There is too much pressure on a client’s brief in a pitch process
When looking for a new agency, common practice is to invite selected agencies to generate initial ideas, explain their approach, and share relevant experience around the problem you’re seeking to solve.
Typically, most pitches involve an initial brief. This brief is crucial for the agency, as it provides the basis for deciding whether to participate in the pitch; if they do, the information in your brief will be what the agency works from as they prepare to pitch. Smart agencies use extra discovery phases that enhances the brief, adds insight and allows them to ignite their own expertise to provide their opinion of the right solution. However, sometimes this extra phase isn’t possible. The result is a large reliance on that original brief.
This puts tonnes of pressure on the brief. Itself. It needs to be right. For clients like you, a pitch can be a very unnerving experience. While it should be exciting – with fresh ideas and the chance to look to the future – it is uncomfortable due to the pressure: how do you decide who the right agency is off the back of short meetings and reviewing work that the agency prepared without full insight into what your organisation is all about?
A pitch is not a good dress rehearsal for working together
A brief also does not represent how a good agency partnership works day-to-day. Here at Velo, we take briefs from clients as instructions, but interrogate them with questions based on our five WHYS approach; we find that asking why, why, why, why and why gets to the root cause of what the client is trying to achieve. And, sometimes, the answer being sourced isn’t the best route. Identifying and actioning this is only possible when the brief – or more accurately, the direction – is interrogated thoroughly, including testing hypothesises and validating understanding. This is simply not possible to do in a pitch process due to time. It shows again that a pitch process does not represent how you work with your agency day-in, day-out.
This is why the pitch process is broken. It puts too much pressure on a client to provide a full, robust and complete brief to fill all gaps.
Seek agencies that are recommended instead. You can save time, worry and go straight in to use the time that you would have invested in a pitch process to get down to working in partnership together.
Your brief no longer needs to be perfect, as it is a jumping-off point. Any agency worthy of their fees should have the talent, skill and enthusiasm to interrogate that brief, enhance it and add the details you didn’t know were needed to know to spark the creativity and strategic ideas that result in outstanding campaigns. Better results and better partnerships are better for stress levels all around.
The pressure on your brief comes from pitches being flawed
We’re not suggesting that a brief is pointless. Far from it. The pitch process puts too much pressure on the brief being perfect. This is why pitches are a flawed method for finding an agency partner.
It is flawed for the agency because the brief will not answer all their questions.
And it is flawed for the clients because the pressure of making it as good as you can is immense. If the brief is weak or misdirected, so will be the work of the agency doing the pitch.
The recent Up to the Light survey published by the Design Business Association proves this point.
It names the top reason for a client to have had a bad experience with their agency is to have been let down in front of colleagues. This can often happen in a pitch process if the brief is not watertight and signed off by all stakeholders.
The same research shows that 53% of clients have made their minds up about the agency in the pitch process within the first 15 minutes. Without a watertight brief, minds will veer towards ‘no’ much more than to ‘yes’.
70% of clients admitted that their pitch brief was not as prescriptive as it may have seemed, illustrating how hard it is to formulate that brief to get the pitch process right.
It’s only when you work with your agency in partnership over time that you know that the relationship is effective, creative and ultimately fruitful. Shortcut the pain of pitching and source your next agency via recommendation.
The pitch process is broken. Selecting agencies based upon recommendation is the only way to prevent the pressure that comes with having to write a watertight brief.
It is, in my view, the only way to go. But, I would say that, as Velo is built on recommendation. See what I mean here – www.velo-b2b.com
