How Marketers Can Run Better Pitches

James Lawrence: Welcome back to the Smarter Marketer podcast. I'm here today with Darren Woolley. Darren, welcome back to the pod.

Darren Woolley: Thanks, James. I always enjoy our time on the pod.

James Lawrence: Yeah, very much looking forward to today's conversation. So Darren Woolley is founder and CEO of Trinity P3.

Trinity P3 is a Marketing management consulting company founded in Australia, but now has offices in Sydney, London and New York as well. Trinity P3 in any given year, we'll work with, um, the very, very large group of both Australia and the world's largest advertisers. Um, earlier this year, Trinity P3 published its inaugural state of the pitch report.

And as a result, Darren, I wanted to get you onto the pod to discuss the report and essentially how marketers can run better pitches, so I think a really good starting point would be to discuss how the report was put together, what the process was, and I guess the why of all the information.

Darren Woolley: Yeah, James, it's a really good point because since COVID or probably a rising out of the pandemic, we've seen advertising agencies globally increasingly complain about the pitch process, you know, and how unfair it is, how wasteful it is, and particularly, and if we look to the UK with their pitch positive pledge, the negative impact that pitching is increasingly having on agency staff, both for their mental and physical health.

Lots of conversations. Lots of talking. But one of the things we noticed is it was all anecdotal. There was no actual documentation or quantification of where things were going wrong. So what we're hearing is lots of complaints. But not a lot of detail into how big a problem are these individual things.

So that's what motivated us to do the state of the pitch research, which literally from our perspective was combining, uh, all of the issues that we'd heard anecdotally and capturing those in the least number of questions. We, uh, worked with a researcher market researcher to make sure that the questions were framed in a way that weren't going to bias the outcome one way or the other.

And so, uh, we're able to then put that in market for a six month period. It ran from the 1st of July. Last year to the 31st of December. And the reason for that is we wanted to get the largest possible cross section without being in market all the time. We've got 77 pitches, individual pitches reported on.

Now, of course, this is from the agency's perspective, but I think that's really important because. It's not often that agencies feel empowered in the pitch process to give the marketers feedback on how well or how poorly the pitch was run or how it could be run better. And so there's two parts to this research.

The first is capturing what are the pain points that are in the marketplace for the agencies that are pitching, but more importantly, giving marketers You know, quantifiable feedback on where things are going right, but more importantly, where things are going wrong and could improve. So we consolidated the data.

We analyse that from various aspects and put that together as a report, which is both, uh, Qualitative and quantitative, because you'll see in there there's narrative from the individual agencies, but also interpretation of the data from our perspective as pitch consultants for more than 20 years.

James Lawrence: Yeah, nice one.

Yeah, speaking from experience, I don't think we've ever once been asked for feedback from, as an agency owner, right, in terms of our perspective on how a pitch was run or what could have been done better or what could You know, conversely, was really good about that particular process. So I think, um, it's nice to be heard, Darren, for has an aspect putting my agency owner hat on, um, at the time when the report came out, there was a quote from you, which is marketers are boiling the ocean in their search for the right agency.

That for me, that'd be a nice place to kind of jump into the, some of the findings from the report.

Darren Woolley: Okay. Well, the first one is that the pitch is still run the same way it was 30 years ago. You know, you could say that the Mad Men era. Of pitching exists today. What is very different today is the number of things.

The first is that back then you would appoint an agency is what was known as the agency of record. You're probably looking at a 3 to 5 year contract. There was a sizable amount of money in today's market. The first thing is that it's much more about projects and what we're seeing is that there could be projects from 50, 000 in value right up to millions of dollars in value.

But the pitch process is exactly the same. And so what we're seeing is that there's completely out of kilter, the level of investment in time and effort that agencies need to make in the pitch process for a vast range of very different paybacks. And so that's this boiling the ocean is, is the first.

Problem. The second one is that back in 30 years ago, you had a creative agency and a media agency. Today, you might have PR, you'll have, uh, you know, SEO or digital agencies. You know, the number of skills and capabilities that are actually required can exist within specialist agencies, but often At the top end of the market, the very large advertisers and small are looking to consolidate as many of those.

So what we also noticed is there could be up to 11 different capabilities. required from an agency to be successful in a pitch process. And yet that old fashioned, you know, um, speculative creative, here's a brief go and show us what you can do. It doesn't actually test any of those. It tests maybe a handful, but it doesn't actually test the agency's ability across all those capabilities.

And so it's not fit for purpose anymore.

James Lawrence: Yeah. I think that quite interesting in the report. I think the number was four. Different kind of disciplines or capability areas was the biggest number on the majority were four or more, which I found quite interesting. And you kind of think of it as being creative or media buying or something like that.

But the majority of the pictures had four or more capabilities built in there.

Darren Woolley: Yeah. Yeah, and that's just the nature of the complexity of the world we live in, you know, marketing today is not, uh, making a TV ad and just running the hell out of it. There are so many consumer touch points that marketers are expected to be across and, and whether they're going to have a range, you know, a village of, you know, Uh, specialist agencies that they then need to make work together or they're consolidating as much as possible into two or three agencies that are offering those.

It's a very different selection process to the one that just says, Oh, I want the agency that comes up with the best TV idea.

James Lawrence: Yeah.

Darren Woolley: No, I, I don't think there's a marketer around. Perhaps. You know, government will occasionally appoint an agency to come up with a TV ad is about the only time that that approach is, is legitimate.

James Lawrence: Interesting. Do later on want to talk about how marketers, should be thinking for some of the smaller kind of scopes, 50 grand, 100 grand type work versus the larger ones. But before we kind of get into that, and you'll obviously have a perspective on this. Who should be running the process because obviously you've got processes where Darren's smiling for those that are that are listening and not watching, um, where you'll have procurement running it, you'll have marketers running it, you'll have external consultants assisting like Trinity P3, but I guess that probably is.

James Lawrence: Pretty, um, important consideration before you start looking at how many agencies and how to pick them and what the process should be.

Darren Woolley: Yeah, look, and I'm not going to say that you should get a consultant because I actually don't think that that's right for every pitch. You know, if you have a very large, complex selection process, And you don't have either the resources or the time to do it, then I would suggest you look at getting some sort of professional assistance in designing and managing that process.

Darren Woolley: But for a large number of advertisers that want to run their own pitch, I think there are some base lessons And some considerations, extensive range of considerations that they should be going through and they probably not because let's be honest, you know, the average marketer may run one pitch per year or one every three years.

Darren Woolley: It's very difficult to become an expert. When you're doing something so infrequently, you may consider it, or your CEO may consider that it's part of your job as a, as a marketer, but it's not a capability that's easy to build, you know, expertise in because it is so infrequent and even then between pitches, it could be quite different what the requirements are or what the success looks like, you know, you might be running something for a small. Influencer, project right through to a multimillion dollar media, uh, process. And, and you need to have very different attributes for each of those.

James Lawrence: Yeah, absolutely. And in terms of for a marketer to get the best outcome, what are your observations with that kind of procurement versus kind of marketing?

Darren Woolley: So procurement have a really important, um, uh, part to play in that process. And that's really around risk mitigation, due diligence and corporate governance to make sure it is fair. And. A commercial oversight that is hopefully not driven by savings, but truly does look at value. So that's if you have access to a procurement, uh, capability, they would be the things that you would engage them for, you know, due diligence and governance, uh, commercial oversight and risk mitigation.

Darren Woolley: What are the potential things that could go wrong? Marketers have at their disposal The ability to run very good pictures what they don't often have is either the time personally all the resources within their marketing team to do it well and that's always a big issue because you know if you go into a pitch process.

Darren Woolley: Depending on what that process is, it can be very easy, but you know, if you're sticking with the standard one that seems to get churned over again and again, you, you really are looking at a three month process potentially that can take anywhere between 500 to a thousand hours of extra work for the people involved collectively for the people involved.

Darren Woolley: I don't know many marketers that. That will say to me on a daily basis. Oh yeah, I've got an extra four hours each day to run a pitch. It just doesn't happen. Everyone's already stressed for time. So running a pitch can be incredibly difficult and leads to one of the big areas that agencies particularly complain about, and that is pitches that drag on and on and on because none of the people are available.

Darren Woolley: Or are always incomplete because there's never the feedback guidance or direction of what the agency should be doing. And both of those are usually underpinned by a marketing team that is already time pressured or time poor.

James Lawrence: Yeah, and I definitely can think of two rocket clients. One where procurement, I think, dealt with us in exactly the way you just described, right?

James Lawrence: Where to me, it wasn't about driving, um, eating every single last dollar out of us and screwing us down. It was genuinely going through a process If I was a marketer to find the best marketing partners to help that client, um, and then dealing with another very high profile client where procurement just came in and it was into my view, not getting the best outcome for the business, but just trying to get a commodity as cheap as possible.

James Lawrence: You see, generally speaking, procurement working in that kind of, um, productive fashion to work with marketing to get the right agency partner, or do you find it is a function where marketers are kind of getting. Almost screwed out of the best partner for their needs.

Darren Woolley: It's interesting, James. There's actually a number of different scenarios that we see play out.

Darren Woolley: The first one is the marketer that doesn't have enough budget for what they actually want. And so procurement becomes a. Convenient bad cop that is given by the marketer the job of getting the price down. Now that happens, you know, that is, you know, marketers do not necessarily want to have those tough relationship damaging conversations with the agency in a pitch.

Darren Woolley: So procurement is convenient to do that. Then in very large organizations, you'll often find there'll be a procurement team who are actually KPI'd on savings across the board in everything they do. That is their number one thing. Unfortunately, when they get to marketing, savings can often come at the expense of efficacy.

Darren Woolley: So in those situations, you have to be very careful. You know that the, the procurement has not been, uh, held account to deliver savings because of course, you know, if it's your job or theirs, they're going to look after their own job. Then the third area is where procurement is mandating pitches. And it's very much that the marketer is not even, uh, a partner with procurement, they're being told that, you know, and usually because of legal or finance, procurement is being told, well, that contract's been in place for three years, four years, five years, we must go to market to make sure that it's the best.

Darren Woolley: And, and so, you know, in 2019, we very quickly identified that behavior and started offering, uh, what we call commercial reviews, where if you've got a very good relationship with your, uh, agency, and it's a high performing relationship, instead of the disruptive way of going to market, we would come in as an independent third party industry expert and look at all the commercial arrangements and write a scorecard report to show where that relationship sits and thereby avoid a pitch.

Darren Woolley: Now, why avoid a pitch? It's disruptive. It's, it's costly and potentially you may end up with a new agency when you didn't need one and have to go through that whole onboarding again.

James Lawrence: Yeah. And speaking as an agency owner, when clients that you have a great relationship with and you're doing great work for, Um, kind of go, we've got to go out to, to tender.

James Lawrence: It's not a particularly nice feeling. Right. I think you're, you like to use the, um, the analogy of, you know, the husband and the wife and, you know, look, it's going well, but I might just go out to market for, for the next couple of weeks and see how things are and, you know, better. I'll come back.

Darren Woolley: And look, you know, many marketers will convince themselves that the incumbent knows their.

Darren Woolley: Business and knows their marketing better their brand better than the any other agency. Unfortunately, the selection process in the way it's run is not beneficial to the incumbent because it's very much driven by what's new and exciting and interesting rather than what's well known and defined and comfortable.

Darren Woolley: You know, so in the same way as going off and dating other people is not the best way to judge the strength of a marriage, um, pitching an incumbent who you have a very excellent, productive relationship with is not the best way, because even if you appoint them, invariably, there's been damage, either financial, emotional, uh, you know, or otherwise to that relationship.

Darren Woolley: That's right.

James Lawrence: And there's not a, there's not a digital. Campaign that we couldn't audit and find problems with right whether that's an existing client or a perspective It's just the the nature of of the uh, the space, right? Um, I think it might be a kind of glib question, but as a marketer, why do I care?

James Lawrence: Why do I care about the pain that i'm inflicting on agencies? Why do I care if i'm costing agencies tens hundreds of thousands of dollars to pitch? Um from a marketer in house sitting here What's like kind of what's in it for me to to do a lot of these things?

Darren Woolley: Okay. Well, what I'd first say is it, it starts with the biggest mistake many marketers make when they go to pitch.

Darren Woolley: And that is not spending enough time clearly defining for themselves what success looks like. Okay, because often marketers will find themselves going to market to just see what's out there. Let's go to market to see if there's something better without defining what better looks like. And so along the ways can lead to all sorts of problems.

Darren Woolley: Now, if you want something better, you've got to be better. As a marketer, and this is where the danger is. If you've not defined clearly what the outcome looking for, then often you'll send mixed messages to the agencies involved, and that's where we see a rise in perceptions from agencies. That it was not a real pitch, that there was a preconceived outcome that we're just being put through the paces to test the incumbent and they stayed with them anyway and wasted our time or, you know, and, and that leads to marketers as individuals getting a reputation for having their favorite agency.

Darren Woolley: And this is just, you know, and, and so it calls into question the ethical. strength or the ethical ability of the marketer. It starts to create, uh, a poor reputation. And the impact of that is that you will not get the best agencies pitching for you. And I've seen it personally. I've seen marketers over the years who are known to have their favorite agency and will put a whole lot of agencies through a pitch process just to justify appointing their favorite agency, who will then not have.

Darren Woolley: The good agencies participate in that pitch because that's their reputation justified or not. If that's the reputation, the thing is from a marketer's point of view, it sticks with the individual. It's not about the brand. When you change jobs, that reputation goes with you as an individual and can end up being a career limiting.

Darren Woolley: Perception that hangs around you. I remember very early on having a marketer who for no fault of their own had a pitch go horribly wrong, and they were terrified of reproducing that subsequently because they'd had feedback from people in the industry and within their own organization. Of the impact of, of that happening, you know, it's, it's, it's a real concern that I think most marketers overlook.

James Lawrence: It's just true, but it's, um, I can definitely think of a person that we've dealt with where it's very frustrating as an agency owner when you go through the process and the work gets awarded back to the incumbent when you have the feeling that it was always going to happen. And it was, they went out to market to rubber stamp or to get some fresh ideas or, um, to the point around procurement, just to kind of.

James Lawrence: Just test the waters and make sure what we're getting is kind of, it's kind of market. Um, and we'll talk about feedback a little bit later on, and particularly when you don't get feedback, both positive and constructive, because I think getting feedback and if it's, if it's real, and particularly about, you know, why your pitch didn't stack up against the winning kind of option, um, it does get really frustrating from the agency viewpoint.

Darren Woolley: And, you know, It's not just the incumbent, you know, when a new CMO or marketing leader comes to a role, and then they run a pitch and sure enough, they appoint the same agency again, you know, and you feel like it's the agencies legitimately feel that they were set up. You know, why didn't they just appoint the agency that they want to appoint without putting everyone through The, the, the cost and the disruption of, uh, of pitching when they had no chance of winning.

Darren Woolley: And so I think, you know, this is a very real, um, real issue and a real consideration for marketers on wanting to be seen to be highly professional, not just in the role of marketing, but in the role of procuring the right agency partners or the right agency, you know, suppliers, uh, to that relationship and building good relationships.

Darren Woolley: Cause we know that's really where the best value comes from is when marketer and agency can work seamlessly together. You know, and build a high level of trust. That's where you get more value than any amount of negotiation can deliver.

James Lawrence: 100%. I'd like to move on to, , I guess the process like RFPs, chemistry sessions.

James Lawrence: I don't, I can't recall the number, but there was basically, sorry, 45, I think was in the report, um, The most agencies that were engaged in one particular pitch process, which is completely terrifying, completely terrifying as an agency owner. Um, how many agencies do you get in at each stage? Just to hear from your perspective, and maybe this would be a good part, a good point to kind of look at best practice or best approaches when you're dealing with a reasonably small project in terms of monetary value versus some , bigger contract work.

Darren Woolley: Look, , the 43 or 45 is, um, particularly when procurement insists on going to open tender. So that's where there'll be some sort of advertised tender online. Usually these days, once upon a time, there was a tender section in the newspaper that every new business person would pour over. But you know, there's usually an online tender process which everyone jumps into.

Darren Woolley: Now, the first thing is, if that's your filtering process, then you should make that as easy as possible for people to participate with capturing enough information that you can quickly filter from 45 down to half a dozen that you're then interested in. The actual number that should be involved is that Let's think about the outcome.

Darren Woolley: How many agencies do you want to appoint at the end? It's usually just one. So if you start with a hundred or 50 or even 20, you've got a long way to get to one. And what we say to people is, you know, sure. Look at the marketplace, look for who's available, who is possibly the best fit, and then quickly find a, the least, uh, Expensive way of getting that down to a handful that you can then go into deeper, deeper interrogation.

Darren Woolley: Having said that, if I've got a client that has a project for somewhere between 50, 000 and 100, 000, the average pitch. Process as they run the type you were talking about with chemistry and credentials and, and doing speculative creative, an agency could be spending 50 or even more just participating in that pitch.

Darren Woolley: So the fee is not even anywhere near enough to cover the cost of winning it. So what would you recommend? There's so many things that could be done. You could just meet with three agencies and have their credentials and ask them to provide the contact details of you know, three clients that they currently work with and talk to those clients to see what each agency is like.

Darren Woolley: And then a point one to the project. There is no need to go any further than that. You've got a budget. You know how much there is to spend. You know, you could simply do it that way.

James Lawrence: The, um, the point around public tenders and capturing just enough information to filter to a meaningful number really resonates.

James Lawrence: We, as an agency, we don't respond to any tenders like that. So we will be on certain lists and we just, we don't respond because our feeling is, is it's just take a number and. We're not willing to invest the money for the work because we kind of get enough work through other, other ways. So I look at that and go, but if we were required to put, you know, generic bit of information about the agency, some rough commercials on how we approach things and just a simple number of questions, collateral, we probably already have, I'd be pretty open as an agency to respond to that.

James Lawrence: But often you're, you're being asked to answer, you know, 10, 20, 40 pages of pretty. Um, custom information, which takes days and days and days of the staff members time.

Darren Woolley: And the most annoying thing is that every one is different. So it's not like you can just fill it in once and just supply it to everyone.

Darren Woolley: There's always different requirements. So it really is bespoke for each one. The other problem is with that. Is that when clients are running pitches, like full on pitches to just put an agency on a panel, you know, they're not even being awarded a piece of business with a financial return, you're actually having to tender and go through the cost and time to get it.

Darren Woolley: To then be included on a panel that could be anywhere between three and twenty different agencies that may get work at some stage down the track, you know, and again, that's a big investment for a very small chance of a return. So this is what we're talking about is that there are so many different ways of meeting all the criteria and the criteria for, um, selecting any supplier, no matter how small or large is to have, um, A process that has governance and due diligence and is fair and delivers the appropriate outcome.

Darren Woolley: You know, they're the four main criteria that any process should do. There is no rule that says there is a particular way of running this. There's lots of different ways of running it. The problem is We find that marketers, of course, in this area don't know what they don't know, but what they do know is that a pitch is run this way, you know, chemistry sessions and speculative, creative and negotiations.

Darren Woolley: And so they think that that's the only way to do it. So they, it becomes the go to methodology. Whereas, yeah, we find ourselves, we certainly have some standards, but we have customizing the approach to meet the needs of each client and to minimize the harm that it does to the agencies.

James Lawrence: I think an interesting, another point, I think the potential reputational damage that a marketer does running a pitch in the wrong way is a really good one.

James Lawrence: Are you observing that sometimes what you might think to be a really good potential agency partner just doesn't engage with pitch processes if they're set up in the wrong way, where if you've kind of, you know, if you're boiling the ocean on a reasonably small scale, Project expecting a whole bunch of hurdles to be jumped in the dog and pony show at the end of it.

James Lawrence: Do you think that marketers are running the risk of actually not even having the best potential agency partners respond to that process?

Darren Woolley: Look, it's a good, uh, good question because it leads the observation about the rise of the independent agencies. Now, we've seen in the last five to 10 years, this huge expansion of independent agencies in the marketplace.

Darren Woolley: Now, there's the traditional network agencies, they're largely run by people that are employees. You know, they're employed to be the managing director of the office in, in this country. And so they have a mandate to win as much business as possible and take every opportunity. It's very different when you're dealing with independent agencies because the management, the owners are actually on the ground in that office and increasingly are making value judgments on whether to participate or not, on the basis of, Is this going to be a fair process?

Darren Woolley: Do we have a good opportunity to win? Will there be a reasonable return on investment if we are successful? And they're making those business decisions up front and not participating in pitches where they don't think it meets any One or more of those criteria. Okay. If you, if you buy into a lot of these agencies, independent agencies are offering a valid, legitimate and quite exciting alternative to the traditional network offering.

Darren Woolley: That's what you're potentially missing out on by not running a process that Gives them those opportunities. They are the ones that, you know, even with a pitch consultant, like Trinity pay three, contacting those agencies, they will have more questions around, okay, what is the process? How many agencies will be participating?

Darren Woolley: What is the indication of the fee? They'll want that information so they can make a decision, a commercial decision, and a legitimate decision around whether it's worth participating It's not just a financial cost. You can imagine what you would probably relate to the fact that if you, as an agency owner, put your team into a number of pitches that are unsuccessful, then you start to get a morale issue and you probably get a burnout issue.

Darren Woolley: Because you don't have staff that are just sitting around waiting for the pitch to come in, almost everyone in your team is doing additional work outside of their paid work to actually make that happen. And you can imagine you win three or lose three or four on the trot. People are starting to become disenchanted.

Darren Woolley: So you need to be much better as a business owner in making those calls and pitching more for the ones you can win. You've got a better chance of winning. And not pitching for the ones that you feel like you've just been included in the number. And I think that's a great, great thing.

James Lawrence: Yeah, a hundred percent.

James Lawrence: Yeah. For like, from our experience at Rocket, you know, I think we're a really good agency. We do lots of really, really good work. We, our resting position is we won't respond. To RFPs, tenders, et cetera. That's our default position, unless there's a really compelling reason to do so. And so the types of questions, but yeah, I guess you're seeing agency owners ask the types of questions that I'll be asking of my team, right?

James Lawrence: Which is how did they hear of us? How many other agencies are involved? What is at stake? How many hurdles do we have to jump through? And yeah, I reckon nine times out of 10, we just go, we're not interested because we're not going to go through that process to have. You know, a sea of agencies competing driven on cost or the idea that it's going to go back to the incumbent, um, agency.

James Lawrence: I do find that when you're talking about some smaller value work where it might be just a bit more of an informal process, but still follows, you know, all the steps to be a kind of a rigorous process. I really love just that agency credentials type session. 30 minutes, 45 minutes, just a chat, set a chat.

James Lawrence: Let's see if largely it could be a fit here. And if there, and for me, that's not about them assessing us, that's about each party assessing the other. And often we'll say it's just not, not the kind of work that we're interested in, in following through. And so I think you do, as a marketer, potentially set yourself up for a lot of good agencies, not really being interested in your process if you, if you don't go about it in the right way.

Darren Woolley: Exactly. You know, and, and over time, if you continue to do that, you'll start to get that reputation that will hang around you like a bad smell, you know, it does follow particular marketers when they change jobs, the agencies are looking at the individual. It's very much a personal thing rather than a brand reputation impact.

James Lawrence: Um, on a more complex pitch, right? I guess we've talked about the it's a project. 100 grand. You speak to some clients assess work. It's almost a test, I guess, in some ways. What about for a much more, um, a larger account, potentially one of those more traditional accounts, millions of dollars and potentially multi year.

James Lawrence: What is that approach that you think marketers should be taking to find the right agency partner?

Darren Woolley: Yeah, we personally don't, uh, encourage clients to go to speculative creative. We think that the pitch process is too, uh, abstract to actually use that as a way of proving the ability of the agency to deliver work.

Darren Woolley: You know, you can see the work they've done for other clients. You can see the results. You can get testimonials from their existing clients. We much prefer to use what we call workshopping. Or workshops, strategic workshops, where, you know, on a big pitch, you do, uh, credentials, which are more about demonstrating their existing ability to deliver the capabilities required.

Darren Woolley: A chemistry meeting where you get to discuss those capabilities, but really test out if this is a combination that can work well together. And in that, breaking down the idea that it's a presentation. You know, having more people from the marketing side in those meetings. So that you really do get a measure of how well there's an alignment of values and culture, then going into a workshop where collectively you work on a problem for half a day, maybe four hours, sometimes a full day workshop.

Darren Woolley: Now, the reason for that. Is it's as close to a test drive where you find out how the agency thinks and who are the people with the ideas and who are the people that are, can articulate them, but also for the agency to see how the marketer works, you know, what is there a hierarchy? Uh, are there some people that are more open to ideas than others?

Darren Woolley: Yeah, so it really is. Uh, we call it the test drive because both the agency and the client get a very good chance of finding out about each other with even in those workshops included in, in the case of an automotive brand, we included like the dealers representatives, the, um, uh, spare parts division, even the CEO of the company sat in on those three workshops with three different agencies.

Darren Woolley: And you've got this collective view of which of those they thought would bring the most value to that relationship.

James Lawrence: Do you find that

Darren Woolley: having to do work? Yeah,

James Lawrence: do you find that approach creates a more obvious winner when you look at kind of when you've got three agencies just pitching an idea and creative and you know, the team spent hundreds of hours on it.

James Lawrence: Do you find that it's often harder to reach consensus in that? Environment versus when you do have key stakeholders spending half a day in a room with the people that would otherwise be doing the work with them.

Darren Woolley: Yeah, so we introduced that workshop approach in 2007. Prior to that, we saw often when creative was presented.

Darren Woolley: They were no longer judging which agency was the best, but which idea was the best. And that becomes even more subjective. I mean, all of these decisions, James is subjective. Okay. But judging creative work comes down to almost personal taste. Whereas, you know, chemistry and aligned values and cultures is something that.

Darren Woolley: Is often collectively felt. So I'm not sure whether it's a clear winner, but there's usually people can articulate a clear preference in the workshop that will often not be seen when they're judging work. And here's the other thing about speculative creative work is you can never know as the marketer who actually did the work because a lot of agencies use freelancers.

Darren Woolley: You know, and it could be the junior team or it could be a freelance team that actually did the work. You're also in that process, seeing a pitch team, a presentation team who are very good at presenting, but you're not actually meeting the people that will most likely be working on your business because their skillset is.

Darren Woolley: how to present and woo a client rather than run a relationship from day to day. And so that's why we find the workshop. We actually had a workshop in the early days with an agency that was well known for being terrific at presenting and they failed miserably in the workshop because they spent the whole time presenting to the client rather than working with them.

Darren Woolley: So, so, you know, it, it, it does have its strengths. Yeah, it's interesting. The market is that, um, At the start of it, say, oh, three half days of, you know, but at the end, so it was the best, best investment of their time and likewise for the agencies. Now, that would only be used for, as you said in your inquiry, for a very large Piece of business, you know, we're talking hundreds of thousands of dollars in fees per year over 3 to 5 years, you know, there has to be a return on that investment.

James Lawrence: But I guess

Darren Woolley: there's

James Lawrence: the, it's the principles of right that should be able to be adapted and used. In less expensive pitches. Right. And to

Darren Woolley: your point earlier, you said, you know, you like those chemistry sessions, but, you know, they're not the word that we have to find a better word because chemistry sounds like, you know, we get together for drinks and or coffee and chit chat, you know, it should be about business.

Darren Woolley: The conversation should be about this is what we do. How can we bring this to help you? Achieve your goals and for the marketer to say, okay, that's what you do. How would you do it for us if we have these issues and, and use the meeting as a way of finding where's their common ground and alignment to fulfill the predefined goals.

Darren Woolley: Idea of what success looks like

James Lawrence: Mr Willie. I think if anyone can put a name or a label to rebrand the chemistry session into something else, it's it's you and I see a blog post or a podcast coming soon on the topic. Well, I hope so what I'm paying paying for pitching.

Darren Woolley: Yeah, the first thing out of the research is while a lot of marketers talk about it, very few are actually doing it.

Darren Woolley: And if they are paying, they're paying a token amount, you know, we're talking 10, to each unsuccessful agency. And in some cases, then asking the agency to assign their IP to them for the 5, 000 or 10, 000. And this is where I think the problem is, you know. I personally, I recommend, and as a company, we recommend clients paying a substantial commercial fee if they are either wanting to own the intellectual property produced, and I'm talking, you know, sometimes in the hundreds of thousands of dollars to each agency.

Darren Woolley: Uh, or they have particularly rigorous and detailed requirements of the agency as part of the process. You know, we want fully rendered, uh, videos and things, you know, things that you should never need, but if they want them, they should pay for the, the agency should not be out of pocket for anything. That is unusual, but or specific to that client, I don't think a general payment of a fee for every pitch is a good thing because it starts leading to that idea of entitlement.

Darren Woolley: I've paid you a fee. What do I get out of it? I want your IP. I want this. I want this. Yeah, we have had situations where. Uh, in the process, the workshops or something and agencies come up with an idea that, you know, or, or suggested something that wasn't, uh, ultimately the agency wasn't successful and we've gone back and negotiated ownership of that, uh, for a commercial fee to actually buy the intellectual property.

Darren Woolley: I don't know why this is not more common. You know, why do we have this approach that People have to own everything, just own what you need to, and everything else, uh, you know, is the product of the agency, you know, working to win the business. So, my baseline is, yes, uh, pitch fees should be paid in specific circumstances, but not as a just payment.

Darren Woolley: A general practice, because I think it will lead to agencies becoming more abused than they are already

James Lawrence: interesting. Interesting perspective. What, um, in terms of just timeframes, I think one of the, um, starts to come out was just agencies finding just not enough time to the process itself. Um, just, I guess, for a smaller process through to a larger one, how do you set it up in a way that you're actually giving the appropriate amount of time for the process to flesh out?

Darren Woolley: Yeah, look, and agencies are split on this as well. Some agencies like a fast process, you know, it's like, yes, let us get our resources together and do a four week sprint and it's over and done with. Others, uh, say no, we'd rather two to three months and have time, you know, two to four weeks of each step as a way of being able to then, Maximize the or optimize our resources to deliver to your needs where agencies get really frustrated is when that process drags on and on and on, you know, when we're getting to six months or even up to 12 months for a selection process, there's a huge amount of frustration from the agency's point of view, I think if you're going to run a very fast pitch and we have run pitches in four weeks, there's But at the very start, you need to have that conversation with the agency and explain the process and explain the timings up front, get them to agree or not.

Darren Woolley: If they, if they can't do it, you know, accommodate as much as possible. But if not, then it may not be for them because there are situations where clients through. No fault of their own or sometimes for a lot of fault of their own, you know, I've, I've left it to the last minute, but you need to get agreement.

Darren Woolley: You need to treat people as professionals and treat them with respect and get that agreement and then run the process exactly how you've planned it. And not suddenly change it midstream because, you know, you're, you're asking them to do something extraordinary, at least be respectful enough to deliver your end of that bargain.

Darren Woolley: That's

James Lawrence: good feedback. We, um, we actually, when we're assessing what work we want to go in for. It's, it's one of our big negative ticks, right? It's someone that comes to us needing something urgently or needing to change agencies urgently or needing responses turned around urgently. There's generally a pretty strict correlation between those types of prospective clients to pretty difficult clients to work with for whatever reason.

James Lawrence: And I think to your point, maybe there's sometimes very valid reasons for that. Um, but I think if you're going to get the best agencies to respond and to. Give their best response front footing that and explaining away the exactly the reason makes a lot of sense. And, and the other one's totally true, which is, uh, nine times outta 10, all the dates that you get on a tender or a on a RFP are, are not met.

James Lawrence: Right. Um, yeah. Always the expectation that your responses are in by the due date or you, or you won't be, uh, you won't be included to the next phase and then often it doesn't get. Doesn't come back the other way, which can be very frustrating. Um, I'd like to talk about feedback. In terms of advice, and I think this does come back to, you know, why should I care as a market out to the point?

James Lawrence: We've already discussed, right? Reputation matters. It's about doing the right thing. And I think generally these things do come back around again. But, um, how to give it. How detailed to go, um, and what your, what the report says agencies are feeling out there.

Darren Woolley: Okay. So, you know, the interesting thing is marketers often feel that they don't want to be the bearer of bad tidings and they don't want to upset the agency.

Darren Woolley: So the first thing is, you know, we've recently heard from some agencies in a pitch that they were all told that they were a close second. Um, Okay, that there is nothing worse than telling an agency that they're a close second. It's actually not. It's

James Lawrence: music to my ears. It's that anytime we don't win a deal, that's what we hear.

James Lawrence: And every time I say to my team that are working on it, it's not true. Well, here's a line for you,

Darren Woolley: here's a line for you, James, and for every, every agency owner, when you're told you're a close second, turn to them and go, this is not the Olympics. I'm not getting the silver medal. Because there is no silver medal.

Darren Woolley: There's no bronze medal. You either win or you lose. Correct. And so, I'd say to marketers never say they're a close second. It's, you think you're, you're soothing the pain. You're actually making it much worse because then there'll be this process of, uh, of post mortem in the agency going, what could we have done better to be, you know, to be one?

Darren Woolley: They'll never know. The other thing is that, you know, the agency has had the, the professionalism to participate in this process. You need to have the professionalism to provide them with feedback that doesn't breach confidentiality of what the successful agency did. But gives them very practical things to think about next time, and that could be everything from, you know, we thought that in the presentation, one person was leading too much and we didn't get the sense of being a team or what others could, whatever it is, you know, It's the sort of invaluable feedback that the agency can take on board and, , they may choose not to do anything about it because that's the way they work, but it's so valuable and, and the type of thing that, , in some ways agencies will feel like, well, okay, we didn't win, but you know, that was a really valuable lesson and we've got things that we can do for next time.

Darren Woolley: I've seen very, very senior marketers, , say to me, , right, we're, we're going to give feedback and we've got all these notes about all the things. And then we've got into the meeting and they spend 20 or 30 minutes going, Oh, you know, and it was, you're really good. And, you know, and they're trying to,

James Lawrence: so close,

Darren Woolley: but, but they've bought into that idea that, , say four things nice before you say one thing bad.

Darren Woolley: Yeah.

James Lawrence: Yeah.

Darren Woolley: You know, say one thing nice, tell them, , yes, we thought you're incredibly professional, there is nothing that would make us not want to consider you for future projects, whatever those things are, you know, be very clear. But here are some observations we made. And these are our impressions, but , that's what we were basing our decision on where you could have improved and then just go through them and have a, , a very rational grown up conversation without getting into personal slurs or, Uh, when the agency invariably asks, yeah, well, what did the other side do?

Darren Woolley: Well, they did their thing. We're trying to give you feedback on what you could do better. It's not about the comparison.

James Lawrence: Yeah. Hallelujah. For sure. Like it's, um, We have a saying at Rocket, you know, feedback is a gift and It's not uncommon to be completely ghosted, right? You kind of put all this time and effort in, you don't get any response, or you get the, it was a very hard decision, you're a very close second, and you guys are so good at all this stuff, we'd love to consider you for a few, and it's, it's so frustrating, um, never ever have we received detailed feedback, and has that done anything other than make us feel positive towards the experience.

James Lawrence: The NSO validates The entire process often, which is, and sometimes we get told who the winning agency is. And with that, as you said, going into too much information or anything confidential, the elements of the approach that the client might've liked more about where they went. And then the things that you did actually do well, because it can be quite validating to know that, yeah, you actually built great rapport and we liked you and we thought you were excellent for these reasons.

James Lawrence: But it's, it's so helpful and I think it's almost depending obviously on the time and effort often it kind of is almost, um, enough to have made the whole process worthwhile as an agency, which is we didn't win it, but we actually learned a lot about how we can win future work when if you just get nothing, it is just mind numbingly frustrating.

Darren Woolley: And the other problem is only giving feedback at the end of the process, , in that. There's a procurement attitude that everyone, you know, to create a level playing field, everyone should just get to run their race and then we'll make a decision. The trouble is that what that means, if an agency makes a small misstep very early on, And yet absolutely ideal, they've got no chance to correct it because there's no feedback.

Darren Woolley: There should be opportunities for feedback at each step of the way, not in a way that is going to make or give one a benefit over the others. Stops them being eliminated because of perhaps one misword or misinterpretation, even so. I think, you know, treat this as if you're building a business relationship, start the pitch and run the pitch in the same way you would want to continue the relationship if it's successful.

Darren Woolley: And that is with open communication. Be aware of not. Uh, biasing a favor towards one agency over another, but give everyone the opportunity to be the best they can possibly be in that process because you want to choose the right agency for you. And you need to make sure that the process itself is not getting in the way of making that choice.

Darren Woolley: And I think that's where, you know, there's nuance in all of these that people, often agency people will be on the agency side and participate in pitches and they'll find themselves one day and they go, Oh, I can run a pitch. There's a big learning curve from being in a pitch to actually running a pitch because, um, I went through that myself, you know, 25 years ago, changing from agency to, to pitch consultant.

Darren Woolley: It's a big learning curve in, in understanding the two different perspectives , and managing that.

James Lawrence: Yeah. And it is so hard when you receive , a brief or tender RFP, whatever it might be.

And often it can be hard, um, To know exactly what to put forward when you have so much to talk about or so many areas to go down to. So not being coached, but kind of being brought along for the journey and making sure that you are being given the best opportunity to put forward your true. True story, right?

And not having things , not discussed that you actually can cover in quite good detail. Darren, um, it's been an awesome conversation. , any other advice for a marketer on how to run a successful pitch that we haven't covered today?

Darren Woolley: Well, I would say to every marketer, you know, there are a hundred considerations that you need to go through.

We've actually detailed all of them on, on our website because what, you know, we know that a pitch consultant is not necessarily the solution for every marketer, but If every marketer could have the knowledge that we have or the experience at their fingertips, that would be a really good thing to, to improve the pitch process.

And so I'd say to them, take the time before you even start the pitch to really work through what are the important things to find success, who's going to be involved, how much time do we have, what do we really want to achieve out of that? Get that not just in their minds. But in the, , get collective agreement on the marketing team side, or even the whole organisation before you even begin to , engage with agencies, you know, because it's so important.

We are making, uh, potentially big decisions here around the future success of the brand and the business and getting it right is not something that you should leave to chance. There's always going to be unknowns, but the more you prepare for it, the better you'll be.

James Lawrence: Love it. And the report itself is available on the Trinity P3 website. State of the pitch report, Trinity P3, we'll bring it up.

Darren Woolley: It's Trinity, uh, trinity b3.com/state of the pitch with ens between each one. We'll get you the report.

James Lawrence: I'm impressed, Darren, that you know , the, , URL of the page. , I was gonna ask you on the, um, the kind of all , the, uh, the characteristics of a well run pitch, which you said are on the website too, but I'm not gonna, .

Probe you on that URL unless you're, uh, Not off the top of my head. You will find it. Or you can email myself. Um, Darren, thanks so much for coming back onto the pod. Always love chatting marketing with you.

Darren Woolley: Always enjoy it. Thank you, James.