Over the course of my career as I must have worked on dozens of pitches, for all shapes and sizes of agencies. Yes, pitching is an imperfect way of going about business, but for now we’re stuck with it, so here’s What I Wish I’d Known about them:
Get started straight away.
I know the pitch date is a month away and you’ve got an overflowing inbox, but if you don’t start now you’ll be working the weekend before the pitch. Once you’ve done the actual work, Strategy guru Russell Davies (link to book below) reckons you need to do one hour of prep for every minute you’ll be presenting.
Read up.
Get hold of copies of Perfect Pitch and Everything I Know about Life I Learned from Powerpoint and apply everything that’s relevant to your project.
Appoint an Admin Queen (or King).
Someone needs to make sure you’re working on what the brief actually asks for, set up the check-in sessions, book the travel, balance the budgets and generally keep the show on the road.
Book Proofreading time.
Whether your agency has a professional proofreader, or just someone who is great at detail, book them in now to spend a few hours the day before the pitch checking your deck for typos and making sure everything makes sense to someone who hasn’t worked on the project. If you leave it until the last minute to organise, they’ll inevitably either be too busy or on holiday.
Ask someone to be your Red Team.
In military lingo, a Red Team tries to find vulnerabilities before the enemy does. In the case of a pitch, you need someone senior, not working on the project, who you can ask to try to find the holes in your thinking early on and to make sure the story you’re telling makes sense as you get towards the big day. Note: NOT someone who will come in on the day before the pitch and criticise everything, when it’s too late to do anything about it.
Share early and publicly.
It’s a team effort and the strategic thinking should be shared well before the creative brief is to make sure that everyone is on board. In fact, all the thinking, be it media, digital, shopper or PR should be shared early. War room walls are great for this, but if you’re remote or spread across several offices, try a miro board or similar.
Get the facts straight
How will you be presenting – on their laptop or yours? Is there a projector or big screen? What size of room is it? Will the time limit be strictly enforced? Are there other presentations that day? How many people will be there and who are they? Who are the actual decision makers? You can’t be persuasive if you don’t know who you’re persuading and there’s nothing worse than discovering that your laptop won’t talk to their screen.
Rehearse. More than once.
Simply having to speak it out loud can make it really clear what’s missing, or not quite right yet. Whenever I need the motivation to have another run-through, I think of London’s successful bid to host the 2012 Olympics. They held ten complete rehearsals in the run up to their pitch. While the stakes might not be quite as high when you’re pitching for WheatyCrunch, practice really does make perfect.
Save the final deck in every format possible.
You need a copy on your laptop hardrive, one on a memory stick and one in the cloud. Bitter experience suggests you should also save a PDF version in case powerpoint decides to remove all the images as someone makes final tweaks on the move.
Get there early. Really early.
With the state of both the UK motorway system and the train network, arriving at the destination at your expected time is far from guaranteed. And no-one will be at their best if they’ve just sprinted on foot across the city, had to get up at 4am or have spent 3 hours driving up/down the M1 in heavy rain. Aim to get there in plenty of time for something to eat and a leisurely chat. Then, if you’re delayed, you’ve still got time to neck a sandwich and make it. And if the pitch is 3 hours away at 9am, for god’s sake book a hotel for everyone.
Happy pitching!
(photo by Benjamin Child on Unsplash)