7 mistakes to avoid when pitching for new business.

Some caveats before we begin.

The following advice comes from my more than 30 years presenting creative work to potential customers, and as such it is biased towards organizations that sell creative professional services.

It’s also important to understand that speculative creative pitching is not what you want to be doing. Your best clients will not ask you to solve their business challenges so early in your relationship with them, before you’ve had the opportunity to gain a deep understanding of their challenges and opportunities. I highly recommend Blair Enns’s The Win Without Pitching Manifesto if you’d like to learn more.

1. Don’t pitch too much.

Too few leaders know exactly how many new business pitches they invest in each year, and even fewer know how much they spend on these pitches. You get what you incentivize, and many sales people will cite the large number of pitches they have done as a measure of their success.

By clearly defining the traits of clients that will provide the most value to your company, and setting a goal of wins per pitch, you will narrow the focus and increase effectiveness of your team. It should be crystal clear to everyone in your organization that if your goal is to take on 4 new customers this year, that the optimal number of pitches is 4.

(The optimal number of pitches is actually zero, achieved by implementing strategies that encourage new clients to select you without a bidding process. I’ll save this for another article, but if you’re impatient to know more then hire this guy.)

2. Don’t pitch for work you can’t win.

If you’re approached out of the blue by a big brand that's a huge step up for your company, they are probably just comparison pricing. If you can’t hijack the pitch, drop out.

Your ego will make this really difficult to do, so get them on a call and ask “what do you know about us and how confident are you that we can solve your business problem?” Don’t send this question by email — it’s important to hear if they can answer it in realtime.

Always check that the opportunity is real. You’d be surprised how many RFPs are actually just information gathering exercises where the customer isn’t ready to spend money.

If your prospect can answer the following questions, then the opportunity is probably real.

• What specific problem are you trying to solve?
• What does that involve?
• What is the likely return if you fix the problem?
• What are the criteria for selecting a vendor to help?
• What is the process for selecting a vendor to help?
• What is the final process for approval of the project?
• Who is the final sign off and what is that person's position?
• Is there a budget approved, and if so, what is it?
• If there is no assigned budget yet, what is your sense of what this should cost?

If they claim they aren’t prepared to share their answers on some questions, then the job might be real, but they will not be a great client.

If your salespeople are afraid of asking these questions then you need better salespeople.

3. Leave enough space for the mouse.

This phrase is taken from Peter Coughter’s book, The Art of the Pitch, where he encourages ambiguity, using the analogy of a mousetrap overloaded with bait.

The curse of knowledge imbues you with a clear understanding of the value of your offering, so it can be tempting to fully describe it to avoid ambiguity, but this doesn’t leave space for your prospect to extrapolate your ideas in a different, more relevant (to them) way, based on domain expertise that they haven’t shared with you.

If you’ve done this well, the prospect may interrupt your creative presentation and take it in a direction you didn’t expect. This is good.

4. It’s about them.

Your anecdotes and creative proposals are intimate to you, but your prospect will view everything through the lens of their organization, with a bias that you may not be able to predict. Assuming you’ve left enough space for the mouse (see above) you can find yourself feeling that your audience is derailing your presentation, messing with your carefully considered schedule.

I’ve been in too many meetings where a creative’s ego wrestles the presentation back on track to how they imagined it would go, missing the opportunity to turn their monologue into a conversation which would have increased the probability of success.

5. Don’t rely on a narrative arc.

We’re so familiar with the three-act structure that we’re driven to create suspense and build up to a big finale reveal.

Structuring your presentation so that it has emotional and rational peaks and dips is a powerful technique that I endorse, but you’re not making a movie where you can assume your audience will sit quietly and stay until the end. 

Near the start of your presentation, give your audience an overview of the whole presentation and reveal the intended outcome. Knowing how far they are through your presentation is often all a prospect needs to know when to ask valuable questions.

And don’t save the best bit for last, or the immediate start. You’ll have the highest levels of attention 10 minutes into your presentation — that’s when you have the highest probability of winning them over.

When planning your presentation, ensure it works without the final 20%. A decision maker might be late, or you might have a technical problem, or valuable prospect questions might result in you running out of time.

6. Create two pitch decks.

Much of our work output is visual, so we rely heavily on presentation decks to illustrate our approach. The most common mistake I see is presentation decks that work as standalone documents instead of a supporting backdrop.

Try this experiment. Take a pitch deck and give it to someone unfamiliar with it. Ask them to look it over and then present it to you. If they are successful then it’s not a presentation deck, it’s a proposal, a ‘leave-behind’. 

This is a really valuable document, as your prospect can share it internally to absent stakeholders to help share your message. In fact it’s a great document to create as a precursor to your presentation deck. That way you can send it ahead of your meeting to give your prospect time to come up with valuable questions.

Creating an effective presentation deck from this proposal document involves removing as many words as you can without completely removing meaning. 

Remember, when you show the next slide in a presentation, your audience will stop listening to you until they’ve read all the text on screen. 

How many screens should your presentation have? As few as possible, without needing to clutter screens with multiple messages and too much text.

7. Learn how to close.

There are 5 distinct phases a prospect goes through when buying services like yours, with your creative presentation being a moment of elation for them, when they are fantasizing about how wonderful life will be with you. 

But this feeling of elation is short-lived.

About 6 hours after your presentation, their dopamine spike plummets and they get a hangover of buyer’s remorse even if they haven’t yet committed to you.

Take advantage of euphoria before it dips by sending the proposal version of your presentation deck immediately after the meeting as a follow up where the body of the email summarizes the key findings of the meeting.

It’s very common for creative organizations to keep prospects waiting for several days for pricing, leaving the detailed pricing to begin after the presentation. This creates a cooling off period where defeat is all too often snatched from the jaws of success.

Have the pricing ready to go before you make your creative presentation — your follow up email should include a scope of work ready for them to sign off. You may get resistance from your team on this as creative presentations often unearth opportunities that change the scope of the project, but submit the pre-presentation pricing anyway with the caveat that you’ll revise this based on the new information.