Nathan Hodges is the Managing Director at TrinityP3 and has led significant projects to redesign marketer agency rosters to deliver a more seamless delivery. This often results in the need to tender for a complex range of marketing capabilities.
Since the pandemic, agencies worldwide have been increasingly vocal about ditching the pitch, and trade media have run headlines and opinion pieces claiming it is broken and even dead.
As Australia’s and APAC’s leading pitch consultancy, we noticed that while there were plenty of opinions, there was very little data on this topic, so we undertook our research called The State of the Pitch in Australia.
One of the more interesting insights was the breadth of disciplines identified in the research, from strategy to production, PR to social media and influencer and more. Nathan shares the complexities and challenges when your pitch requirement is not just a creative or media agency.
You can download your copy of the State of the Pitch Australia Report for free here.
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If the account management team in an agency or agency group gets it and understands that actually you’re not after showcasing a particular discipline, you’re after a whole agency approach to try and solve business problems time after time, after time, using the resources and skill sets available to you. If they get that, then it can click really soon and really, really quickly.
Transcription:
Darren:
Hi, I am Darren Woolley, founder and CEO of TrinityP3 Marketing Management Consultancy, and welcome to Managing Marketing, a weekly podcast where we discuss the issues and opportunities facing marketing, media, and advertising with industry thought leaders and practitioners.
If you’re enjoying the Managing Marketing Podcast, please either like, review, or share this episode to help spread the words and wisdom from our guests each week.
Since the pandemic, there’s been an increasingly vocal call from agencies globally to ditch the pitch, and trade media have run headlines and opinion pieces claiming the pitch is broken and even dead.
As Australia and apex leading pitch consultancy, we noticed that while there were plenty of opinions, there was very little data on this topic. So, we undertook our own research called The State of the Pitch in Australia.
Run from June to December last year, the report makes it interesting to read what’s going on and what’s going wrong with pitching.
One of the key findings was the large number of disciplines and capabilities marketers were wanting to test to find the successful agency.
Well, my guest today is responsible for managing and facilitating some of the most complicated and diverse tender processes over the past decade and is here to discuss the implication of managing a composite pitch process to create the ideal agency model.
Please welcome to the Managing Marketing Podcast, TrinityP3 managing director for Australia and New Zealand, Nathan Hodges. Welcome back, Nathan.
Nathan:
Hey, Darren. Good to be back.
Darren:
We have had this conversation previously around the idea of agency models and the different models and the different approaches, but I think in light of the insights coming out of The State of the Pitch in Australia, the research, one of the key points that I highlighted in my introduction was the number of capabilities that some marketers are looking for.
It’s not just a creative agency or a media agency, but there’ll be a long list, including social media, influencers, CX data. And that this is becoming a trend that we’ve noticed outside of the research. That’s right, isn’t it?
Nathan:
Yeah, absolutely. It’s not a surprise, I suppose, that as rosters and agency capabilities expand, rosters become more complicated and more diverse. It’s not a surprise that there’s a demand that the pitch process as well should reflect that. It’s a natural development.
What often becomes difficult is to convince a marketer that actually the pitch process that they’re about to embark on or in the middle of needs to reflect some of more of the kind of complexity of their daily life.
And the fact that they have got agencies with diverse capabilities on their roster, they’re all trying to work with each other, others to varying degrees of success, and with varying levels of input from the marketer.
And given that we always proceed with any pitch on this hard principle that you need to make the pitch reflect as best you can what it would be like to work with the agencies that you’re assessing, it’s not a surprise that some of that needs to be part of the pitch process.
And we kind of think the more the better. But it is a challenge to get marketing teams to get their heads around that perhaps. I mean, everyone thinks the pitch is simple, of course, as we know.
Darren:
Yeah, well, anyone can do it.
Nathan:
[Crosstalk 00:03:48] But geez, they’re as simple as they can be without missing the point.
Darren:
I think the idea that marketers are looking for more capabilities from a single agency is also reflected in the trend we’ve noticed of agencies no longer easily fitting a particular pigeonhole.
I know that when we talk about a digital agency, what does it even mean to be a digital agency, or a creative agency, or a media agency?
In actual fact, many of those labels are no longer relevant because almost all of them will offer more services than just media. We’ve seen media agencies build out their content capability as a way of expanding into what was traditionally, perhaps, a creative agency remit.
Nathan:
Of course. And we know that every agency worth its salt, if they’re asked a question like, do you do this? Or Can you help us with that? The answer’s always going to be yes.
Now, are they the very best option in each case for each discipline, for each specialism, for any marketer? Well, that’s to be decided and tested and worked out and established.
But of course, massive diversification in what agencies can do. The thought of a digital agency, I just think is a useless phrase, has been for many years now. I don’t know what isn’t digital in anything.
What was it that John Wilkins used to say? That he reckons that years ago he told us that digital was like a gas, is what he said. And it (I’m sure it was John) permeates through everything that we do. Says, let’s stop talking about it as a specific thing. And it’s been like that for a long time.
So, of course again, this starts to build this complexity in any pitch process if you start to look at it more closely and look at it properly. Now, we’ll come to it. We’ve got a very clear solution for how to do that but let’s not underestimate that there’s more to it than meets the eye here.
You’ve got to put these jigsaw pieces together. And you know what, I think we were talking the other day about this. The ultimate roster model that any client is after they know what that picture looks like, the finished jigsaw.
But the various pieces of the jigsaw puzzle that need to go into that, well, if you put one down, you’ve got to find another one that fits alongside that, and then another one and another one. So, there’s different routes to get there, unless that’s another [crosstalk 00:06:19] making.
Darren:
Sorry. So, Nathan, it’s probably worthwhile just clarifying here. We’re not talking about where you’ve got a roster of agencies, and you want to swap one out for another. I want to replace my PR agency with another one, or I want to replace my media agency with another one.
That’s almost like to use your jigsaw metaphor, lifting one piece out and trying to find the one that fits best back into that pattern.
What we’re talking about is where there’s been a requirement to really step back and look at all the agencies and see how they’re working together and how well collectively as a roster they’re delivering the marketing needs, isn’t it?
Nathan:
Yeah, that’s right. And complexity drives duplication here. I mean, as the disciplines that are required and the speed and the nature of those disciplines and how they’re applied grows, of course, rosters become larger and larger, agencies proliferate on client rosters.
And clients end up with four to five or six different relationships with agencies where they previously had one to two.
So, to go back to your raising there of the pitch that you take a PR agency, you lift one out because it’s not performing, and put another one in, rarer and rarer are the occasions where that’s actually a completely hermetically sealed thing to do.
Because often that agency, whatever it is, PR or digital or social or creative or media or planning, whatever it is, has actually managed to manage other parts of a campaign that was discreet to it across different disciplines.
And the web has already started to be created. The tentacles go through the web, if that’s not mixing metaphors, dreadfully, which I’m sure it is.
So, it’s very rare to get that kind of process these days, almost that kind of pitch. If you’re running that kind of pitch, you might put your fingers and ears and close your eyes and go, “La la la I just want to get my rate agencies sort of swapped out and I’m going to move on.”
But often when you look closer at it to, in order to chase down duplication, to maximize delivery, to make sure that the marketing team are not running between agency and agency and agency trying to get different jigsaw pieces to fit into a picture, you probably need to look at more than that. You probably need to look at where those capabilities are.
And what do we find time after time, Darren? Every time you add an agency to your roster, you’re probably losing between 12 and 15% in efficiency every single time you do it. Not counting the extra time that the marketing team takes to run around engaging, disengaging, briefing or unbriefing that agency.
Darren:
So, what you’re effectively saying is that it’s possible to run a pitch process, to say build a village from scratch. A lot of clients who are marketers will talk about they want a village of agencies.
And let’s be honest, that’s being driven by underlying desire to have best of breed in each of the capabilities.
So, it almost says, I’m going to go to market and find the best social media agency, the best influencer agency, the best paid media, and so on and so forth, best SEO SEM. And I’m going to put them together in a village and have them work together.
Now, that’s solving a complex requirement with a complex roster, isn’t it?
Nathan:
Yeah. Look, that looks great on paper. And I suppose it’s fantastic if you’re the kind of client that’s got an enormous budget and unlimited ability to go to the market because there’s no kind of competitive conflict in that market.
And it’s great if every agency is desperate to work in your business and will do so for a fragment of your overall budget. But of course, that is exactly what you’re trying to do there.
But of course, your plan crashes straight into reality there, because of course, you’ll need to put five or six of those disciplines into one place, because otherwise you get no kind of share, of voice or command, of attention or focus, of investment or skillset from the agency that’s there.
So, this is what the composite pitch is designed to do. It takes that ambiguity, it takes that gulf between what might look ideal on paper, rarely these days, or increasingly rarely is it a village model for most marketers these days but it might be a village model, it might be a lead agency model, it might be a whole host of different models.
But it allows you then to meet the reality of the market without compromising on the ultimate answer in terms of deliverables and in terms of features of the roster.
So, that’s it. You don’t just decide on your roster model and then rigidly stick to it and hell or high water, that’s what you’re going to get out of a pitch. It allows you to go, “Well, you know what, the reality of it is actually, if we put six of these disciplines into this one agency here, they could manage the whole thing for us.”
“And there’s remuneration and focus and big fish small pond advantages out of that. And it is easier to manage for us and there’s less inefficiency.” And here are the two or three specialist disciplines that you really can’t shirk.
And then how would those agencies all work together? Are they all going to be trying to eat each other’s lunch? Or actually, is there a way to make the remuneration and the collaboration and the expectations work across the piece? You find all those things out in a pitch.
And it sounds like a nightmare. And sometimes it is, but, well, it’s reality. You’ve got to do it.
I’d rather that we help manage this process for clients in a pitch than they do it with grim reality and commercial pressures for the next 12 to 18 months until it all crashes down and they realize that they had made a mistake. You’ve got to grip it at some point.
Darren:
Well, there’s that old saying about changing your roster is a bit like changing engines on an airplane mid flight. I’d rather change the engines on the ground and then take off rather than trying to do it while I’m in the air.
The other level of complexity with this idea of best of breed is that there’s not necessarily a need to have everyone best of breed for every capability.
And to your point earlier about the fact that finding an agency that might have a core competency in one area, but also, having built out a competency in something else might give you the opportunity of covering two or three of these capabilities to the level that you require for the delivery of your marketing budget.
Nathan:
That’s right. I remember a client four or five years ago, maybe even longer than that, we are putting a lead agency model into that client at the time. And they had about five or six agencies all kind of working within a flat structure.
And while we were putting this together, I remember very clearly the client said to me, “Nathan, I don’t need more insights from my agencies. I just need brilliant delivery and I need one insight.”
And what they found was they were running between all of those agencies trying to work out who had got the best or the most applicable insight, whether it’s a PR based one, or a social based one, or an ad based one or whatever it was.
Everyone had fantastic insights and all been incredibly clever, but actually the client only needed one, then they needed everybody else to fall in behind that and make that work.
Now, that’s why the lead agency model worked so brilliantly for that particular client. And they sailed off into the sunset delighted with that.
So, absolutely, you don’t always need your social agency to have the greater strategy capability in the world and be able to change your brand if that isn’t going to fit with what actually was your main discipline.
So, this is the kind of thing you can test and work out in a composite pitch or in a hybrid pitch. You actually allow the agencies to deal with the actual business problem at hand.
And it’s much more about their ability to do that. And then access wherever they’re able to, through their own resources or through resources elsewhere, perhaps from other contenders in the pitch or elsewhere in their organizations, access the disciplines that allow them to solve those and bring that insight that they brought to the table, to life and to delivery.
And often again, this brings me back to kind of the pitch needs to be as close to working in real life as it can be.
Most of working in real life is that ideally, you’d ask an agency to alongside you, tackle a business problem, look at the marketing and communications implications of that, and then deliver in a seamless integrated way across the piece regardless of where budget or kind of turf or boundaries sit and just deliver that for you.
Now, there are roster models that we can put together. Lead agency model will do that for you. But you’re not testing their expertise necessarily in every discipline. You might well be testing their ability to manage and deliver a complex comms campaign for you.
So, how good are the account management guys? How good are the strategy guys in being completely channeled and disciplined agnostic and just looking at the business problem?
How willing is that agency actually to say, “You know what, 70 or 80% of this isn’t actually not a comms problem, it’s actually a business issue where we’re going to throw it right back to you and give you some kind of digital build concept, or some Apple, or some different way of going to market that will actually solve a lot of this for you.
So, it allows you to test that stuff as opposed to a beauty contest of who did the best ad or who did the best TikTok campaign, or who did the best media strategy or whatever it happens to be in the old language. So, anyway-
Darren:
And that’s the point, isn’t it? Because what we saw in the research is that the almost traditional outdated, you could say, approach to either speculative creative or media buying exercises is predicated on the agency being fitting in a very particular pigeonhole, to be classified as this is the core competency here, this is the core competency, I need to select one of these and put them together.
When actual fact, ways of testing core competency is as simple as looking at case studies, clients they’ve worked with, talk to their existing clients as a way of being able to test whether they have the capabilities and the competency in a range of disciplines.
And then really to your point in the composite pitch, test out (to pick up again on the jigsaw puzzle) how well those pieces fit together in real life.
Because what we’re talking about as a composite pitch is really bringing different agencies together in a workshop to solve a particular set problem and see how well they actually collaborate and what is the quality of the thinking and the outputs that come from it.
Nathan:
That’s right. So, obviously, there’s no right or wrong here. I’ve got huge respect for awkward agencies that produce brilliant creative work that changes categories because they’ve just fought the good fight all the way through that. And so, I come from agencies like that myself.
But for certain marketers, for certain roster tasks and increasingly these days with a proliferation of disciplines and ways of expressing and delivering an idea, if you’re too much of a champion or too much of a backer of a certain way of doing something, then actually you can behave like an asshole as an agency.
The client can hire those guys and lo and behold, within 18 months it’s a disaster because it’s all conflict and nothing has been resolved and nothing’s been managed.
Whereas if you can actually ask the agencies to be super smart further back and further up the funnel and further back from the problem, and sit alongside the marketing team and look at what are the strategic alternatives to execute and deliver against these particular objectives.
And then the disciplines that it gets executed in the remuneration for it, and the channels in which it appears. If it does, you are agnostic about that and you haven’t got a dog in the fight, then for many marketers these days, that’s a much, much better way to roll.
And a way that allows the marketing team to go back to their day job as opposed to asking all the kids in the roster to stop fighting with each other and stop trying to recommend over each other.
So, this horses, of course, [crosstalk 00:19:36] marketers there and that’s fine. Go on, go on.
Darren:
Yeah, no, sorry. But it does require you going into the process knowing what the picture is on the jigsaw puzzle that you’re trying to build. You do need to go through a process of reviewing and designing the ultimate model of what is needed.
And not just a list of capabilities, but also, the depth or importance of each of those capabilities. Because if-
Nathan:
Yeah, 100%. So, you need to get all of that mapped out. And there’s always two or three ways to get to the end point. You don’t always have to be rigidly stuck to one model if you know what the destination is. So, that’s the first thing.
So, there’s several ways to get there, and the market will offer up the way that … you know very quickly if a marketing team is looking at agency, just go, “God, they’re really brilliant, we’ve got to get them on board. How could that happen?” And you can reshape around that. That’s the first thing.
But the second thing as well … and we know how many times in podcasts do we go back to this? You’ve got to keep a really close eye on what the actual culture is of the marketing team and the organization that surrounds them.
Are they going to be able to harness a really kind of bullheaded creatively super passionate agency that kind of plays hard ball? Or are they going to need an agency that sits alongside them, like I was describing earlier and looks across the entire piece strategically?
Or are they going to need an agency that can deliver brilliantly whenever the stakeholders come knocking and need something in PowerPoint and on video and in a document and in a presentation in six hours because they’ve missed a board meeting.
They’re very, very different animals in terms of the agencies that you bring in.
And to be able to bring into the pitch process the tests that allow you to understand whether the agency with fantastic credit credentials can also do those other things. Or whether the agency with fantastic credit credentials actually is going to be completely useless and not play well on those things.
These are the things that will destroy a roster and destroy a relationship in 18 months. And like we said, it’s better to know that now, and either just go, “Right, okay, I’ll put a crash helmet on because it’s worth it. Or actually, that’s not the right agency for me at this time.”
That’s what the hybrid pitch allows you to do. So, you’re not …
Have we actually defined the hybrid pitch? I mean, it’s not a scary thing. It just allows you to have a level of ambiguity and flexibility about what the actual outcomes are going to be in terms of the agencies that populate the roles on the roster model. That’s all there is.
Darren:
Yeah, yeah. So, it’s a process that allows you, once you’ve defined what a successful roster model looks like, to then review all the pieces available to you in the marketplace through a series of steps to get to what’s the best combination.
And the best combination is always going to be meeting all of the capability requirements to the depth of expertise that you need.
But at the same time, build a roster where you’re also, understanding if there’s any gaps or overlaps so that you can specifically set up guidelines or rails for people to operate within so you’re not getting this waste of energy through people fighting over the same thing.
Now, I think it is scary, because let’s be honest, every time we run this with a new client, they look at the complexity of it, and it freaks most of them out because they’re comparing it to a traditional pitch, which is, “Oh, I need a media agency. Let’s go and find a media agency.”
And subconsciously they’re deciding that on the gap that I’ve pulled the old one out, I need someone to fill that hole.
Whereas this, to your point, and I’ve forgotten the phrase you used, but there is this uncertainty as part of the process because you’ve got ambiguity, you’ve got all these moving parts during the process and they’re going, “So, which one’s the right one?”
And well, we’re getting there. Just like a jigsaw puzzle, you have to try a few things out before you get the solution.
Nathan:
Yeah, it is true. And often what I’ve found is to reduce that kind of scary element, you ask questions to which honestly, you haven’t got an answer at that stage.
So, we can get to the point where you’ve got an agreed roster model. It might be a media led one, it might be a creative led one, it might be a digital led one, channel led or any of those models.
And you go, “You know what, we don’t actually know yet whether this is going to be best delivered by a holding company, or by a large independent that has friends, or two agencies that will work hand in glove on the channel and on creative or whatever it happens to be. We don’t know.”
Darren:
Or the right media agency with the extension of-
Nathan:
Yeah. Any of the above.
Darren:
There’s so many options available to us in the marketplace. And yet to reduce it down to stereotype classifications of what’s available to you, actually underplays the opportunity that’s often being overlooked.
Nathan:
That’s right. And we’re in good company here because my friend, Helmuth — well, he’s a Prussian from the 19th century, I’m not sure he’s my friend, but Helmuth von Moltke, of course, you’ve heard me quote before, no plan survives first contact with the enemy.
And I mean, it was true of Prussian warfare in the 19th century, pre Bismarck or with Bismarck as well.
But it’s certainly true now, in roster management because you can have all of those plans, but actually you don’t know who’s available in the market, who’s willing to pitch, who’s brilliant at the moment, and who’s able to furnish as many of the things that we need.
And it’s hardly ever the people you expect. And I’ve worked on pitches. There was one for a financial services company out in WA that we did in, oh, a few years back now, where the actual group that went forward and took the business astonished me and the team that was working on the pitch as well.
Because they really gripped the challenge, which was not to be prescriptive or fantastic or demonstrative in their creative or strategic work, but actually to look at how this business needed to be managed and how many alternative ways could be tabled as an answer to any of the questions that were being posed.
And it was great. We did it. There was a bit of role play involved. I mean, that made the client slightly uncomfortable. It always makes me slightly uncomfortable, but it worked like a dream because we said, “What would you do if we asked you this question? What would be your next three or five moves?” We said to the account management team.
And they said, “Well, okay, we’ll get these people in here. We’d have a chat to this person, and we’ll come back to you within 24 hours.” We said, “Right, go and do it.” And they did it.
And so, it just painted that picture of what life would be like were you to turn the management of your roster and the management your business over to this agency group.
These are the things that you can’t find out until you get there. And you can prescribe, and you can predict as much as you like, but until you actually see whether the people in front of you on the pitch, on the day can meet the test in surprise and delight, you don’t know.
So, this is why we say, look, you just need to tolerate a little bit of ambiguity because in the end, in a pitch, when you know, you know. Let’s be honest, Darren, I don’t think there’s ever been a pitch where the client at the end of it goes, “I just don’t know.” Very, very few and far between of those.
There might be somewhere they’ve got their two agents they really love and want to have both of them, but there’s never one where they just go, “I’ve not met anyone at all. Nah, I just don’t know.” It’s just very, very rare.
Darren:
The other thing I like about it is that it unlocks and frees you from decisions like I’m going to go a holding company solution upfront. Or I’m going to go a network agency, or I’m going to go best to breed. It actually allows you in one tender process, one pitch process and why we call it a comp-
Nathan:
Hybrid or composite.
Darren:
Hybrid or composite pitch is because it allows this multi layering. The thing is, it does require everyone involved to embrace complexity and not try to immediately reduce it down to the simple.
You do have to be comfortable. And this is where your ambiguity comes in, is that you have to say, “Yes, what I require is incredibly complex, but that’s okay. I’m not going to dumb it down.” Because in dumbing it down, you’re actually eliminating opportunities that could be incredibly advantageous.
Nathan:
It’s a funny odd thing, isn’t it? The teams that tend to get this straight away are procurement teams. They just go, “Oh yeah. Oh, I see what you’re doing. That’s a very sensible way to go to market.” And I never quite understood why they get it often before the marketing teams kind of embrace it.
It might be because it fits one of those … we fill out those endless forms that procurement teams support. You need a market plan and all those things that procurement teams love to send out forms, I can’t even remember any of them now, but it might fit one of those.
But they just get it straight away. They love the fact that it’s a comprehensive way to go and meet the market. And allows for any of the diversity in that market and any of the offers there to be evaluated, assessed, and seen if there are any advantage. And then you go with it. So, anyway, that’s an aside.
Darren:
No, I think my observation is procurement get the process because it is a robust process. Like they will believe that the process will deliver the outcome.
I think the challenge for marketers is that so much of the decision-making process is about people, relationships, and individuals.
And this idea of what happens if I like that person in that agency and that person in that agency and how do I bring that all together? And yet that’s actually infinitely possible in that process. It’s just then exploring is that going to be the best solution?
Nathan:
Yeah, I think you’re right. Maybe the procurement team see this translated into a process and go, “Yeah, okay, I see what you’re doing.”
Whereas (I’m generalizing terribly here) but for marketers it’s much more, “Oh, I don’t see how that works. How do you put one from one stream and one from another stream?” But anyway-
Darren:
Well, they don’t see how it works in the context of how a traditional pitch is run. Because while it has elements of the traditional pitch, it’s quite different.
And that’s why I said earlier, I think it does scare some of our clients when we take them down this path. But procurement people seem to generally be happier when they see the process or we can explain the process. And we’ve done it so many times to actually deliver the outcome.
Because I’d say my experience, and I’m sure you’d support this, is there is always a point in the process where it just feels like there’s so many moving parts and it’s so complex. Will the answer arise out of this? And it always does.
It’s a bit like brainstorming sessions. There’s always that point. And you’ve got a lot of experience facilitating. There’s that point where it just seems to be chaotic.
But because of the process, out of the chaos comes a solution that no one could have necessarily predicted or even designed upfront. Because you don’t know what’s available to you at the start of the process. You just know the outcome you want to deliver.
Nathan:
In facilitation, I always talk about it as the darkest hour, which is just before the dawn. So, the darkest hour, you just think, “There’s so much stuff here. We’re never going to get anywhere.”
And often in facilitation, one of the participants will just go, “Oh, I don’t know what we’re going to do here.” And then suddenly people go into a different mode and bang it comes together.
But I’d say on the pitch, it’s not as scary on that on the composite pitch process because you probably know 50, 60% of what you’re going to do after the chemistry stages. After you’ve posed those questions, you see agencies starting to answer them.
In my experience, in our experience, I think most of the time you come out of the chemistry stage knowing a hell of a lot more about where you’re going.
Like often you can say, “I don’t think these holding companies have got it,” or, “I don’t think these indies are going to be able to sort this out,” or whatever that quick judgment happens to be. The pieces fall into place quite quickly.
Darren:
And this is where I’ve seen marketers particularly come to the fore because once you’ve done the credentials and the chemistry and they’ve almost defined all of the moving parts, the creative mind of the marketer starts going, “Well, what would happen if we put that with that?”
And you can see them start to play with the possibilities that could be formed to deliver the outcome you need.
And I think that’s a really interesting idea because it’s the sort of thing that you could never design from the beginning. It’s the process that delivers that opportunity.
Nathan:
That’s right. And the other thing I like about it, (maybe one of the last things we say here) is that it allows account management in any given agency to be as important in the pitch process as account management always is after the pitch when you’re running the business.
If the account management team in an agency or agency group gets it and understands that actually you’re not after showcasing a particular discipline, you’re after a whole agency approach to try and solve business problems time after time, after time, using the resources and skill sets available to you. If they get that, then it can click really soon and really, really quickly.
And again, takes me back to trying to get the pitch process to be as much like it would be working with that agency as possible.
And the more we can get account management teams to not just be evaluated on, oh, I don’t know how vigorous will they nod in meetings or how loudly and enthusiastically they say things like, “Oh, great question. Fantastic questions. Thank you for asking that.”
Or even worse that they spend most of the pitch with their backside in the air, under the table, trying to get the laptop to connect with the projector, to connect with the Zoom calls.
So, the more account management can play their true role in these things, I think the better it is for everyone. I think no surprises at the end of it is a good pitch.
If it didn’t contain any surprises between the pitch and the actual working of the agency on the business, then it’s probably quite a good way to judge a pitch.
Darren:
Nathan Hodges, thank you very much for coming and having the conversation because look, it’s an area that’s increasingly part of our business because in many ways running a pitch is important, but actually designing and implementing a whole new more effective roster model can have transformational change for our marketing clients.
So, thanks for coming and having that conversation.
Nathan:
Absolutely pleasure, Darren. I’m going back to work now.
Darren:
Now, for everyone who’s interested in downloading a free copy of The State of the Pitch in Australia, it’s available from trinityp3.com/state-of-the-pitch with a hyphen between each of those words. Thanks very much.