Fight unfairly - 6 secrets to selling ideas from the best creatives and strategists in the business...

One of the things they don't tell you as a young strategist or creative is that having great smartypants ideas is only a very small part of your job. In fact, it's probably the easiest part.

Unfortunately, there's a big shock waiting.

It often comes as an eye opener for young people entering into the marketing business.

Soon, you realise that your lovingly held ideas have no intrinsic value.

Ideas alone are worth the sum total of nothing. As Derek Sivers writes, ideas are just a multiplier. Or as I would say, 'they're fleeting farts in the wind unless they're actually brought to life'. The value is in seeing them through. The value is in the execution.

Until you can persuade others of how good your ideas are you're stuck as the marketing equivalent of a eunuch - full of endeavour but with no chance of an end product. You're brimming with great thoughts and ideas that in your brain make so much sense and could propel a brand to a higher plane, but without the ability to execute and see them to fruition.

It's a hugely frustrating situation to be in. I know because I've been there.

Get it sold

But there's no point in being an 'ideas person' if those ideas never see the light of day beyond your head or your lovingly prepared slide deck. The secret is to get it sold.

Your idea might be ten times better than the other agency you're pitching against, but that's irrelevant if you can't communicate that incredibly well.

I really believe that every great creative or strategist is also a master at persuasion. Everyone has great ideas, but the best are those that manage to get past 'No' more often than their peers. It's that simple. They have learned the tricks of persuasion and instilling confidence in a client, whether they feel it themselves or not.

The real rigour and tenacity of great creativity and strategy comes with making your concepts buyable.

You need to be part psychologist, getting inside the heads of your clients and understanding their incentives.

And you also need to think like a lawyer, building a case to make yourself and your ideas more credible and buyable to others, chiseling away at the rough edges so as to ensure as little as possible is left to individual subjectivity.

Just like you'd test and edit a campaign to make it resonate with your consumer base, so you must create room for your client to inhabit and relate to your work. They're your first audience.

The most obvious example of needing to persuade is in the pitching process.

We've all felt the hardship of pitches, feeling like you're in some sort of crap reality TV show as you prepare to communicate form the thoughts you've been working on for weeks in bitesize form, the sense of impending dread as you try to read a client's reaction, the pain or immense pleasure of a win.

With an increasingly competitive pitching process fought mainly on cost, every agency is looking for any unfair advantage that they can get, desperately grasping to make it an unfair fight.

Here are six tips from some of the best creative and strategic minds in the business on selling your ideas.

Please share this post with others who you think it may help and check out this APG event which provided the inspiration for this post.

1) Conduct experiments

The first brilliant example of how to sell ideas comes from Jim Carroll. It's the power of real world experimentation.

'If you can demonstrate theatrically your idea or proposition, it goes a long way to making the sale. An experiment can be enough to convince. 

In the original pitch for Polaroid cameras, BBH wanted to understand more about the difference between Polaroid and 35mm cameras. So they sent people out to weddings and asked them to take photos with both, and analysed the results. The Polaroid photos were spontaneous and expressive, where the 35mm shots were posed and this helped them carve out a really distinctive positioning and campaign idea for the brand.

Another theatrical demonstration was on a pitch for milk; so familiar to us all that we never think of it as a beautiful, white, natural drink. So the team re-branded the drink as KIML and filmed responses to this new drink in shopping centres. That simple reversal created awe in place of boring familiarity.'

Richard Shotton is another proponent of this method. Thinking about the bystander effect and diffusion of responsibility, Shotton persuaded creative teams to change copy from 'Blood Stocks are low in Britain' to 'Blood stocks are low in (local area)' eg 'Blood stocks are low in Brixton'. This approach helped create a sense of relevance and urgency for people, and improved propensity to donate blood across the UK.

On a recent podcast, Shotton told the story of pitching for New Look. He had a hunch that the brand wasn't cool and in a bid to prove this, he took two men, took photos of them with New Look and Topman bag, put them up on dating site 'hot or not' and asked people to rate. After two weeks, the exact same photos with just the bag switched out had hugely different results. The Topman photo fared much better.

Experiments like this can make your big idea sing. So use the world as a laboratory to test and illustrate your hypotheses.

2) Show and tell

If you can show along with telling, you're much more likely to get an idea sold in. You might feel intuitively that cheap, nasty prototypes might diminish a creative idea, but often they do the opposite. Seeing something on a slide and getting the chance to play with it, bend and break it are two completely different things.

This is particularly relevant for ideas that are rooted in technology. Creating a quick, dirty early prototype of an app, website or video is a very good way to showcase what you're trying to verbalise.

As Martin Beverley, Executive Strategy Director at adam&eveDDB said at the recent APG event,

'we often focus on telling a story, but actually just demonstrating things can be really powerful. Go one step further and make it feel possible.'

He spoke of how his agency mocked up the famous black and white Skittles pack for Gay Pride month to show a client, helping to sell the idea.

He also gave the example of how the agency created a really crude mock up of the brilliant Honda Type R campaign, which the client instantly loved.

There's an old trick at play here in that the more you can make an idea tangible, then the more difficult it is for a client to say no, since it feels like you've already sunk a lot into making it a reality.

This idea also plays back to the 'Lean Startup' concept of building a 'Minimum Viable Product' where startup develops a new product or website with stripped back but sufficient features to allow early feedback or buy in. What's an 'MVP' for your idea?

3) Reduce, reduce, reduce

It's difficult to buy an idea if it's not clear what you're buying. Many in marketing make the mistake of over intellectualising or blunting their thinking by hiding it in a tangled mess of slides and big words.

We've all given a presentation and throw in a big word that you’d never normally say to ‘impress’ the audience (while cringing on the inside).

We've all over complicated a theme to make it sound deep and meaningful.

But great creatives and strategists reduce to aphorism.

They struggle with editing themselves heavily. They take an idea and boil it down to only it's best, most useful parts. This takes incredible discipline. Like Stephen King says, it's about 'killing your darlings'.

But this is not just about the jargon trap. It's also about using metaphor or analogy to make your idea as succinct and memorable as possible. Jeff Bezos is a master at this. In his shareholder letters every year, Bezos' razor sharp writing delivers a clear strategy for Amazon's thousands of employees and shareholders.

The best example of this clarity is his 'Day One' mantra - that Amazon must focus on remaining a company that is constantly uprooting itself and remaining nimble. These two small words evoke so much.

'I’ve been reminding people that it’s Day 1 for a couple of decades. I work in an Amazon building named Day 1, and when I moved buildings, I took the name with me. I spend time thinking about this topic. Day 2 is stasis. Followed by irrelevance. Followed by excruciating, painful decline. Followed by death. And that is why it is always Day 1.'

There's incredible beauty in distilling an idea or concept into a few words, and being brave enough to make your concept easy to buy or not buy.

Your goal here is to chop away the fluff. By reducing down, you're doing the hard work of thinking through the decision making process on your audience's behalf. You're putting in effort to create a shortcut, and making it easy for them to decide either way.

As Marie Oldham, CSO at VCCP Media said, 'don’t forget that most ideas fail, often because they look or become unworkable in the client organisation. So making them simple will help greatly'.

4) Employ an expert witness or 'informant'

This is an incredibly effective tactic that I've seen used quite a few times. The concept of an expert witness is used in law to describe 'a person whose level of specialised knowledge or skill in a particular field qualifies them to present their opinion about the facts of a case during legal proceedings'.

But smart creatives and strategists use this same approach to convince clients of the veracity of their ideas in pitches too. For a road safety pitch, why not bring in a psychologist trained in the area of why people drink and drive. For a pitch to a children's toy manufacturer, why not film a play group and examine what they think of the toys. For an FMCG brand targeting Mums, why not bring in someone's Mum!

It's just a brilliant use of ethnographic, qualitative research that, while a small sample size, helps to shift the balance in your favour. It adds weight to the argument.

The best example of this that I've ever heard comes from Rob Campbell. He calls them 'informants'. Whenever it fits to the brief, instead of conducting classic research groups, he gets into conversations with unexpected 'informants' who provide him with a different angle. For example, he interviewed prostitutes to find out more about luxury cars. Why? Prostitutes are financially driven to find the best clients, the best clients drive a certain style of car and as such they bring a completely different perspective to the table.

Similarly, for a car radio brand, he brought a car radio thief into the pitch to 'inform' the client of the error of their ways.

Depending on the brief and whether informants would bring value to the conversation, Rob has interviewed priests, thieves, policemen and teachers. According to him, 'sometimes this helps to inspire a new way of thinking and I end up in a really interesting place that I would've never got to otherwise. Sometimes it helps to validate an approach with an additional point of view.'

Take a look at this brilliant interview to understand more.

Use the expert witness or the informant and you'll win your case.

5) Conduct a pre-mortem

This is another trick that is surprisingly effective. I've heard it mentioned by a variety of entrepreneurs as a way to grease the wheels for selling in ideas. Quite simply, if you can pre-empt any questions within your presentation then you become more buyable.

For almost every presentation you do, there'll be someone in the crowd who is thinking critically and just waiting to throw in a tough question. But if you actively call out what you think might go wrong or any pitfalls and how you would propose to overcome these, it makes you almost bulletproof. By being humble, practical and admitting some risk, you gain an advantage. As famous strategist Jim Carroll says, the client will value the fact that you're willing to have a mature conversation about risk, because all big ideas come with some of it.

This is using a a form of 'inversion' by not only thinking about what could go right, but also seeing what might go wrong, what might the client dislike and outlining how you can can ensure this doesn't happen.

It's a similar enough concept to the idea of 'pre-mortem' coined by psychologist Gary Klein. In a pre-mortem, a project manager must envision what could go wrong—what will go wrong—in advance, before starting. A pre-morten insulates you by preparing it for the worst.

6) Simple, stealable, re-sellable summaries

And finally, another Martin Beverly idea.

There's nothing worse than when you sell a really great idea to your client, but it gets lost in translation when they need to sell it to their bosses or colleagues.

It really pays to be aware of the fact that your client has other stakeholders that need to be brought on board, so arming them with the ability to do that is very useful.

To avoid the 'purple monkey dishwasher' problem of Chinese whispers, it can be very helpful to give your client a video clip or one slide summary to facilitate their own internal sell. It's a great way to show some empathy.

Also, a summary will help your audience remember what you've presented even when you're not there to present it to them again. It stops the idea becoming something else and coming back to you in a different, watered down format.

The more you can give clients the killer pitch on a page or piece of film, the easier it is to get an idea through.

Remember, 'enough of your bullshit, just get to the point' is salient advice, so finish every presentation with a short four line rundown of your approach.

In summary

If your working in marketing, it's very likely that at least part of success relies on the ability to persuade others of the power of your ideas. Like anything in life, there are some tips, tricks and shortcuts to help you with this. It pays to learn from the experiences of others.

There's nothing subversive or unethical about knowing how better to frame and communicate your ideas. It's just good business. In fact, I'd argue it's a skill that should be taught more often.

Employ some of the above and see how you get on.

Please leave any of your own tips and ideas for selling in ideas in the comments below, I'd love to hear them...

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Shane O'Leary

@shaneoleary1

www.shaneoleary.me/blog

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