Pitches 101: Can't Live With Them, Can't Live Without Them
When you're in client services, pitching new business becomes more important as you become more senior. It is utter chaos.
You’re pulling late nights, strategic direction is changing as quickly as your underwear, you’re deep-diving via self-directed crash courses in verticals and brands you’ve barely touched in your career, and your kids wonder if you’re traveling for work because you’re never home. That’s right: you’re on a pitch.
Pitches are necessary to fill up the “leaky bucket” of agency life. Just as much as we’re pushed for organic growth on existing accounts, you’re always just a Teams message away from a business development lead to being thrown into a pitch. The only variable that remains constant between pitches is chaos, despite the best of intentions of all involved. But they can be incredibly valuable - not just for the agency that wins them, but for the players involved.
But First…
Before we get into the post, let’s have a quick awkward conversation. I’ve been posting weekly on this here newsletter and the response of the small but dedicated subscriber base has been very positive. I love to hear from folks about my posts - agreeing or disagreeing with the premise that week.
But last week, between (you guessed it) being on a pitch and some insanity going on at home, I was unable to post. This, despite a round trip of nine hours on the Amtrak regional for a client visit (my nervous energy when traveling translates really well into writing this newsletter.)
And how many of my 80 subscribers asked what was up?
That’s right - zero. I’m not mad, just disappointed.
Was this a large setup to simply post one of my favorite Tiger King gifs? It was, but it was also worth it.
The Pitch is Back
Pitches combine two themes this newsletter has covered extensively: growth at all costs and ambiguity in jobs.
If you’re at an agency that is losing clients, your biz dev team will be under immense pressure to convert on pitches. This makes sense - as revenue dries up, the BD team needs to make it rain to make up for it. All eyes are on them to help keep the agency afloat.
So if an agency is hitting their numbers and growing existing clients the pace can be more reasonable? Alas, dear reader, it cannot. It just means growth targets are even higher and the BD team is under immense pressure to convert on pitches. We are in an age of infinite growth and pitches and the pressure around them are a microcosm of that.
And they are uncomfortable - wildly so. I am a man of process and order and stability (you can imagine what having two toddlers in the house does for my sanity - thank god they’re cute.) Pitches are the opposite of all of that - despite the best of intentions the process falls apart quickly, order and stability follow soon after. In the discomfort vs. being uncomfortable dichotomy, they are firmly in the latter.
They Aren’t Challenges, They’re Opportunities
But this is where you can grow in timeframes that are only possible in chaos. Is it a preferable way to grow? Absolutely not. But in industries categorized as “client services,” pitches are a reality, and they can be opportunities if you approach them that way.
Some of the fastest learning curves I’ve experienced were on pitches - tools I’d meant to train on and get up to speed (even if they weren’t for my clients) were part of them, new statistical methods I hadn’t mastered yet, attribution methods I hadn’t used in years - all had to be crash-coursed to not look foolish in front of potential clients and other internal teams. Fear mixed with chaos is a hell of a teacher.
Navigate Chaos
But pitches aren’t only negative, even if they are chaotic. It’s important to be able to navigate chaos at times in business and this is a great place to build that skill. And the learning you get from being in an uncomfortable situation for a couple of weeks or months is immense.
I can’t quite pinpoint why pitches are always chaotic. I think it points back to Parkinson’s Law, which states that work expands to fill the allotted time frames in which they need to be completed, regardless of the amount of actual work that needs to be done (most recently applied to “stuff” by Rishad Tobaccawala, which is why it’s top of mind.) The endless tinkering and direction changing? Parkinson’s Law has a role to play there.
Work on Your People Skills
The teams are usually composed of folks who haven’t really worked together before. You might know them from a head nod at the free coffee station, but you don’t know their work style or much beyond that. And the room is full of these co-workers as you dig into a wide-ranging brief due in a month. Here’s where you can learn to work with a variety of personalities in a high-pressure situation on short notice.
Strengthen Your Time Management
Some pitches are simply looking to you to provide your expertise from your department to help make a story for a potential client even more compelling. These tasks tend to be more manageable as you remain in your comfort zone for the skillset, even if the hours are bumped up significantly. Work on your time management skills here.
Learning Something New - Fast
Then there are the pitches where you have to dive into something you don’t know much about - whether it’s an internal tool other teams use, a client vertical or brand you’re not as familiar with, or a process that is basically hieroglyphics to you. This is where you unlock massive learning gains.
It’s important to know where your growth opportunities are going to be prior to saying yes (or being voluntold) to new business projects. That way you know what you might need to train on or shore up prior to stepping into the first standup meeting.
Shout Out to Business Development Teams
One aspect of pitches I remain in awe of is the full-time BD teams. For many agency workers, pitches are temporary insanity obstacle courses - a chance to learn or hone some new skills while making a temporary work/life balance sacrifice. For many on BD teams, this is simply their work, week in and week out.
I usually take a day off after a pitch to decompress and try to rinse my brain out. The days leading up to a pitch I am usually stress dreaming about my sections and our potential client and it lingers for a day or two afterward; I find taking a day off hastens the exit of those dreams and gets me back to my regular stress baseline.
That’s a luxury BD team members don’t have. I’m sure there’s a certain kind of person who can operate effectively long-term in that environment; I know I’m not one of them. So I always have incredible respect for people who make up these teams and still have time for a life outside of work and don’t seem to burn out.
Grab Bag Sections
WTF Instagram: You might have seen this floating around the ‘Gram, but if you didn’t then you got proper Zucked. Over the weekend there was a mass logout of people on the social platform so Zuck and team could go in and change your settings to “Limit Political Content” for your timelines. Fear not, if you want to see as much content as possible about two elderly folks fighting for an office neither of them are physically or mentally fit for, there are steps you can take to turn up the politics on your feed. Caveat emptor on that one, though.
Album of the Week: I always keep my eye on the UK and Irish hip hop scene after getting into The Streets and Dizzy Rascal in high school. I’m glad I did because it put Maverick Sabre on my radar pretty early on in his career.
Maverick originally came out with this album in 2012, but re-recorded it as “Mav’s Version,” a move borrowed from TSwift, as a way to recapture earnings from his back catalog from The Man.
If you’re new to Mav, start off with some real firepower from this album. “Used To Have It All” has that blue-eyed soul feel we’re used to from acts overseas, as do “I Can Never Be” and “I Don’t See the Sun.” For more energy, “Let Me Go” and “I Need” could fit the bill, though be warned that Mav’s approach to music is cathartic, so you’re not going to get any club bangers here. Give Lonely Are the Brave (Mav’s Version) a spin; unfortunately, you cannot borrow my autographed vinyl copy.
Quote of the Week: “Everyone wants to live on top of the mountain, but all the happiness and growth occurs while you’re climbing it.”– Andy Rooney
See you next week!