Someone is not that happy with the State of The Pitch

This year, leading pitch consultancy TrinityP3 launched a landmark State of the Pitch report. However, as the second year of the survey kicks off, Ellie Angell notes that one person in the industry doesn’t seem happy with it…

After the success of our State of The Pitch initiative earlier this year, the team at TrinityP3 have been busy engaging the industry in the second wave of research (and agencies, if you’d like to take part, please go here).

As we were running through the current inputs (20 plus so far) yesterday, my eyes were drawn to a less than friendly comment – left not in answer to a specific question in the survey as far as I can make out, but more as a general rant.

I won’t go through all the elements of the comment but at its heart, it had a couple of charges:

? Firstly, TrinityP3 shouldn’t be the authority on what’s “wrong with pitching” (for the record, we’re not trying to be)

? Pitch consultancies, of which TrinityP3 is among the most prominent, have driven the so-called “race to the bottom” on price and poor staffing.

? No one in the industry will be honest about the problems and therefore the whole exercise is a farce.

The anger is real

Ok! Wow! A bit to unpack there and, also ouch!

It’s kind of hard to know how to respond to something like this, but I choose to lean into it because it’s so…well, so interesting.

I hope that the relationships I and the rest of the team at TrinityP3 have with so many good agency people, many of which go way beyond ‘pitching’ and have survived both pitches lost and pitches won, are genuine, or at least more genuine than this commenter might seek to imply.

As I say, I’m not sure we’ve appointed ourselves as anything; we’re sticking our heads above the parapet and inviting commentary about pitching in a systematic way, and reporting back on it - the good, the bad and the ugly, not just ‘what is wrong’.

It's You…no, It’s Us…or is there a collective responsibility?

When I joined TrinityP3 in 2015 (almost a decade ago!) I met with Darren Woolley in a café in Melbourne. And I said to him that if TrinityP3 was the type of business intent on screwing agencies over in pitches, then I’m out.

He assured me that this wasn’t the case, and talked me through how TrinityP3 operates the process – not the up-front, first we do a search, then a chemistry session stuff – but the back end, the work we do, the IP we’ve developed, the approach we take, the tailoring we do where we can, and the guidance we provide to clients to get to the right outcome for them – not the cheapest, not our agency mates, not the ‘best idea’, but the right agency, that agencies often simply don’t see.

And we’ve stayed true to this approach, with the ultimate decision being with the client, who can choose to take our recommendations or ignore them, we win some and we lose some.

There’s a huge culture of blame attached to pitching.

The commenter also argued there was a problem with ‘our model’ as a pitch consultancy. He or she was clearly looking for someone to blame.

Other than the fact that the ‘model’ of pitching was not invented by us, it’s also true that in the average year we are generally involved in a relatively small number of pitches that happen in Australia typically in the order of 5%-10%).

The rest of the pitches are run by marketing teams, procurement teams, other pitch consultants, procurement consultants. And the rest of our business – the majority of it, in revenue terms – focuses on areas adjacent to pitching. We often talk clients out of running pitches yes that’s right!) in favour of something less invasive, or which will prepare them to make better decisions about how and why to pitch, when that time comes.

With the best will in the world and without trying to be defensive, I’m not sure that the evils of pitching can be laid entirely at our door, or that running a survey to give, not just us, but the industry a wide-angle lens on the state of new business hurts anyone.?

But obviously things aren’t perfect. And this person is apparently furious about it. So, who can we blame?

Oh, it has to be the agencies themselves, right?

Can we blame agencies for continually accepting shoddy deals, participating in shoddy processes, ruthlessly cutting each other off at the knees to win a piece of business? (To be fair there’s a reason they call it a race to the bottom).?

Well, yes and no – agency acceptance does set benchmarks and precedents in a number of ways, but at the same time, what are they supposed to do, just refuse to play? And this also doesn’t account for the love-hate relationship with new business and pitching. Many agency boss have spoken to me about – the adrenaline of winning, and the benefits to the agency, inherent in pitching, that can be found like diamonds in the rough of all the cost and time and stress – the forged teamwork, the new ideas that can come out of pitches, the confidence brought by a win.

Look no further than the original bad guys – yes, it’s Procurement!

Ok then can we blame procurement teams for strangling agencies on fees?

Well…kind of, but not entirely. Procurement teams will react to the market, and what the market will yield; and they are often internally KPI’d on cost and cost alone. Some procurement teams understand agencies, some don’t. Some respond well to our counsel about the definition of value in an agency (clue: it’s generally not found in cost inputs alone); and some are much more reserved. The power dynamic between marketing and procurement in any given organisation varies significantly. It’s a mixed bag.

Marketing teams…they just don’t know what they’re doing with pitches, surely?

Can we blame marketing teams for bad process or decision-making, or unreasonable demands in pitches?

Sometimes, for sure. But then some marketing run pitches get glowing feedback from agencies. Some marketers have helped to evolve the industry as a whole by having the courage to build new agency roster models, or redefine what success looks like in ways that bring opportunity to different types of agencies who would otherwise have been overlooked. Look at Telstra and +61, for example. Marketers running crap pitches…it’s not universal.

Self-serving industry bodies, what good have they ever done?

Can we blame industry bodies for not having teeth? Pitch Positive Pledges, all that kind of thing.

It’s not easy herding cats - let alone getting them all to walk in a straight line at the same time.

They’re doing their best and the intent is great, but without fundamental structural change in terms of the remit such bodies have, they can only really influence and guide, they can’t enforce. It’s up to agencies and marketers and consultants and all the rest of us to adhere to or reject such initiatives.

OMG, don’t get me STARTED on pitch consultants

Can we blame pitch consultants?

Like any other area, there are good consultants, and there are bad. I’d like to think we fall into good and feedback from agencies, clients, via referrals from agencies or clients, via testimonials would suggest that most of the time we do, but that doesn’t absolve us of everything. It just means we continue to try and that while, yes, of course, we’re a business, we are genuine in our attempts to do our best.

It's no one, and it’s everyone.

You can see the pattern, right? ‘Blame’ is useless in the context of the various spinning plates involved. We all spend so much effort on apportioning blame.

Much better to shine a light on the challenges, celebrate the positives and chip away, one pitch at a time, where we collectively can, to move things forward in the right direction. It’s what we try to do with the State of The Pitch. It’s not going to solve the world’s problems on its own. But it’s something constructive and facilitates a discussion on something most agencies are very focused on.

An open invitation

Finally – this is serious – if the author of the comment wants to reach out to me, in complete confidence, to discuss what they wrote – they are more than welcome. Let’s get a coffee or something. I’ll buy. We will only improve by constructive dialogue.

Everything else - and I’ve learned this through my own professional mistakes as much as anything going on in the industry – everything else is wasted energy.

An edited version of the article was published in LBB Online August 30, 2024

You can read more about this and contribute to the State of the Pitch Research here.