Pitch Perfect

In light of the mass of new business pitches taking place in the advertising world currently, an interesting debate has been running on LinkedIn. Given the amount of time and effort that new business pitches take up, the discussion is the balance between contractual and financial commitments vs chemistry and culture and which element should take place first.

Like it or not, most sizeable clients will have strict procurement rules in place, so the completion of long written responses and excel spreadsheets is an inevitable part of their tendering process. What any business invited to a pitch has the right to know in advance is, what is the full scope of the process and what is the scoring mechanism used to determine who progresses to the next stage?

It amazes me how many clients consider the scoring mechanism to be a secret, not to be shared with participants. It’s in their interest to provide the maximum amount of information possible to allow tendering businesses to produce the best response, yet many fail to do so.  

I also believe that the questions asked in the presentation stage of pitches are fundamentally wrong. If you’d like to know my solution to this, please contact me at howardnead@redroadco.com.