So Nottingham RFC pretended their crowd was bigger than it really was with inflatable people.
And we sometimes claim our pitch was “best” even though the client chose to work with another agency. So we were best, but we still lost.
Is this all bad?
Trying to persuade ourselves and others that it wasn’t our fault that we lost is an understandable reaction. After all, no-one wakes up in the morning and says to themselves “OK, how can I screw up this pitch today?” We give it our best shot. We do what we can often in challenging circumstances with insufficient resource or inadequate briefing.
But most of the reasons why we lose pitches are down to us, not “it was a straight three way pitch” implying we only ever had a mystical 1 in 3 chance of winning.
In fact I feel a table coming on……
|
Excuse |
Solution |
|
“Client changed their mind” |
Ask better questions at the start, be more thorough, find out the real purchase criteria |
|
“they chose the competition on price” |
We needed better to understand the client’s take on delivered value for money, if price is the key criteria, don’t pitch |
|
“the client’s FD’s brother runs the rival agency” |
Better understanding of the decision making process at the start, and decide not to pitch |
|
“procurement got involved and ruined everything” |
Embrace procurement, they have an important role. |
|
“Dog ate my pitch document” |
Feed dog better, make a back up |
Of course it would be understandable if colleagues get quite defensive when it is suggested that nearly all the reasons pitches are lost are in fact excuses, and we failed to do our job properly.
Nevertheless, even if we do our job in an exemplary manner, we can still lose, often due to something that is a little more difficult to pin down – “chemistry”. The rapport between client and agency is so crucial that this is often the deciding factor. Here, the passion and enthusiasm for a client’s brief becomes a key determinant of success, and it is very difficult to fake passion.
Back to Nottingham RFC and their inflated crowd. There is no substitute for passion in sport either. The fake crowd didn’t seem to help as they lost to Exeter 15-14.
So the exercise was a failure, unless of course they would otherwise have lost 15-0.
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