8 Things We Know About Pitching

If you go into a pitch with these in mind it might just help you win:

1. Personal confidence. The most important factor is to have confidence in yourself and your abilities. You need to be confident in your personality, appearance, skills, and overall presentation and project this at all times.  Look them in the eye, don’t look at the ground, walk with a straight back and stand tall.
2. Confidence in your agency. You should always be prepared to represent; that means knowing your agency background and skill sets as well as believing in its ability to deliver.  Make sure the rest of your team know this too as it’s very important they’re all drilled in what it so damn good about your agency.
3. Research. Learn about your audience before you even meet them. Never go into a meeting without as much background knowledge as possible.  If you’ve had a first meeting with them, you should have taken away a few little personal pointers that may help too: kids, sports, news, etc.  What are they into?  You should have already found that out.
4. Pace. Don’t waffle. Your audience has a limited attention span.  But don’t speed through it all either; try to maintain a steady pace.
5. Clarity. Concise, clear and creative – that’s really all most potential clients want from their agency partners.  No bullshit.
6. Set up a follow up action. Always set a follow up action during the pitch – be wary of assumptive closes but make sure there’s a reason to go back to the prospect.  Being able to call after a pitch is excellent so that you can find out about how you did.  It is now time to ask if they thought you missed anything and you’ll be able to quickly rectify if something is amiss.
7. Understand the brief. Always be prepared to question a brief and ask prospects for clarity themselves – not doing so means you’ll get it wrong and look arrogant.
8. Do the small-talk.  Not too much, not too little. You need to know about current affairs and anything that you think may be of interest.  Make a joke. Slip something in whilst pitching here and there.  It shows you are a person who understands what is going on the in world.