The Pitch - Know When to Hold ‘Em, When to Fold ‘Em

By Bruce Olive / Mar 03, 2010 / No Comments

The agency RFP process, widely criticized by agencies to the point that it’s even driven some to strike, has been covered extensively by authors voicing opinions for fixing or refining the age-old procedure (see examples below). While it’s easy to recommend ways to amend the clearly challenging and expensive RFP process, the question remains – once you’ve chosen to participate in a pitch, how can you tell if and when you should politely decline to participate?

For example, we recently pitched an account from a large global corporation headquartered in Wisconsin. The new VP of marketing visited twice, provided guidance during the process and informed us that we were finally shortlisted for the actual pitch, going against two mega agencies. We felt the love, the interest and the validity.

Fast forward to post-pitch and D-day. We did not win the account. Oh well, it happens all the time. A big deal and yet not a big deal - simply part of “our” business model as a marketing agency. Despite the fact that RFP’s are time-consuming and cost a bunch of money (research, creative, media planning, presentation, travel, etc), we understand the risks and rewards going in eyes wide open.

But here’s the thing. When we reviewed our January website analytics, we noticed a startling fact - over the entire three-month duration of the pitch, we did not receive one single site visit from Wisconsin headquarters. Not one. We also found that zero corporate stakeholders had taken the time to review our personal or corporate profiles on LinkedIn. The oversight of not noticing this earlier suddenly dawned on us. We were so deep into the pitch and so busy with the work that we never took the time to review the facts. And the facts spoke to a lack of interest in spite of the personal visits, emails and telephone calls from the delegated corporate coordinator.

We would have noticed this apparent lack of interest much earlier by keeping a closer eye on our collection of analytics, and could have responded by withdrawing and allocating our time, effort and dollars more appropriately. Coulda, woulda, shoulda.

So you can bet that the next time we pitch, we’ll be monitoring our web traffic and other analytics, gauging interest throughout the process and staying absolutely on top of our newly designated “interest-o-meter.” For our clients, we embed and apply metrics to practically everything that we do, and we’re held accountable by them. It’s now time to put the same process to work in our pitching. Embed the metrics, analyze them daily and make decisions based on facts, not feelings. Because despite what we want to believe, love has nothing to do with it.