Ellie Angell is a Business Director at TrinityP3 and has been responsible for advising marketers through some of the more high-profile and complex pitches over the past decade. Her experience has time and again that often pitching is not the ideal solution..
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 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.
Rather than discussing how to pitch, Ellie is sharing with us the factors you must consider before deciding to pitch and exploring the alternative to going to pitch.
You can download your copy of the State of the Pitch Australia Report for free here.
You can listen to the podcast here:
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They’re not stupid. They understand that their reputation is at stake, they understand, and it’s well-documented that marketers switch jobs every 18 months or so. So, they run an inherent risk by dropping everything of coming up against that marketer in another organization at some point in the future.
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 Marketing Management 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 around the world 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, while there were plenty of opinions, there was very little data on this topic, so we undertook our own research called State of the Pitch in Australia.
Over the past several weeks, we’ve discussed many of the aspects from the insights arising from the State of the Pitch research. But one issue we’ve not discussed until now, is why you should not pitch and what you should do instead.
My guest today has many years experience, both on the agency side and now, on the marketer side of the pitch equation, and has an independent and pragmatic approach to the question to pitch or not to pitch.
Please welcome to the Managing Marketing Podcast, TrinityP3 business director, Ellie Angell. Welcome, Ellie.
Ellie:
Hi, Darren. Nice to be here.
Darren:
Ellie, it is an issue, isn’t it, where we’re often approached by marketers that have got it in their mind that they have to pitch their business, even though it may not necessarily be the best solution to the problems they’re facing.
Ellie:
Yes, it is, is the short answer. It happens quite a lot. And we are often engaged in conversations before we get involved in a project to really work through with those marketers exactly why they’re pitching and whether or not pitching per se is the right solution for them at that moment in time.
Darren:
The reason I raised that straight off the bat is because when we saw that such a large proportion of pitchers are actually run by marketers themselves, I’m wondering if as part of the process, they get that challenge to why they’re pitching if they’re running the process. It’s almost as if they make the decision to pitch.
Is there any part of their process that actually challenges that as we challenge the marketers that come to us?
Ellie:
Yeah, I’m not sure that they do. I mean, I think with the best one in the world, teams can operate in echo chambers to a certain extent, and they talk themselves into the reasons why they want to pitch, but often they’re working off an assumed base of knowledge.
And again, with all due respect to the marketers involved, they’re all very smart people, but when we interrogate this and their reasons for wanting to go to pitch, we often find that they can’t answer satisfactory to themselves some of the more fundamental questions about why they’re pitching.
Questions like, what do you want from your agency going forward? What type of agency would you like? How well is the relationship operating with your current agency? How well are you working with your current agency? What could you be doing better as well as them to improve performance?
And these kind of questions are all really important ones because of course, if you pitch without a sound base of knowledge about why you’re going into it and what you want to get out of it, you could end up with the same perceived problems in a different agency in six months time.
So, doing that groundwork is something that we get quite heavily involved in, as I say, sometimes even before a project gets underway and marketers can be quite surprised by what it is they can’t answer, and that does change their perception of whether or not they need to pitch and when they pitch and how they pitch.
Darren:
I know there’s often also, the response that well, I really just want to know what else is out there. It’s a bit like watching television with a remote control, what else is on TV rather than necessarily wanting to watch something in particular.
The same sort of mechanism happens here, whereas marketers may have been with their agency for a few years, and suddenly they’re wondering, well, am I missing out on something?
And yet, a pitch is not necessarily the best thing to do to your incumbent, is it?
Ellie:
No, absolutely not. It’s not the best thing to do to your own team or your incumbent or the other agencies involved if that’s the reason.
Shopping around is fine and talking to other agencies is fine, but in putting agencies and putting yourselves through a process that ultimately costs hundreds of thousands of dollars in resource time and everything else, the sort of we just want to test the market is often not really the best way forward from an effort in versus reward out perspective.
What are you really going to gain in a pitch process in terms of rewards? It is often much better to interrogate what could be done better with your incumbent and to work on that first.
And again, come from a place of knowledge on that before you just say, “Well, I sort of feel that we could be getting something elsewhere.”
Darren:
Yeah. It’s also, interesting that I’ve noticed many marketers feel that going into a pitch with their incumbent, that the incumbent will have an advantage in that process because they know their business better than a new agency will.
And yet that’s not necessarily the underlying mechanism, is it? Because there is a bit of the shiny new thing happening in pitches as well.
Ellie:
Just it. I think, I mean, we’ve done work on this. Statistically, the incumbent is more likely to lose a pitch than it is to win. And yes, of course the shiny new thing mentality does come through in a pitch.
And part of a well-run pitch is I’m picking the nuance of that, I’m understanding the integrity of that, and trying to understand the value outcome of that to a marketer’s business as opposed to the quote “shiny bells and whistles” that an agency is presenting during a pitch process.
So, there’s all sorts of pitfalls in that and all sorts of nuances in that. Yes, theoretically, the incumbent has an advantage in that it knows the client’s business, but the incumbent only knows what the client has been talking about.
The incumbent only knows based on how well that that client has been communicating and working with it. And so, that there’s probably a lot that’s unsaid that the incumbent isn’t necessarily aware of.
And that adds to the issue of bells and whistles coming in from other agencies, it doesn’t necessarily stack up that the client is going to get the best result out of those agencies just because of what they’re saying in the pitch.
Darren:
Yeah. In fact, early on I got involved in managing a couple of pitches where the incumbent was in that terrible position of being challenged by the client to say, “Well, why haven’t you suggested this and suggested that,” as they’ve seen it from other new agencies.
And so, they’ve had to be on the defensive or had to do a complete back flip and embrace these new ideas. Either way they feel like they’re playing catch up rather than a leadership role in that pitch process.
Ellie:
Well, I mean, again, it comes down to how well the two parties have been working together. And of course, in certain situations, yes, the incumbent could be guilty of just not being proactive enough or not showing enough of new stuff to the client.
I must admit in probably most cases that I’ve encountered in pitching, it’s not really the case. If you dig into it, and if you get into the nuances of how the agency and client are working together, it becomes clear that there have been initiatives started, there have been meetings had but they’ve been dropped for whatever reason.
But then in a pitch, when the client’s head gets turned, it’s very easy to point the finger at the incumbent and say, “Oh, well, you haven’t actioned this.” That puts the incumbent in a really difficult position.
And so, is it a level playing field, becomes more the question. That it’s like the tired old analogy that the incumbent is your wife for 30 years and the other agencies are the hot new things that have suddenly come onto the scene full of promise in life.
Darren:
Oh, Ellie, you’ve just completely destroyed my story I put to many procurement people, and they say to me, “Oh, well, we pitch every three years when the contract’s up.” And I said, “Well, are you in a relationship? How long has that relationship been going? Is it a good relationship?”
“Would you go home tonight and say, ‘It’s been a great five years but I think we should go out and date other people for three months and then come back and if it’s still as good as we think it is, commit for another five years.’”
And they all say it’s nothing like that. But in actual fact, because one of the key things about high performing client agency relationships is that level of trust, it does become an essential part of the mix that when you start challenging the relationship and breaking the trust that it’s very hard to rebuild again.
I know it’s a commercial relationship and that that may seem overly emotional, but it is at the core of great relationships, a high level of trust and respect, isn’t there?
Ellie:
Look, trust builds over time. I’ve been involved in high trust relationships in the agency side, and I’ve really enjoyed them. But I do think there’s often a lot said that doesn’t actually apply to reality. Certainly, in pitches and in terms of the way the marketer wants to actually engage in agency.
I think some marketers have to be true to themselves, and maybe they’re not at the moment. If you ask a marketing team what they want from their agency in a pitch, it’s always about relationship. It’s always about productivity. It’s always about building trusted partnerships over time.
But that fundamentally doesn’t equate to, oh, every three years we’re just going to pitch and change our direction. I think if marketers are true to what they say they want, they would treat agencies in different ways sometimes.
I don’t think it’s always the case that them saying, “Well, we want a strong, trusted relationship.” I’m not sure that’s always the reality when it actually comes down to it.
And that’s a whole other topic about how they’re treating that relationship and whether or not the way they’re treating that relationship is getting the best value out of their incumbent.
Which kind of brings us full circle, do they really understand how they’re operating and the way they should be or want to be operating with their incumbent to get the best value for their business.
Darren:
Yeah. I raised the issue about the pitching every three years, but before we go onto that, whenever you go and do any sort of online search about reasons for pitching, there’s usually half a dozen. But what would you say are the top three reasons to pitch?
Ellie:
Do you mean the agencies that clients give me or that I think are the top three reasons?
Darren:
That you think. That what are the three reasons you think are the strongest when a client comes to you and says, “Look, I want a pitch.” What are you listening for, I guess, to be very certain that this is the right strategy for them or the right way forward?
Ellie:
Yeah. I mean, we’ve sort of covered it a little bit, but I’m listening for true understanding and deep understanding of the way their current relationship is operating and what they want from their agency and the fit between those two things.
I’m looking for how they’ve attempted to remedy or change any kind of challenge that they’ve had with their incumbent. I’m looking for … sorry, I’ve lost my train of thought.
Darren:
That’s alright.
Ellie:
Sorry, let me wind back and let’s do that again. Sorry.
Darren:
Okay. So, what are the things that you’re listening for when a client comes to you saying they want to run a pitch that really will say to you, there’s a valid reason for running a pitch here.
Ellie:
I’m looking for clarity of objectives, exactly why they want to run a pitch. I’m looking for knowledge of what they want from their agency going forward, and whether that’s fundamentally different from what they’ve got right now.
And I’m looking for understanding of how their incumbency and their incumbent agency is working with them, and how they are working with those incumbents to stress test whether or not more work needs to be done to fully optimize that.
And these are all valid sort of ways that value for the client can be improved without necessarily running a pitch or at least without running a pitch yet.
Do it with integrity, do it with the right objectives, do it to be aligned. Another thing I’m looking out for with initial conversations is how aligned is the marketing team about what it is they want and need.
There are often very different opinions in the same room about what they want and what they need. And that’s before procurement walks in.
So, I’m looking for all of those sort of signposts to work out whether or not to have a deeper conversation about, look, is this the right decision for you at this moment in time? Do you need a stronger base of understanding before you launch into all of the effort that’s required and the risk that’s involved in pitching?
Darren:
Yeah, absolutely. You’ve mentioned procurement, and we’ve touched on the point that every three years or at the end of the contract, there needs to be a pitch or a tender process.
And often marketers will come to us and say, “We have to do this.” But often they have to do it because it’s a procurement or legal requirement as a policy within the organization, rather than a mandatory that must be followed.
Because whenever I’ve questioned it, it comes down to it’s a procurement policy, and that covers everything from procuring utilities such as electricity, to travel, to stationary, and professional services. Have you found the same thing?
Ellie:
Yes, absolutely, I’ve found the same thing. And again, it’s just a sort of preconceived notion that everyone just accepts within an organization.
Let’s be honest, procurement teams understanding of marketing as a discipline is varied. Marketing as a discipline is very different from buying widgets.
And there are different ways to assess the value that’s being provided by a marketing vendor, or a marketing agency, or a supplier, whatever the language is without pitching the market.
There is human IP involved, there are relationships involved. It should not be a wholly cost-input relationship. It should be a value-output relationship, too.
So, we’ve been successful in the past with showing organizations how we can satisfy procurement. The value that they’re gaining in whatever terms is still competitive with their incumbents, and put it to procurement that there are benefits, in fact, to not pitching and to taking an alternative route of assessing.
And by doing that, we’re not necessarily saying, “Oh, well, we’re just ignoring any mandatory, or any compliance requirement or any procurement requirement.” We’re saying, “Let’s satisfy that requirement, but doing it in a different way from going to pitch.”
Darren:
With a lot less disruption, of course.
Ellie:
Well, the way I often phrase it is, it costs less in consultancy fees for a start. It costs a huge amount less in resource input cost; it costs less in time, it costs less in the effort, and there’s less risk involved.
And it puts you on a much more secure footing going forward to make an informed decision about whether or not negotiation with your incumbent or pitching is then the best way forward.
But you take a lot of the risk out of just going to market because of some mandatory requirement by doing your homework on this kind of stuff first. And 9 times out of 10, we find that actually there is a solution that’s good for everyone and that a pitch is avoided.
Darren:
So, you’re talking about our commercial reviews, which I guess was 2019 when suddenly the industry’s talking about ditch the pitch.
And we realized that the conversation around how well is the relationship with the incumbent, that does it deserve to be taken to market, or is there a better way of doing a commercial review. Not just a relationship review, not just a financial review or benchmarking, but actually a holistic approach. That’s right, isn’t it?
Ellie:
Yeah. Well, look, I mean, in different forms, we’ve been working on this kind of projects since before 2019. And it got consolidated into the commercial review in, I think around, yeah, like you say, 2019.
But yes, a holistic look at the performance of both the client and the incumbent in an agency relationship can be extremely useful to understanding where things can be tightened to improve.
And that yes, it could be resourcing and remuneration, but yes, it could equally be operations and process. It could be strategy and outputs. It could be the way in which the agency scope is constructed. It could be all sorts of things that we uncover.
There’s often so much unsaid in these relationships when it comes to performance. But in doing that, the client has to be prepared to have the light shone on its own team as well as that of the agency team. It’s very much a two-way street.
And that’s kind of at the heart of what we’re doing. Yes, we’re assessing agency performance, but we’re doing that in context of how the marketing team is operating with that agency as well as the agency operating with the team.
Darren:
Because ultimately, it is interdependent, isn’t it? The best agency in the world can’t do the best job possible if the marketing team’s not working with them in the way to facilitate that.
Likewise, the best marketing team is not going to get the best work from an agency team that’s either under-resourced or poorly managed. So, the two are absolutely interlinked.
And that’s why one of the things I think we’ve noticed from our clients when we’ve done these commercial reviews is that balanced checklist almost of reporting what are the opportunities on both sites?
Ellie:
Sorry, we’re going to have to stop again. Sorry, my fucking coffee machine has just decided to-
Darren:
Do a cleansing cycle?
Ellie:
Sorry.
Darren:
That’s alright.
Ellie:
Okay. Maybe just repeat that question again and we’ll-
Darren:
Oh. One of the things that I’ve noticed is that marketers particularly appreciate the fact that we provide a balanced almost scorecard or checklist of things that can be done by both the agency and the marketers to bring that together and deliver greater value.
Ellie:
Yeah. They find it incredibly valuable. They really do. And again, it’s all about having an informed position about just how you need to operate with your agency to get the best results.
And we’re talking about the stuff that often certainly procurement teams just cannot see or don’t understand. And I can understand why.
But this is at the heart of why agency relationships are very different from a lot of other supplier relationships where those kind of interdependencies just don’t necessarily apply in the same way. We’re very focused on actionable recommendations or options for those clients.
And that can be through anything. It can be through as I’ve said, structure and process. It can be done by creating different ways of working together. It can be through specific initiatives that we’ve noticed that could really benefit both parties. It could be about knowledge and data sharing. It could be about contracts and what’s in the contract and what’s not.
So, to do that just provide so much that they can work with to take that relationship forward, retain all of the IP and the trust and the relationship that sits inside of it and optimize the outcomes for their business, which at the end of the day is the most important thing.
Darren:
I know this is a little ironic, but one of the things that I always smile at is when we’re presenting back the results of these commercial reviews, how often both agency and client will go, “Oh, yeah, that’s obvious.”
But it’s only obvious once you draw their attention to it. It’s like quite a few things get overlooked in the day-to-day running of the relationship between the marketing team and the agency.
And it’s only when you actually bring a focus to it and reveal how that’s impacting value and performance, that people suddenly embrace it. The fact that they think it’s obvious is a good thing because it means then they’re able to quickly embrace it and adapt.
Ellie:
Absolutely. I mean, I think people fall into practices, and it becomes the norm, but they’re not always the most optimal practice. We also find that there is a lot that goes unsaid. In all but the very best working relationships there are things that are just not said between the two parties.
And a lot of what we do is in stakeholder engagement on both sides to uncover what those threads are. And there’s often consistency, but there’s sometimes complete diversification between what the agency believes is happening and what the client team believes is happening.
And bringing those two things together in an open environment with an independent body facilitating that, that’s what brings those solutions to the fore, and that’s what brings the richness of those solutions to the fore.
And a lot of the time, yes, they might say, “Oh, well, yeah, we’ve done this with other clients, or you’re telling us what we know.” They still appreciate it because they just haven’t been talking about it in the right way.
And it provides a platform and say, “Right, okay, look, here we are, we’ve got 10 things that we really can do quickly to make this thing better.”
Darren:
Yeah. Now, I’m going to put you on the spot a little bit, but what I want to do is just throw to you some of the scenarios that came out of the research and see if there’s an alternative approach or an alternative way of thinking about it that would perhaps either minimize the impact of going to pitch or negate the need to go into pitch at all in the traditional sense of the word.
Now, the first thing is the fact that there was quite a number of very small projects that were actually going to a full pitch.
So, if a marketer is sitting there with a project, it’s not a long-term three-year relationship, it’s a one-off project, and they’ve got about 50 to a 100,000, what should they be doing other than going to pitch?
Ellie:
Taking a much less onerous route. I mean, there’s a basic costing effort in reward out scenario playing there, and it has to be balanced for both the agencies and the clients. If it’s a $50,000 project, you’re going to be way behind before you even start that project in terms of the amount of effort and cost that’s been outlaid.
So, in that kind of situation, it’s really just cutting away all of those extraneous pieces. You just want the agency for one project.
Okay, identify a few agencies that you think could be suitable, talk to them and it, and based on those overview conversations, engage one of them to run a project and see how it goes.
I mean, subjecting an agency to rigorous financial reviews, strategic overviews, creative concept work and all that kind of stuff for a $50,000 project just simply doesn’t add up.
And we find a lot of the smaller agencies have been really successful in doing business that way. They get one project and then they get another, and then another, and it’s all done without pitching because they’re building it based on sort of proof of the project.
So, I think yeah, just taking a very truncated route and using intuition and market knowledge to understand that as opposed to the full gamut of strategic media creative testing is certainly a better way forward.
Darren:
Yeah, absolutely. The next one is probably questionable, but there was a number of agencies that reported that it was clear that from the get go, there was a particular agency that was going to be appointed, and they felt that they were just being taken through the steps to justify the appointment of that pre-identified agency or pre-chosen agency.
Now, some of that could be just a little bit of paranoia, but if you were a marketer and you wanted to appoint a particular agency, it’s not that it’s unprecedented because we’ve seen it happen a number of times in quite high-profile situations, but what would you recommend?
Ellie:
Well, first off, there’s two things here. If agencies in a pitch feel that that is what they’re working against, they should exit the pitch.
Agencies should stand up for themselves in that scenario. They shouldn’t be playing that game in the sort of vague hope that they might turn a client’s head around from what is a predetermined outcome.
So, that’s the first thing. Agencies should have more respect for themselves, honestly, and they should exit a pitch like that.
From a client point of view, closed assessment. If you have to assess the agency that you want to hire, okay, you can assess that agency, but don’t involve five others.
Now, a lot of what we do when we bench … I mean, and let’s just talk about numbers for a sec. When TrinityP3 benchmarks in a pitch, we don’t benchmark the agencies against each other. We benchmark against the industry and against our data points to make sure that the overall value is competitive, not the cheapest agency wins. And that’s just on the money side of things.
So, if you know the agency that you want to hire, assess just that agency and make sure that you feel comfortable with the competitiveness and the offering and the people, and then hire it.
There’s an integrity thing here. Don’t bring five other agencies into that picture for absolutely nothing. You are wasting everyone’s time, including your own.
Darren:
Yeah, absolutely. The next one’s very similar and you have touched on it previously in our conversation, but it’s where the incumbent gets appointed and leaves the other agencies feeling either that they were just put in there to put commercial pressure on the incumbent or the incumbent reports that they were taken to pitch purely to end up with a lower fee for the same services.
Ellie:
Well, again, I mean, it’s a commercial integrity thing. That’s an incumbency assessment. So, it’s slightly different from what we’ve just said. If there’s a shiny new agency, you really want to appoint that agency, you just assess that agency.
If it’s the incumbent that you just want to nail down on fee or some other angle, assess that incumbent and have a sensible negotiation.
And if you can’t come to an agreement, well, again, the agency should be standing up for itself in that scenario and not bending over on fees and making it a loss-leading piece of business for them.
Agencies have contributed to some of the more unhealthy aspects of pitching by not being assertive enough in this.
And I’ve worked in agencies and I’ve worked for holding companies, and I understand the pressure that they are under just to get business through the door, and even if it’s not the most profitable.
But ultimately, rather than wholesale ‘ditch the pitch’, it’s more about agencies be assertive and stand up for what you believe is right.
And so, bringing that back to the scenario, yes, it should just be an incumbent assessment. It should be done by an independent … I mean, this is what we do, but it’s done by professionals looking at overall value and competitiveness.
Then, it is the marketer’s and agency’s decision about whether or not they can reach an agreement. If they can’t, the incumbent agency should bow out with honor and okay, then they have to run a pitch.
But running a pitch just to screw the agency incumbent down on fees is not the right way to do it at all.
Darren:
Well, it’s incredibly wasteful and disruptive, isn’t it, to everyone? Marketers and-
Ellie:
It disrupts the relationship, it disrupts the trust, it disrupts people’s time. It’s morally bankrupt in commercial terms, frankly. I know that’s a strong term, but it is. And it shouldn’t be happening, and agencies should not be complicit in it.
Darren:
The other one is the question of whether you should include the incumbent in the pitch process. Do you have an opinion on that, or does it change from circumstance to circumstance?
Ellie:
If it’s been assessed and if it’s meaningful for the incumbent … I mean, the same applies to the incumbent as any other agency in the pitch. They all have to have a fair chance of winning that process.
And we’ve been involved in some really difficult conversations with clients who have not wanted to front their agency. Where there are systemic issues with the relationship or where a pitch’s been deemed to be the right thing to do is the first question we ask is, should the incumbent be involved?
And if there is no meaningful reason for the incumbent to be involved, do not involve the incumbent.
Darren:
And look, sorry, I’m laughing because the number of times you hear the marketers say we want to include them so that they don’t just lose interest in our business. It’s such a sort of, I’m going to say flaky. It’s such a thin reason for including the incumbent.
Because I don’t know, from my experience 30 plus years, I’ve never seen an agency just drop the business and walk away. Of course, they’ve got to manage the loss of the business and the resources and things like that.
But the idea of including the incumbent purely to keep them hanging on a hook to the end while you’re also, wanting them to do all of the work that’s part of their scope of work is just ridiculous.
Ellie:
We come up against this … and you can hear my tone. I’m getting quite erratic about it because it does frustrate me sometimes. We can’t disrupt the BAU. There is a sort of element of, with all due respect, you can’t have your cake and eat it.
A pitch is going to disrupt the BAU, whatever you do. So, that’s the first point.
The second point is along the lines of what you said, agencies are professional entities. They’re not stupid. They understand that their reputation is at stake, they understand, and it’s well-documented that marketers switch jobs every 18 months or so. So, they run an inherent risk by dropping everything of coming up against that marketer in another organization at some point in the future.
There are all sorts of reasons why it’s not the best thing to teach their people. You don’t keep your people employed that way. There are all sorts of reasons for an agency to not be unprofessional.
Yeah, the other thing is that there should be contractual protections against that as well. And in a good contract, there are about the behavior of an agency in a transition process or in a termination process.
But fundamentally, it’s just about common sense. And if the agency doesn’t have enough common sense and drops the ball, well, they weren’t the agency to work with in the first place.
But every pitch disrupts the BAU. It does. It diverts attention.
And this is why we are forever talking about … and everyone is surprised because we’re theoretically a pitch consultancy, but we’re actually a marketing management consultancy, which is much more than that.
And that is the integrity that we hold in helping marketers make the right decisions is really important to us as a business and being objective about that.
And marketers and agencies both need to be complicit in making the right decisions for the right reasons. And that’s what we’re here to help them do.
Darren:
Well, it’s interesting that you make that distinction because pitching is important. It’s either the start of a relationship or the end of a relationship. Either way, the way you start and the way you end should be as high quality as the way you operate during it.
And that’s really our focus, isn’t it, is creating long-term, high performing, sustainable, enduring relationships. That’s marketing management.
Ellie:
Absolutely. If you want to pitch, pitch for the right reasons and pitch it right. It is just a simple kind of thing. Without that, integrity is lost, objectivity is lost, and the right decision won’t be made.
We are not saying ditch the pitch. We are involved in managing pitches, it stands to reason that we’re not saying ditch the pitch, but we are saying pitch it right and pitch in the right way.
And I often say (and I mean it) to clients quite a lot it’s like, to your point, we’ve done our jobs. If we never darken your door again from a pitch perspective, you’ve found an agency that’s going to work with you for an extended period of time, that’s us done our job.
Of course, we can work with you on other projects, but we don’t want to be pitching the same businesses every single year because the relationships have failed. It’s really important to get that stuff right.
And that involves all of the things that we’ve been talking about in this conversation starting with, is it the right decision to pitch or not?
Darren:
Yeah. Ellie, time has just flown by. When I introduced you, I said independent and pragmatic, and you’ve absolutely delivered on that in every aspect. Thank you so much for joining me in this conversation on when to pitch and when not to pitch.
Ellie:
Thank you. It’s felt quite cathartic, actually. It’s been quite good to talk so pragmatically and honestly about it. So, yes, I hope people find it interesting and useful.
Darren:
And for anyone who wants to download their free copy of State of the Pitch in Australia, you can go to trinityp3.com/state-of-the-pitch with a hyphen between each of those words.