Agencies, let's stop 'pitching' - our clients will love us for it

Traditional Pitching Serves No-one

5 years ago, I lived for pitches.

In my Account Director role, my job was to bring in business to my agency - the more the better.

How did I do it?

Winning pitches.

Find them, understand them, spend 3 weeks preparing them, pitch them...

Win some

Lose some

At the time it was about 50/50... Which I was delighted with.

It slowly dawned on me, however, that this pitching business set agencies up to fail.

Firstly, it turns our wonderful agency solutions into commodities that can be judged based on one key metric - price.

Secondly, it doesn't allow for true discovery work that always increases the quality of an agency's solution.

Finally, we have to fork out all the work before we even know if we're going to be paid.

Pitches don't serve agencies.

The stranger realisation I had, however, came 2 years later.

Pitches don't serve clients either.

It took me actually conducting one myself to realise this.

You see, conducting a pitch is incredibly time consuming. To source agencies to take part, arrange numerous meetings, bring your stakeholders to the table, assess each proposal, negotiate with the winner.

Before you've even started the project, the client has already invested nearly 50 hours of time....

Imagine if they spent 50 hours preparing one agency for success?! How much better would the results be??

In short, pitching, and pitches are a waste of time for all involved.

So what's the alternative?

As an agency, I suggest you insist on 3 things the next time you have an opportunity to work with a client.

#1 - Thorough Discovery Process

I'm certain most of you do this when you have the opportunity - make sure you do it in every new business setting.

The Discovery Process is not negotiable.

It's impossible to prepare an impactful proposal without truly understanding what the client in front of you really needs - this is uncovered in discovery.

A good discovery process should include run through 4 layers:

1. The Facts - how are they currently operating in the areas you will help them with?
2. The Problems - what problems have they got right now that need addressing?
3. The Impact - what impact are these problems having?
4. The Cause - what is causing these problems to occur?

In each of these areas, be prepared to bring to light extra issues that the client may not already know about.

Once you've carried out your discovery, it's time to look to the future.

#2 - Agreement on Success

Some agencies shy away from this because they're slightly reluctant to guarantee results.

However, not agreeing on what success looks like when starting a new client engagement is setting you both up for failure.

It's crucial to understand why the client wants to work with you, and specifically what results they are hoping to achieve from your work together.

Specifically is a hugely important word in that sentence.

If a client wants 'more leads' - how many more do they want?

If a client wants 'to increase their social presence' - on which socials? And increase by how much? What is a result they will be happy with in 1, 3 and 6 months?

As an expert in your field, being able to judge how realistic these goals are should come naturally and that's exactly what you do. If a client's expectations and desires aren't conceivable, then this is the time to tell them!

Not 2.5 months into the project.

#3 - Outline Roadmap Back by IP

Most agencies are fantastic at laying out the phases and roadmap of a project, and this is extremely important.

However, many miss an opportunity to make themselves stand out even more.

Almost all agencies have, use and rely on some very unique Intellectual Property, but few talk about it out loud, especially in a sales situation.

Genuinely unique IP is one of the few ways agencies can really differentiate themselves from every other competitive agency out there.

Before your next proposal or sales call, think about the unique IP that your agency brings to your client work. Then work out the clearest and simplest way to explain it to your clients.

Don't write another project roadmap, without the IP to back-up why you take that approach.

Thought Of The Week: The Perfect Proposal

In July 2021, we developed a brand new Authority Agency Sales Process to help embed these three elements, and many more, into a consistent and repeatable sales process.

One small piece of this was a proposal template called: The Perfect Proposal Template.

We're feeling generous this week, so wanted to make it available to all of our wider agency network.

You can grab it here:

https://training.oliverduffylee.com/perfect-proposal-template

If you find it useful, I'd be very grateful if you can share your experience of using it on LinkedIn or whatever other platform you like the most :)

Becoming An Authority Agency

For those of you that don't know me, I'm Oliver Duffy-Lee and I run a company called Authority Agency.

Our mission is simple, we want to help as many scale-up agencies to reach and win high quality international clients as we possibly can, whilst also helping the founders to get more time back in their life at the same time.

If that sounds like you, there are 2 ways we can help you immediately.

Free Training

Firstly we run a free Facebook Group and every week we put new training in there for all of our members.

You can join?here :?https://www.facebook.com/groups/authorityagencyformula

Agency Growth Audit

If you want to move faster, you can book an Agency Growth Audit with one of our Scale Specialists. It's a super-quick, free call where we'll help outline what's slowing your growth and show you what's possible in the next 90 days.

If that's you, can you book?here :?https://calendly.com/oliverduffylee/agency-growth-audit-mastermind

I'm very happy to be here on your journey to building the agency of your dreams.

If you ever need any advice, send me a DM.

To your success,

OD-L