How agencies blew the pitch

"Matt Schow, as online marketing director for Men's Wearhouse, has to deal with this problem all the time. A number of times each year, he'll walk into a pitch from a major agency and see right there on the first slide, his company's name misspelled as "Men's Warehouse."
What kind of client is Mr. Schow that he must have agency reviews "a number of times each year." I would suggest he find one good agency and stay with them for ten years or longer. I couldn't run fast or far enough from an invitation to present for his business. -Ralph Heath

Blaise: I found your article to be informative and well written. However, I believe there is a fine line between working hard to win a piece of business and being played for a fool.

I have been in New Business Development for over 17 years. Over the length of my career I have brought in millions of dollars in new accounts to a variety of types of marketing/advertising agencies. My perspective is slightly different from that of the persons you interviewed.

I believe If you are employed by an agency it is equally important to protect your agency's assets as it is to be prepared for a pitch.

Experience has taught me that before you make your team work their butts off and give away their expertise and hard work for free, you should either have a verbal commitment and be pretty confident ahead of time that you will be awarded the account, or be paid a stipend if the prospect is asking you and your team to develop creative or a full-blown marketing strategy in order to win their account.

I agree it is important to be prepared, to make sure your pitch team understands your prospect's "pain" points, their marketing challenges and goals, their services and products and the decision-making process before presenting them with a proposal of any kind. Up front research needs to be done and lots of questions need to be asked, answered and confirmed in order to recommend something to the prospect that will make sense.

However, in addition to pitching to polite, brilliant and highly communicative marketing leaders and decision-makers, I have experienced rude prospects who never return your calls or emails with your questions after you have been invited to pitch, those who believe it is their right to expect your pitch to be a fully developed marketing campaign or marketing strategy without paying for it, those who give you one set of information to build the proposal but then have a completely different set of needs and criteria when you go back to pitch, and those who make you go through an RFP process just so they can show their boss they had a comprehensive selection process while they had already made their decision. I have also come across arrogant decision-makers who believe that because they work for a well-known company or brand, they can treat agency people as if they were not worthy of their respect or basic courtesy.

Fortunately, I have found these types of decision-makers to be rare. It has been my experience that prospects who are seriously considering hiring your agency will respect your team's time and expertise.

I have learned that the key to success in new business is to avoid wasting too much time and effort on pitching to companies that expect something for nothing and focus on those who view you as an equal instead.

Laureen Peck
Director of Business Development
E-centives

Enjoyed-informative-well worth the time in reading.
Sheldon Stern

Blaise - Very nice and well thought out article written from experience no doubt!

The only thing I might add is that listening to the client can be almost as important as what you present and say. We find that being good listeners helps us get deeper in the client's business and makes for an effective follow-up to the presentation/pitch. Don't feel like you need to run the show and do all the talking.

Not only should an agency know the latest techniques and language, but they should also know the techniques from the past, like the 1980s. So many young (under 40) presenters know nothing of what was learned years ago from the Japanese and others.

Speaking from the agency side, I understand the importance of putting your best creative foot forward when presenting to a client. Specifics of any online marketing campaign should be spelled out beyond the "what's wrong with this picture" path taken by many agencies. The presentation should instead focus on the opportunity for a given online initiative and present a strategic plan of attack by which an agency would go about engaging the target audience and growing your business.

However, I must say the mention of creative mock-ups makes me cringe. As addressed in previous articles, an agency needs to understand the challenges faced by your business in order to spell out the opportunities for growth and ROI. To this end, I prefer the "let's work together to become an extension of your marketing team" approach before moving forward with the design. Bringing creative work to table without such an understanding puts agencies in the awkward position of being critiqued based on creative done in the dark. To make matters worse, I've seen design eerily similar to that which was presented before being told "no" by the client.

The bottom line is that good design (and good marketing strategy) is strategically informed through a collaborative process involving both agency and client. If you select an agency based on speculative comp work, you're simply choosing the "prettiest" of the bunch and risk putting your agency before the interests of your audience and the goals of your business.

Take a moment to absorb this and ask yourself, "when was the last time I wrote a marketing plan without conducting a SWOT analysis?" If a date comes to mind, then perhaps the agency with the prettiest design is the right fit.

Speaking from the agency side, I understand the importance of putting your best creative foot when presenting to a client. Specifics of any online marketing campaign should be spelled out beyond the "what's wrong with this picture" path taken by many agencies. The presentation should instead focus on the opportunity for a given online initiative and present a strategic plan of attack by which an agency would go about engaging the target audience and growing your business.

However, I must say the mention of creative mock-ups makes me cringe. As addressed in previous articles, an agency needs to understand the challenges faced by your business in order to spell out the opportunities for growth and ROI. To this end, I prefer the "let's work together to become an extension of your marketing team" approach before moving forward with the design. Bringing creative work to table without such an understanding puts agencies in the position in the awkward position of being critiqued based on creative done in the dark. To make matters worse, I've seen design eerily similar to that which was presented before being told "no" by the client.

The bottom line is that good design (and good marketing strategy) is strategically informed through a collaborative process involving both agency and client. If you select an agency based on speculative comp work, you're simply choosing the "prettiest" of the bunch and risk putting your agency before the interests of your audience and the goals of your business.

Take a moment to absorb this and ask yourself, "when was the last time I wrote a marketing plan without conducting a SWOT analysis?" If a date comes to mind, then perhaps the agency with the prettiest design is the right fit.

Wow! Complacency can be a real killer, huh? These are great anecdotes. I am forwarding this to my interns so they can pick up this lesson while they are still young and impressionable :)

excellent advice.