It’s time for a reality check.
The demands that have grown up around pitching have left us in a bit of a mess. Marketers and their procurement teams are relentlessly focused on streamlining, efficiencies and ways to keep costs down. And we need some honesty about the impact it’s having.
As an industry, we are continuously aiming to deliver disruptive growth, but we will simply not achieve the impact we are seeking until we acknowledge, and align on, how to overcome four conflicting ideologies hindering the pitch process:
We want only people who will work on our business to pitch and present
This is unrealistic because agencies don’t have expensive talent sitting around waiting for an RFP to come in. Even less so in a world where clients’ desire for efficiency has driven out any ability there might have been to have a bench of unutilized talent. Clients would do better to understand the culture, tools, methodology and process of an agency partner that can drive repeatable and consistent results rather than worry about who’s in the room on Day 1.