Invite us to your next agency pitch...

We do not want to pitch, but we will gladly be invited to join your agency pitch anyway to be able to tell you more about our setup. A setup that we believe will put an end to all pitches. Here are my thoughts on why you should invite us but not expect us to follow the process.

The process

The pitch and RFP process has always been an awful way to start a new relationship but for most brands and organisations it has been the only way to change the current setup or to get new external help. The lead times in the pitches are usually ridiculously short in the beginning of the process when the agency presentations have to be made and then mind numbing long in the end when the procurement negotiation kicks in.

The process is well described by Tara Hunt who runs Truly.

”The agency people come together in a boardroom, go over the creative brief, then start throwing out ”ideas” until they can agree on the best one. Then they work ungodly hours to put together a pitch deck and some sort of demonstration of how those ideas will roll out. Then they pitch their idea against other agencies who have done the same thing and the client picks their favorite, which often not is yours. First off, there are rarely, if ever, any real research or insights that go into those ideas. Nobody understands the audience or the real issues. And secondly, this is what burns people out at agencies.”

…and as agency search consultant Avi Dan writes in his latest article. 

”The problem with this way of hiring an agency is that the pitch is an artificial process, that lives inside of a bubble, and has little relation to reality, to what working with the agency day in and day out would really be like. Because of that, many agencies focus on the sizzle and on creating the perfectly glossy pitch as if it was a Hollywood production, at the expense of being substantive. Oftentimes the winners are agencies that are good at pitching, and not necessarily good agencies.”

The agency search consultants

Not all pitch processes are like this anymore luckily but it’s still very common. The more strategic agency search consultants that are around have helped in making the process a bit better by creating workshops instead of presentations. However, these consultants rarely take responsibility after the pitch is completed and most of them also run a very siloed exercise that is not compatible with the needs of cross-functional teams covering end-to-end customer journeys. 

And that's a big problem! The agency who wins the pitch often gets a reality check when they realize that there are other agencies and consultants at the client with initiatives that are sub-optimized and not aligned. The team they proposed in the pitch might not even be relevant in the bigger picture.

So if you have a need to include cross functional competences in your pitch you probably have to go to the full service agencies and the big agency/consultancy groups.

The big players

The big players have the possibility to offer you customized teams but regardless of how big the groups are they probably still don’t have all the right competences needed. And even if they did it’s not sure that those persons are available just for you. So what do they do? They bring in niche agencies and freelancers as subcontractors taking a rather hefty cut in between to cover their own overhead.

The team lead in this type of setup is rarely neutral. Either the team lead is in one of the agencies in the group making the neutrality highly questionable. Will you only get advice that benefits that agency? If they manage to have a neutral team lead within the group you still get the neutrality part questioned. Will they prioritize their own competences in the group over the subcontracted because that’s where they make the most money?

A different way

I believe that our setup is a better alternative to the classic pitches if you have cross functional needs that will change over time and you don’t want to sub-optimize. Why? Because we build the setup together. We start with finding the neutral team lead(s). Depending on your need and situation it can be someone already working at your place who just need some additional education. Or we might find out that a recruitment makes more sense rather than bringing in a consultant. The important thing is that the team lead is neutral and representing both you and the team.

After that we identify what the team(s) should look like together with you. Do you have the need for a customized agency, an outsourced in-house or just to up-skill your existing teams? In our network we have something we call Dream Valley. It is an aggregated list collectively made by unbiased (client side) advisors, different agencies and experts specifying what we think are the characteristics of the perfect (utopian) company that’s in the forefront at the moment. We try to go beyond the buzzwords and to be as concrete as possible. The list is cross functional, prioritized and collectively agreed upon. It’s a living thing that is constantly adapting when we think it’s necessary.

We always want to start a new relationship by doing a quick gap analysis against Dream Valley together with you to see where the biggest gaps are on a holistic level. Then we do an impact effort matrix of the bigger initiatives currently planned or running in the organization. These two rather quick exercises helps you to prioritize and align you initiatives and it’s a way for us to understand what type of team setup you actually need. After that we go out and find the right talents suitable in the network and also start recruitments end educations if necessary. 

The team lead(s) role is primarily to help the team that could be a hybrid of agency people, freelancers/consultants and in-house to collaborate, perform and deliver but also to evaluate if the team needs to shift or if it makes more sense to recruit a competence instead.

When things are up and running with the team(s) we also continuously update the gap analysis and impact effort matrix to make sure we still are helping you with the right setup and priorities. In this way there should not be a need to ever pitch again to get new help since the setup changes seamless depending on your needs.

To sum up. The customized agency we bring with our network to you in a pitch is like the spoon in The Matrix. "Do not try to bend the agency, that's impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth...there is no agency.”

Dan Lindgren, Founder We Were There