New Business: A Human Approach
In the pitch room, clients aren't buying your agency—they're buying the people who will show up every day.
Every year, I hosted a business development summit. The idea was simple: we needed to consistently investigate everything we did from a new business standpoint. No idea was ever off the table, and it was important to bring in outside help—not to design our approach, but to push our thinking and challenge how we operated.
At the end of the day, it was up to us as agency leadership to decide what we’d adapt or modify and this annual event pushed us into new territory. It was good to have experts come in and give us new ideas to consider.
In agencies, the competition is fierce. Just getting into the pitch is hard enough. Once you’re in, the odds are already stacked against you, and you have to stand out from the crowd. I quickly learned a few rules, and all of them really had to do with leading people.
While the agency brand mattered from the outset—the types of clients, the size of clients, the wins you had in the near term—that’s what got you in the door. But when the lights came on and the pitch process began, that mattered little to none. It then became all about the personalities. How they performed in a room. How we matched everyone’s personality with the personality of the client. Clients want smart people, but most importantly, they want people they can see themselves working with every day.
One of the experts who came in once told me something that rang true: At the end of the day, the client isn’t buying the agency—they’re buying the people in the room.
Remember it’s a performance NOT a presentation
And what did these people have to do to win?
Be themselves, but be compelling. In the case of a pitch, you don’t have to be right—you just have to be compelling. If the personalities in the room weren’t compelling, we couldn’t win.
Master improvisational techniques, not sales. They had to be good listeners, able to ask compelling questions, and most importantly, know when to be quiet and let the client talk. The more we could get the client talking—generally about themselves or their business—the better chance we had at winning.
Work together as a team. We’d demonstrate this by putting planners and buyers, or creatives and analysts, together up front—side by side. Even how we did this visually mattered. High-top stools where they stood (never sat) gave them energy, like they were on an improv stage. To win, it wasn’t a meeting—it was a performance. The best teams put on a show, not a presentation.
Perform. At some point, we had to stop developing the content and focus on how we were going to share it—how to make it a show. If we continued to refine the content, we’d never get to the most important part: making the show compelling.
Be ready and be comfortable. We always did one final presentation with no interruptions the day of, in the same clothes we’d wear in the pitch. Even if the pitch was at 9am, we’d get up at 6am and go through it. When we finished, we’d go around the room and give “affirmations”—everyone said something inspiring about one other person until everyone received praise. This was the final boost of confidence we all needed.
And then it was showtime. Every pitch started with us getting there early, getting comfortable in the room, and flipping on our own music so when the prospect walked in, they could feel the positive vibes. At that point, we had nothing to lose. It was go time—time to let our personalities shine.
Jim