Having work on agency side for nearly 4 years, the best part for me is always the agency pitch. The “sleepless” nights to prepare ideas and presentations with a team of talented people, the fascination of exploring a new industry every time, the performance-like pitch meetings and of course the excitement of winning are the best moments. Each client is different, that’s for sure. But over the years, I’ve found a few tricks which can always get the right attention and agreement from clients, especially in digital pitches.
One: Be very confident
If you don’t believe in what you are talking about, don’t even bother talking; If you are good at it, you need to show it off, in a good manner. I find this exceptionally helpful for me. Since I have a baby face and a hint of foreign accent, being good at what I do and conveying that message with confidence help me earn the initial trust very quickly.
Two: Addressing problems and concerns
Find out the reason for the RFP, nail it in your presentation. There are always reasons why clients want a new digital agency. You are the one they are looking for, otherwise, don’t even bother responding to the RFP.
Three: Tell a story
Too often we stack our presentations with case studies, numbers and charts. They are useful, but only for client internal management meetings! They didn’t come all the way to listen to the same thing in your office. Digital topics sometimes can be very number driven and too “technical” for marketing managers. Make your case study simple, tell a story instead of showing off numbers. Works like a charm.
This is how I tell a story in a recent pitch:
Instead of presenting with the classic Powerpoint slides, I’ve printed out pages and handed each pages to the client as I finish talking about it, so the client can actually read the information at hand.
I am going to tell you a story of search…
I love chocolate cake. In fact, it cost me a lot more time in the gym already. During the research for this meeting, I search “chocolate cake recipe” in Google NZ and I found a recipe by The Client Brand. However, it’s actually a random site copied the recipe from The Brand and out ranking The Brand. Not very happy for The Brand.
I did a same search in Google Au. The results are overwhelmed by Taste. The Brand is nowhere to be found. Not good.
Looking into how consumer search, we can see the search of “recipe” has increased over the years, and a spike around December each year. Potential campaign period if you are not already doing.
For keyword “chocolate cake recipe” alone, there are 27,000 search/month in Australia. That’s 27,000 impressions your Brand is missing! Not even counting other keywords around “recipes”.
The other Client experience a similar problem…(now you’ve got their attention, you can start bragging about your success…)
Tell a story of search
Happy pitching!