The process of new business development – specifically, winning a new assignment from a client – is often elaborate, time-consuming, lengthy and political.
To make the process easier, more productive, and focused on generating the right outcome, the client should outline and broadcast the specific criteria they’ll use to select the best agency. (More about “and broadcast the specific criteria” in a moment.)
The criteria tends to fall into six different categories.
Content. Will the agency’s proposal – specifically, its strategies, its tactics – help the client meet both its business and communications objective? How measurable are the objectives?
Creativity. Will the ideas which bring the strategic and tactics to life be cut-through, differentiating, unique and tailorable to the client’s messages? Can the agency talk about its creative process?
Chemistry. Will the clients and potential agency’s team work together seamlessly?
Reconnaissance. Did the agency show they did their homework? Was their research more than a few minutes spent on Google?
Teamwork. Does the agency team act like they work together efficiently?
Credentials. Can they back-up and prove everything outlined in the proposal?
In my experience, this list is in priority order, with the top three more important than the last three. In my mind, the only criteria which ‘moves around’ is the Credentials. For most pitches, it’s usually the first criteria clients should use to create the initial list, but shouldn’t be the ultimate reason to hire a specific agency. But, it should move to the top when 1) an client is seeking an agency for crisis or issues management, and 2) when they want to hire the least risky agency option.
Some additional thoughts:
“Broadcast” the criteria. Clients should tell all its potential agencies what the criteria are, why they were chosen, and the priority order. They should invite the agencies to ask questions about the criteria. At the close of the presentation, agencies should tell the client why their proposal has met each of the criteria.
Be transparent about the competition. One of the worst things a client can do is to ‘hide’ the list of agencies from each other. In 25 years of being part of pitches from both the client and agency perspective, I’ve never found a good reason to be – essentially – secretive and uncommunicative. (Frankly, they look like a poor partner even before they’ve hired their agency.) The preferable option is to be open and transparent – but the client should ask each agency to outline why they’re better than their competition. Again, their answers will tell a client a lot about who they plan on hiring.
Use a scoring sheet so both client and agency can see how they compare. For the client, its best to document the process in case they have to justify internally which agency was selected. For the agency, the can improve by learning where they’re weak – which, in turn – improves the pitching process for both client and agency in the future.
Don't put more emphasis on the presentation than the conversation. The client and agency should not only talk as much as possible, it should be the bulk of the time spent in the presentation. Again, in my experience, very little of what an agency writes in a PowerPoint document to meet the client expectations is actually implemented. Both sides will make a much better decision by seeing the other side ‘think on its feet.’ In particular, for the client, there’s where they will truly see the quality of the agency’s strategic and creative thinking – and frankly, that’s what they should be hiring in the first place.
