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5 Questions to ask a creative agency at your pitch

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Interviewing the brand and being interviewed as the agency are core skills for pitching.

Getting to “the close” for new business and a signature on the contract requires a clear purchase decision from a brand decision maker.  If you are pitching to a brand – prepare for these questions that they should be asking you.

When you get invited to pitch there are 2 reasons you are in the room

  1. Your track record indicates you should be good enough to do the job
  2. Your future WILL deliver an excellent job
The questions are designed to reassure the brand marketing team that you will be in their future – collaborating, partnering.

Chief Marketing Officer pitch questions to agency

So how can you tell what the future of this agency will be?  the same old, same old competent delivery of past campaigns or new and exciting incremental creativity that will accelerate your brand in front of consumers?

First question: Vision

What do you, the agency, think is the future of marketing/advertising?

You want to know whether they are aware of new technologies, brands moving to new social platforms and integrating mobile solutions into their campaigns.

Second question: New Hires

Tell us about the new team members who have joined this past year.

What are the characteristics of these people and why did they join the team?  Are they crazy future-ologists, or competent deliverers.  Will they bring new expertise to the team (see answer to question 1 above) and can you see your brand leveraging their knowledge to advantage?

Third question: Team Structure

What is your creative team structure and composition?

Listen hard to how many ‘traditional’ job titles are described.  Find out about the digital specialists – are they in a separate group who get brought in to assist or are they part of the core delivery group.  What about outsourcing production and expert tool creation – how honest is the agency about areas in which they are not expert and are buying in talent.

Fourth question: Modern Marketing Communications

Tell us about recent campaigns that were not advertising-led

How many message delivery tools have they used that were not print or TV advertising, direct mail/email or public relations.  Look for innovation and incorporation of ‘gamification’, apps, integration with social media (leading edge at the time of writing is Pinterest, G+), brand collaborations and joint ventures.

Fifth question: The Delivery Team

Who will be working on our account and why?

The individual attributes of the core account team matter.  This will help you get round the agency that pitches with one team and delivers with another.  Why does the agency pick each individual and what are their skills – you’ve got to work with these people.  Go and check them all out on Linked In and Facebook.

The Agency’s reply 6 questions

We found this post from W+K London in which they tried to give the reciprocal questions the agency should ask the client.

  1. Who are the decision makers on the pitch and on the agency’s work?
  2. What are your criteria for judging the success of your agency’s work?
  3. Is your inclination to aim high and do something extraordinary, or to settle for the ordinary and avoid the risk of failure?
  4. What made you consider us for this pitch?
  5. How many agencies are pitching and who are they?
  6. Will you pay a pitch fee?

Go forth and pitch.  But be careful!

Thanks to Edward Boches for the original inspiration for this article

Read more articles on 3 New Business Pipeline and 6 Creating Opportunities from our archive.

 

 

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How to make inbound enquiries work for you

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One of the nicest things about getting your biz dev working well is when inbound enquiries start to come to the business.

I am working with Websters , a niche chartered accountancy practice specialising in service charge accounting.  They have worked hard on a new website and blog as well as some collateral and internal management structures to support business development.

Websters aren't yet ready for the big formal launch event for the site and while it's broadly complete, we are continuing to use it and improve some of the features.  

And so I am surprised and delighted to find that people are signing up to receive their newsletter, the RSS feed and printed brochureware about the business.

Setting up the fields

When I set up the fields for the enquiry form  I originally thought that a simple Name, Email, Company name and country would suffice. 

But I was surprised by the number of folk who want to receive information about the Websters company.

This leaves them with a choice – send electronic information or print.  But for print we need a postal address.  This gave me an idea….

Rather than change the form to include postal address information, why not just research them online and phone them up. This is good becausse

  1. you can find out if they are a real person
  2. you can ask them if they prefer print or emailed information (customer chooses)
  3. you can do a bit of"digging research" into their organisation for your database
  4. you can ask them straight out if they want to have a credentials presentation or chemistry meeting
  5. you can make a fair assessment of whether they are a prospect and at what stage of the pipeline.

Hooray – i know what we'll do – a targeted phone calling session.

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Golden Questions

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A “Golden Question” is one in which the answer tells you more than the question itself would imply.

Useful for research, discovery and us biz dev types who need to quickly assess new prospects and whether they will buy from us.

I learnt about it from Don Peppers who integrated it into his CRM method (Identify:Differentiate:Interact and learn: Customise).  His classic was to find out whether a customer had a high propensity to buy premium brand pet food.  The question was “Do you buy your pet a christmas present?”.  Neat, isn’t it?  Those who do, are more likely to lavish spend on their animals than those who don’t.  Simple.
And so how have I used it with my clients?  They are mainly working in B2B areas and so the question set needs revising depending on your particular positioning and needs.

#1 Digital Agency selling high end technology back-end services

Julian wanted to be able to find out whether a prospect wanted a simple web site or one with higher functionality.  Working with him, I developed two questions to help him quickly filter people:

Question 1: What was the date of your first website?

Question 2: How many times since then have you re-launched or substantially revised it?

Why does this work? With the first quesiton, he can tell if your company is an early adopter or late arrival for the new web technologies.   And with the second, he can assess your likely sophistication as a web user for marketing.  Each time you re-launch a website the functionality is improved. Relaunching every 2 years means you are more likley to be interested in moving to leading edge features.

So, how does your company stack up against his questions?

#2 Agency working with start-up web businesses

These lads want to be able to find out how far down the road you are to getting your website functional.  THey also need to find out the degree of technological sophistication of the person they are talking to.  Pitching yourself too “techy” and you’ll quickly lose the interest of a punter but being too simplistic has the same effect.  Similarly their services vary depending on the stage of the business and how close to launch the start-up business is.

Question 1: Have you got your requirements document written?

Question 2: Are you happy with your user numbers?

The first establishes business stage and sophistication and the second devines the success of the marketing support put into an already functioning site.

Now what golden questions are right for your business?  Can you use them to shorten your prospecting time frame and more quickly find prospects who have the potential to become customers?

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Guest Post: How to Create a Powerful Sales Presentation – Chris Gallagher

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As a business development agency with an involvement in the entire sales process, we help our clients to influence the brands we’ve created opportunities to pitch to.

This article of insightful tips helps you to structure a professional and powerful sales presentation so that you can pitch your agency with conviction, confidence, and clarity.

Tip 1: Define the objective of your presentation

Are you looking to persuade (e.g. sales meeting), inspire people into action (e.g. budget decision makers) or educate (e.g. brands will want to know you understand their industry and target audience therefore new interesting insights will add credibility to your presentation). In a pitch or sales meeting situation, you will be looking to do all the above. The presentation content should then reflect your objectives, which can be measured quantitatively or qualitatively.

Examples of measurements are:

Sales: Did you win the project or progress to the next stage?

Inspirational: When questioned, do the decision makers commit to both the principle and action associated with your presentation topic?

Educate: Did your insights create further discussions?

Tip 2: Understand your audience and venue

Sometimes the presentation title defines the audience.  Sometimes it’s the audience who define the title.

Things to consider on your audience are:

* Who are the people attending your presentation (marketing, finance, procurement)?

* How many will there be, and from what backgrounds?

* How will your audience be dressed, and expect you to dress (ideally the presenter should be aligned in appearance to the audience. In large corporations, shirt and tie is expected. In Marketing Communications, if you are targeting other agencies i.e. white labelling work, it’s more likely to be smart casual. Pitching this wrong can create a barrier to building rapport with your audience.

In terms of venue:

* The size of venue needs to be appropriate to the number of expected attendees.

* Ensure that you know exactly what technology is available to you and take what you need to with you. Even where the venue supplies this, always have a back-up plan. A decade ago this meant having printed copies for all your audience. Now it’s more likely to be a laptop and USB to store your presentation content

Tip 3: Using PowerPoint or video presentations

Using a poorly prepared and visually unattractive presentation can decrease the overall value of your content, as well as the perception of its delivery.

A few simple rules to avoid this happening are:

  • Make the presentation visually interesting. In an ideal world, video should be used, but this can be impractical if you need to edit your presentations frequently (e.g. sales), where PowerPoint will suffice. That said, you can easily embed a mini-video presentation within an otherwise editable presentation. This can be driven by some small headers on the front page of a presentation, alongside your company logo (typical headings for a sales presentation can be “testimonials”, “financials”, and “proposal”)
  • Do not overuse words and bullets. The rule of thumb here is that if I can present or read the content of your presentation without you being there, then it is a poor presentation. Only rely on key phrases or topic headers. Additionally, a thirty slide PowerPoint with nothing but bullets on it will bore your audience to sleep. Imbed “interest peaks” into your presentation (see below).
  • Do not under use or over use animation. Often people feel the need to overuse animation, which can become distracting and over the top. Equally, dropping an entire slide into view means that the audience will inevitably read ahead of where you want them to be. Bring each salient point in as required.
  • Make sure that you know in advance how much time you will have and plan your presentation accordingly. In sales presentations, if the client reduces the time you have to pitch, do not rush through a one-hour presentation in fifteen minutes. Discuss the most salient points or re-appoint to another time.

Tip 4: Create “interest peaks”

A standard presentation is 40 minutes in length. In this time, your audience will be at their most attentive in the first 10-12 minutes, and the last 5. This is because people “drift off” during presentations that are heavy in content, visually dull, or poorly presented. To counter this it is important to continually keep your audiences attention by offering new, interesting stimuli in terms of content and delivery.

Good methods of achieving this are:

  • Anecdote – People like to hear a good, relevant story.
  • Quotes – It is common to open and close presentations with quotes, which make an important point related to the presentation title, or to inject some humour.
  • Jokes – On that very subject, jokes can keep audience energy high, but only if they are tactful, relevant to the presentation, and funny.  Do not stop and wait for rapturous applause, because if it isn’t forthcoming you will look very silly indeed.
  • Video or film – Changing the media you use will inevitable re-engage those lost during the presentation.
  • Using different presenters – A single person for a long period can become dull. If it is realistic, and assuming both are good presenters in their own right, this can help to keep a longer session more engaging.
  • Activities – It is said, “you remember 10% of what you hear, up to 80% of what you hear, see and actually experience yourself”. Where possible get your audience involved in appropriate activities.

Tip 5: Body language

The key mistakes made by inexperienced presenters are:

  • Shuffling from side to side
  • Playing with pens, watches, or anything you’re holding
  • Staring at a single point or at the back of the room. Equally it’s poor etiquette to look at the screen whilst presenting. You should know the content, and even if you do not, use confidence cards for guidance. Remember YOU are your best visual aid in making presentations interesting.

Chris Gallagher is the Strategic Development Director for UpFront Business Development

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