book about writing letters, coming up with ideas and the process to do it.

I finished the book and sent it off to some publishers. Pearson Professional was interested to meet me. But an hour after the meeting, it was clear to them that the book was too niche and they didn’t want to publish it. However, they did want the “Brilliant Pitch” title as part of the “Brilliant…” series.

So what happened to the first book?

The analogy is with fly fishing – specimen hunting with the right fly for the right depth, speed of retrieval. All of these things work. Choice of fly, presentation, tackle. The first book hit the filing cabinet and hasn’t seen the light of day yet!

Do you use the book for your own business promotion?

I had a few speaking engagements with D&AD and the City Womens Network when I mentioned it. Sometimes, during a pitch, I brought the book out and showed it to prospective clients. But you have to be a bit careful because one of the agency owners to whom we were presenting our credentials (who we won) said “well you’ve got some fucking confidence giving me a book like that at the start of your pitch.”

What is the core of your message in the book?

The premise of the book is the “IEDA” process but that is not how people buy in a pitch environment.

What you need to do is change the model and the letters to IDEA

• interest,
• desire,
• evaluation,
• action.

The personal process creates the desire ahead of the decision process. You have to have created the desire before you walk through the idea.

The event pitch is an opportunity to close a decision that is already in the minds of the audience before you arrived. Because if you don’t do that then you can be sure someone else has done it ahead of you and then you have a really tough job on pitch day to turn round a lot of human and personal factors and that’s the hardest job.

Has pitching changed much in the past 5 years?

I think on the face of it yes, because everything has changed in the past 5 years.  But the core principles of effective pitching have not changed at all.

Some things we have lost sight of during this period, e.g. the pure human side of the process.

What else has changed in the past 5 years?

In the world of creative agencies, the paraphernalia of digital has changed – doing pitches on iPads – so the tools of the trade have changed, using moving pictures more than PowerPoint slides which were mainly words. The quality of visual presentation is a lot better there’s a lot of visual content too. The key to success remains the personal side. The fact that “People buy people” is as true as it ever was.

In my experience, the prevalence of things like email make it harder to engage with people. Without email 20 years ago in order to communicate with a pitch prospect during the process you would talk on the phone and meet them face to face. It’s harder now to build personal chemistry.

This is important particularly for agencies. Because often the work entered at the pitch doesn’t actually run. The reason is the clients aren’t as focused on the creative work as the agencies are. Agencies tend to think that the pitch is about doing great work and if it is presented well they win. For clients, they are looking to buy a team of people they can work with next year, the year after and so for them the piece of creative work that you happen to have produced at that moment in time isn’t the most important thing. For clients the question “Do I think I can work with them long term and are they the kind of people who can figure out the right answer going forward?” is more important. This is the process, the workings out and the talent around the table. People, personality and chemistry are still a big deal.

Tell us more about your business

Ingenuity ABM stands for agency brand marketing. When we started we did one thing – we helped agencies find clients. We still do that but we also help sports rights holders find potential sponsors and partners, we run new business events and we also now help clients to find agencies in the digital and direct space.

These are all related and I think we are in the business of “joining up the dots” and trying to do that in a more intelligent and creative way in order to be more effective.

One thing that has changed dramatically over last 10 years is clients’ tolerance threshold for new business approaches – they are all too busy.  Agencies have never been the biggest part of a marketing director’s job but there are too many agencies.  Post recession there are lots of small start ups of people who have fallen out of bigger agencies.

They are trying to win huge amounts of new business – in a random, shotgun, undifferentiated way. Our approach is more audience-centric. Starting from the needs of particular target audiences and we work back from there which is how we construct intelligent processes based on either a known need of a prospect or a pretty good hypothesis to attract their attention.

In order to make a successful approach, you have to do that and be relevant, timely and preferably brief.

And so as the book says pitching is a process and winning new business is a process and Ingenuity ABM are at the front end of that.  We open up conversations and build relationships and when the time is right for both parties we can put them together and they can engage in a meaningful discussion which will result in a client finding a new agency and the reverse.

Buy Brilliant Pitch: What to know, do and say to make the perfect pitch Amazon.com;

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Of course it's easy to justify re-using stuff if it's for 'charidee' but why not just publish and share?

Creative Brief - £300 bare minimum and £2,500 for the 2 Case Study package up to £4,500 for 10 case studies …. and when I searched on copywriters in London and South East there were none listed!  [but over 30 for the UK listed and so some work needed on sub-categorisation, IMO]

Skillfair - free to clients to advertise briefs and £200 for everyone else …. I have used this twice to post projects and got great responses and placed one job with an agency that applied.  A good service with excellent customer service back-up.

Agency Finder -a 'new' service.  Well it's Reardon Smith Whittaker getting the license to be the European arm of an already-successful US business.  Pay £295 per year and then up this to £3,000 p.a. if you accept the offer to go to a pitch… whether you win or lose.  One of my clients is testing it right now.  Will let you know if they turn up anything useful.