Leading a Pitch Team
How to Pitch is something most of us know very well. But even experts can risk “falling in love with their own idea” at the expense of their audience’s belief you can get the job done better than anyone else. Pitching is the alchemy of turning your audience's disbelief into relief right before your eyes, equal parts of sensing, selling, and entertaining – and it is a competition where jobs, money and futures can be in play indeed.
Even though learning how to pitch can really only come from coaching and observing others try, fail and succeed, I have a few guidelines for helping a pitch team prepare.
Make It The Best Story Ever Told! If you sound bored or uninspired - well.....Your pitch has to be authentically enthusiastic. You and your team have to be excited about the ideas you are presenting -- more importantly, you have to bring the audience with you. To succeed, you have to feel the room, look for cues, listen to what may be motivating a question, and try to shepherd the room your way. Rehearse and love it!
Are We Answering The Brief? Designate someone on your team to filter your pitch presentation through this question. It should not be the person writing the deck.
Am I Making Sense? Imagine your audience of client/decision-makers is incredibly busy. Right up until the moment they arrived in a room for your pitch, they were knee deep a kaleidoscope of distractions unrelated to your pitch. And now you have their undivided attention. Don’t lose it by assuming anything. Quickly recap the brief, and throughout your presentation remind the decision-maker audience how the research, strategy, creative, etc. is tracking - in other words, remind them how you are solving their problem.
Illustrate, Don’t’ Read. Early on, I made the mistake of filling slides with copy. It’s an essential step to organize your thoughts - but remember to edit it (way) down for the actual presentation. Many years ago, I was pitching a celebrity CEO in Manhattan. I was nervous because I wasn't the only author of the deck but was the sole presenter, and I hadn't adequately rehearsed to the point of being able to look away from the deck to control the room. I had left too much type on the slides and defaulted to reading them – and he called me on it. Never made that mistake again. And it taught me to be ready, at any point in a presentation, to go off-script with a CEO, to engage, sell and entertain on what they want to talk about. It’s still a pitch, you are still competing.
Be Focused and Efficient. Similarly, it is a mistake to fill your pitch with endless creative variations – the client will get confused about what you are recommending, or may just get fatigued with idea after idea. Unless your pitch strategy is to breeze through secondary executions to register the depth of you thinking and campaign variations, try to rein in and focus your Creative Directors.
What Are You Asking Me To Decide Here? A pressurized C-suite audience or other time-challenged decision-makers may well ask you this – and it is not good. Pre-empt the question by explaining why you are showing each slide and/or creative exercise. For example, if you are building consensus with insights from your great research, be sure to introduce an insights section with its role in your pitch and thinking – don’t assume the audience will figure it out.
3 Things To Remember. My test for the effectively organized pitch is whether the audience can walk out of your presentation and recount to someone who was not in the room what your top 3 points were. Maybe it was just 1 or 2 things, but for sure it will never be the 4 or 5. You are equipping them with tools to remember, sell-in and share your ideas after the pitch is over. So set these points up at the outset, keep mentioning them as you unfurl your presentation and wrap-up with them.
Have An Organizing Creative Idea. This is obvious of course for creative agencies that a successful strategy rests on creative idea, technology platform and/or data insight. But for other disciplines (PR, Social Media, Paid Media, Content, etc.) – you can imbue your presentation with a winning “surprise and delight” campaign idea by organizing your pitch around a core create idea, an idea that will excite journalist, create consistency in live events, focus media buys and most importantly, make your audience dream.
There are many insights, rules of the road and examples of what to avoid for a successful pitch. And while it may be true that clients cannot be faulted for bad work from an agency, they can be responsible for a bad pitch.