A recurring theme in this book is that there’s someone else out there that you need to bring in at this very early stage. It’s the person (or persons) to whom you are pitching. They too will have something to gain from the outcome of the pitch. This is the source of the desire you hope to create. You just need to find out, very precisely, what it is. This chapter is about how to check out the individuals on the buying team, and what you can infer from their professional behaviour to date.
Part of my work involves assessing ‘lost pitches’ on behalf of clients, during which I get to hear at first hand from the buyers how they think the pitch went and why they made their decision. When I started doing these, I used to think that most pitch decisions would be difficult ones, with strong competitors going head to head with little to choose between them. I was half right. In a pitch involving four or five competitors, it tends to be extremely easy to eliminate two or three straight away. Sometimes there’s some debate about who the winner should be, and sometimes one competitor comes a very close second. But the thing that surprised me most was just how simple it is for buyers to rule out the majority of pitch contestants. Most pitch contestants don’t merely lose, they miss by a mile. It happens all the time.
Demonstrate an interest in your customer, not in yourself
A pitch criticism I’ve heard in various guises many times is, ‘They were brilliant when it came to talking about themselves, but I can hardly remember them asking anything about me.’ Perhaps that’s a failing that is particular to advertising agencies, but I suspect not. I think it’s just more amplified in an advertising pitch. The hero of any pitch should be the customer. Not you. This applies even when you don’t have a lot of time to make your pitch. My company runs business-to-business ‘speed pitching’ events, which bring together buyers and sellers in the creative industries. The feedback from these events matches the feedback from our pitch debrief work. The most common complaint is that those doing the pitching have got the wrong end of the stick in terms of understanding the buyer’s real requirements. This means the pitchers have jumped to conclusions (probably the default conclusions they normally jump to – see the section on cognitive dissonance on page 97), haven’t listened properly and/or didn’t ask enough of the right questions in the first place.
At our ‘speed pitching’ events, the agencies doing the pitching tend to fall into two main camps. Each pitch session lasts precisely 11 minutes, and the first camp is comprised of those who see it as an opportunity to download as much information about themselves as they possibly can within those 11 minutes. These are the ones who tend to get a red light in our traffic-light rating system. The explanatory comments from the buyers are usually fairly scathing – they really do not like having to spend time (even 11 minutes of it) in the company of human brochure-ware. One buyer put her point of view to me rather memorably after one event: ‘If I wanted to waste time listening to some muppet read out the standard flannel, I could go and sit in a conference. If these people aren’t bright enough to take the opportunity to discuss what (company name) are looking for, I mean specifically, then I’m sorry but they’re too stupid to be working with us anyway.’ Well said! Who said pitching was supposed to be a one-way means of communication?
Any meeting in a pitch process is an opportunity first for you to find out about your prospect – and for them to find out about you second.
In the other camp are the people who view the 11 minutes as 11 minutes of cross-examination time. The most successful agencies at our events – according to the people they pitch to – are those that, after a very quick heads-up on who they are and what they do, get straight into a discussion about the buyers’ current situation, needs, preferences, preferred way of working and so on. Only in the last few minutes do they begin to talk about how they propose to address these issues, in a very specific way, probably referring to a few success stories that will now be directly relevant to what has been discussed. The highly specific nature of this final stage of the session whets the appetite of the buyers (who are now hearing exactly the kind of thing they wanted to hear). They are already beginning to feel the desire. The session ends with them agreeing to continue the conversation separately, as soon as a slot can be found in their diaries. A brilliant result. Intelligent questioning and intelligent listening enable the seller to work out exactly what to say to the buyer to move the pitch process on to the next stage.
The customer is not always right – and sometimes they lie
It therefore follows that you need to consider what it is that your buyers want and how you are going to make them a hero. Making your buyer a hero is never a bad strategy. The problem is that they often make it hard for you to find out what the real criteria for success are. What they say initially or in the brief may not represent the full truth. It may be incomplete; it may contain assumptions and conclusions that don’t stack up.
A useful way to deal with this comes from the world of academia. People often ask how an MA in history from Oxford is at all relevant to a career in advertising. What, they ask, has history got to do with anything? At which point I argue that, in addition to the inherent value of the study of history (don’t get me started!), it teaches you a method of thinking that is highly relevant to pitching. It all starts with a question that you have to answer. You go to your sources and examine the evidence, aiming off for any inbuilt bias. You then construct an argument of your own and repurpose the evidence to back up your own thesis. Finally, you have to defend your point of view in a one-on-one tutorial. Just like a pitch. It starts, as I said, with a question.
Assumptions are there to be challenged
Just as in the study of history, questions posed by buyers usually generate choices. A history question, such as ‘Explain the reasons behind the breakdown of the political system in England between 1638 and 1642’, opens up options; do you accept the premise of the question (that the political system did break down – and did so between those years), or do you challenge it, either on the basis of degree or timing?
In business, here is a real example that follows exactly this model. The founder of a food manufacturing business gave an interview to one of the popular business magazines. He was asked what professional regrets he had. His answer was that he regretted not being able to grow the business quickly enough to invest in advertising and thus build a bigger and more successful brand. A small comment containing a big assumption – that in order to build a successful brand you have to invest in advertising, and invest heavily. If you were pitching to him in connection with marketing communications, you would have to make a choice. Do you accept his view that a big advertising campaign is the key to building his brand? Or, conversely, do you point out that there are plenty of examples of successful brands, both national and global, which have been built via means other than advertising? You could argue that although he thinks he wants to be able to run a big advertising campaign, what he actually needs (to build a bigger and more successful brand) is something completely different. It would be wise to establish that before the pitch.
Acquiring evidence
Depending on your level of access, the obvious thing to do is to quiz the prospect as thoroughly as possible on every aspect of the brief, including the most basic of assumptions. Leave no stone unturned, and don’t be afraid to ask questions to which the answers seem obvious. The next level of research is where you switch into ‘historian’ mode and interrogate the sources. Your targets may have written things themselves. From authoring a major report to one of those ‘day in the life’ features in their staff magazine, there could be something useful there. I turned up to a pitch once on a motorcycle, knowing full well (thanks to a piece in his company’s staff magazine) that the prospect was a motorcycle nut. Your targets may also have had things written about them. Go through press archives. Reports of job moves within the trade press are very useful. The typical format is:
David Brent has been appointed head of marketing at Rainbow Box and Carton. He will be working alongside the CEO to develop new product areas. He joins after 18 months at Happy Valley Cardboard, where he trebled sales of Happy Landings Toilet Tissue through a controversial discounting policy.
These articles tell us a lot. The information about where people have come from, what they did and why they left give us clues as to how they might react in various situations. David Brent is ambitious (as his short but successful tenure at HVC indicates), he now has a new product development brief and he’s not scared of rocking the boat. When pitching to him, we would adjust the volume up and down in a very different way from if we were pitching to someone who had a track record of erring on the side of caution.
Erring on the side of caution tends to be a feature of CEOs who have moved into that role via the finance director/CFO route. The career path of senior targets is very useful to know, whether or not you are pitching directly to them. Corporate culture and attitudes tend to disseminate down from the top. A cautious CEO breeds caution in the lower ranks. A real go-getter of a CEO, who was a useful amateur boxer in his younger days, is more likely to build a culture that is more aggressive and willing to take calculated risks. The pitch to these two organisations would be very different.
Social networking sources can be useful. LinkedIn, for example, is interesting for the people your target is linked to. Who are they, what do they do and what are they like? If your target has been endorsed or recommended, there will be an explanation of why that person is being endorsed and what characteristics are being acknowledged. As the study of history tells us, most sources contain some sort of bias. Anything written by anyone in PR can be assumed to be dripping with bias. It’s their job. Anything written by someone who is junior to your target, such as a recommendation in LinkedIn, can also be assumed to be thoroughly self-serving. It might, however, tell us how our targets like to have themselves reported.
Your best, most accurate and up-to-date view of a prospect will come from someone who currently works with your target as a supplier or partner. It should be easy enough to discover other companies working alongside your prospect, and there’s no reason why you can’t talk to them. It’s a little like a reverse interview situation, in which the interviewee is checking the references of the interviewer. You could explain that you are in discussion with your prospect, you’re doing a bit of due diligence of your own and just want to check that they deal with their suppliers in a reputable way. The answer will probably be yes and then, as a throw-away line you can ask the real question: ‘So do you know Mark Squires then? Oh really! What’s he like?’
Context matters – because people are different
Having gathered your contextual information about the individuals you are going to be facing off against, you can begin to build your argument. It may already be becoming clear whether you will couch your arguments in the language of seizing opportunities, stealing a march over competitors, taking a bold leap forward. Or whether perhaps it will be better to emphasise that your solution is the risk-free choice, delivering a solid and predictable result executed by a company famed as being the ultimate safe pair of hands. I say this because it doesn’t always occur to people to actually use this kind of contextual information, even when they’ve got it.
It’s not always clear what to do with information you have discovered, because it opens up alternative ways forward. It is the contextual information that helps narrow the options down again.
I reviewed our outsourced IT suppliers not long ago. I spoke to three or four candidate suppliers, and in each case spent some time outlining our current situation – the kit, the software, the reasons why we were considering switching supplier and the kind of solution that would work best for us. I gave them this information because I wanted to make life easy for them, and in turn for me – as I would have four sets of proposals to choose from, each one of which would be spot on in terms of matching my requirements. Two of them came back with a completely standard, menu-based proposal with one piece of personalisation – someone had cut and pasted our logo on to the cover page. Straight in the bin. The third had managed to include an opening paragraph which did, to be fair, parrot back some of the issues I had raised. Sadly, none of these issues were reflected in the body of the proposal, which, like the other two, was clearly a rehash of the bog standard solution. This left me with the incumbent – the fools I wanted to replace in the first place – and so I had to do the pitch all over again. Have you any idea how insulting it can be to your audience to assume that they are exactly the same as any other organisation? Even if you believe they are the same, I can guarantee you that your audience will disagree. Humour them.
All companies assume themselves to be unique. Therefore, no company is automatically going to assume that a ‘standard’ offering is going to be right for them. A degree of personalisation is always going to be appropriate, even if it’s only a few small changes. These few small changes will make a bigger impact than you might imagine, because they show that you have listened to and taken account of the needs and concerns of your prospect. Your prospect will be pleased. Perhaps they mentioned that support is required only between 8.30 am and 6 pm, in which case don’t give them the ‘standard’ 24-hour service. Supply it only when it’s needed, or if you can’t supply anything other than 24-hour support knock some money off so the client doesn’t have to pay extra for an overspecified service. If you know that your prospect is not a detail person, then don’t give them 34 pages of fine detail without a summary section on page 1 – and make sure you have invested time in making the summary both as comprehensive as possible and as short as possible. Equally, if you discover your prospect is cautious and doesn’t like leaping into things, suggest a way in which they can buy in smaller stages over a longer period. (By getting them to buy into something smaller now, you will reap the benefits down the line when you have cemented your relationship with them and won their trust.) Small changes with a big impact – why would you not do that, in any pitch scenario?