What’s the secret to winning a pitch?
This week’s edition of Agency Advice asks industry chiefs the literal million-dollar question: what’s their secret to winning a pitch? And in the arms race to impress a potential client, how much is too much?
You’d struggle to find a marketer or agency boss who thinks the pitch process is perfect. In fact, whenever the people who do pitches are polled, it’s easy to get the impression it’s a process that precisely no one is happy with: lots of work for no guarantee of reward; an alchemical, hard-to-pin-down matter of commerce and relationships boiled down to a few meetings and a slideshow; a good chance that the whole process will end in no one at all winning any work.
Still, only a lucky few are able to exist in the marketing business without pitching at all. So agencies the world over still have to suit up (or put a Carhartt painter’s jacket on) and brave the pitch, a room in which infinite possibilities open up, only some of which lead to getting the business. Big and brash or small and quiet? Big picture or detail?
We asked a bumper crop of agency pitchers how they wade through the thicket.
Louisa O’Connor, managing director, Seen Presents: “Really, you’re in the hands of the pitch gods but it helps to put the ‘boring bits’ into something more interesting – those important but less sexy elements: how can you show that without using PowerPoint? A video, a TikTok, a prop... Think about a format that will resonate with your client or bring a smile (even if they’re reading your disaster recovery plan).”