5 ways to stop losing pitches to inertia

Many of the new business opportunities you lose (or most that you don’t hear back from) don’t go to other agencies…they go nowhere.

The status quo is our number one competitor: appointing a new agency represents change for the client (whether they have an incumbent or not), so pitching is change management…

…but our proposals don’t usually address the trade-offs the client is making, should they choose to not appoint anyone.

Here are 5 trade-offs clients make when they choose not to give us (or someone else) the work.

Access to software

Agencies can usually buy software without bureaucracy, whereas clients have to make a much more compelling case (with a lot more paperwork): if they can’t successfully convince the business to buy the agency, they still have to convince the business to buy the software the agency is using, or they might struggle to do the job themselves.

Agencies can use this fact to their advantage by:

• Actually giving clients access to the software (including charging the license fee to the client and including it in a single invoice) or making it absolutely clear how the client will be able to use the outputs of the software (not just “we use [tool] for [purpose] so don’t worry your pretty little head about it”)
• Clearly articulating the cost of a comparable tech stack, should they choose to procure similar tech themselves (because the choice isn’t spending money on an agency or spending nothing on in-housing…DIY still costs something)

Parting ways with the agency therefore means losing access to the tech the client may come to depend on, which can also aid retention.

I’ll talk through the tech stack during the initial scoping - and I’ll make sure to reference that tech in the cost proposal.

Access to R&D

Clients are almost universally incapable of building marketing tech.

They can buy top of the range kit…and they can typically join up systems and data in a way that agencies can’t…but very few client organisations will get to something proprietary in a marketing department that is likely to be stretched (and possibly shrinking).

Agencies can use this to their advantage by:

• Showing their R&D roadmap in a pitch, so the client can see that innovation is happening; that disruptive problems are being taken care of on their behalf (how are we going to use AI, for example); and that there’s a good reason not to push back too hard on the proposed costs, because the fees fund R&D
• Conducting and sharing research that the client will benefit from: again, the client will have to pay for research if you don’t give it to them within the scope of your fees.

Both research and development are further reasons to specialise (focusing the agency on similar clients with similar problems and/or similar audiences): if whatever you invest in is going to benefit the majority of your clients then you’re going to get a far better return.

I’ll ask the client about their R&D capabilities during the qualification process and I’ll outline the R&D schedule we have (as well as any recent wins) at the time (verbally, though I might follow up with a document)…then I’ll refer back to it during the closing meeting (pitch).

Access to training

The client wants to know how you keep your people at the top of their game, so show your training schedule. Bonus points if you invite your clients: at Rise at Seven, for example, we booked a full-day training session with an external specialist and invited some of our biggest clients. They benefitted directly from the training and got to spend time with peers who have similar problems (and who said nice things about us).

Agencies put themselves under a lot of pressure to know all the answers - we should at least outline what investments we make to keep our knowledge up to standard.

I’ll ask the client about training they have access to during the initial scoping session and I’ll talk through how they might benefit from our training schedule (again, verbally and sometimes with a document). In these early stages of the sale, it’s our job to show how good life could be if the client appoints us…what they’re going to learn is a good way to keep the positivity high.

Access to senior talent

A client who would consider in-housing instead of outsourcing might not be able to get the talent you can get. Perhaps they’re in a less-than-desirable industry or location; perhaps there’s just no way that their organisation will pay the person what you pay some of your team:

• For example, Rise at Seven was well known for its work with Gen Z-leaning, fashion forward female focused brands, so when we were pitching to brands that fit that description, we could bring El Chetcuti along, who’d just spent 6 years as Head of Brand at Missguided. We could wheel out Gerry White, who’d joined us after a 4 year stint as Global Head of SEO at Just Eat, when it was relevant. The overwhelming majority of brands can’t hope to attract people with those CVs…and our whole team was learning from them each and every day
• SME and mid-market clients often don’t have specialists in-house, so if they were going to employ a channel manager instead of an agency, for example, they have no way of upskilling them without sending them on a course (or expecting their new hire to learn on their own). You might have a whole team of specialists, each pushing the boundaries and collaborating with each other to make the agency as good as it can be at whatever it is that you do. If in-housing (or, rather, not outsourcing) is a consideration (which I’ll ask directly during the qualifying conversation), I’ll try to uncover how the brand might be able to support their own specialists…or where they feel they’re falling short
• If they’re going to use AI to generate their outputs, there’s a time burden associated there too: any business that takes what gen AI produces and turns it loose on the world deserves everything they get, so we can outline the QA process we use and the steps involved, whether we use gen AI or human writers. We can quantify the amount of time our experts will spend supervising and outline exactly how much time the client will therefore not spend by letting us do it for them.

We should be introducing the relevant team members during the sales process and they should be able to articulate exactly why they’re the best people for the job. We never say “we have the best people” without backing that up.

Access to velocity

Work that makes a difference doesn’t come together by accident.

During my time client-side at Pendragon PLC, I had 34 direct reports, including PR, web development, social media, content and SEO, but getting the team to produce its first large-scale PR campaign in-house would have been very difficult for me: I’d have to pull everyone away from their previous commitments and BAU responsibilities and I’d have to know exactly how to run that kind of project, end to end, and be able to educate a team who hadn’t done it before on a practical level. There’d be a lot of trial and error and it would take me 6 months to do what an agency that does this all the time could do in 2.

Let’s imagine we’d have done a good enough job to try a second campaign and, with a bit more experience, we’d have done that one in 5 months. All the while, the team would be struggling to find time for this additional responsibility, so I’d have to tell them to stop doing something else, or spend money on hiring more staff.

I was able to quantify how much time and money it would take to do the job in-house (because, again, it’s not free) against how much it might cost for an agency to do it…

…as an agency, why can’t we do that too?

I use a conversation framework during the qualification process and one of the questions I’ll ask is: what have you tried to do to solve this problem previously (and why do you suppose it didn’t work)? I’m going to uncover exactly why the client hasn’t done this in-house so far…and put some numbers (time and money) against how much it might take to do it properly.

But wait…there’s more

Clients make all sorts of tradeoffs when they don’t appoint us: we’re most likely to win a lot of deals at a high price point when those tradeoffs are unique to us, which is the kind of thing I help agencies to uncover and develop as a consultant.