Win More Pitches and Stop Doing Spec Work with Tom Denford | Ep #781

Win More Pitches and Stop Doing Spec Work with Tom Denford | Ep #781 Speaker 1: I want you to stop working for free. If you're tired of getting ghosted on proposals, the endless follow-ups and We'll think about it as a response. There's a better way. The top agencies aren't sending proposals. They're getting paid to pitch and close bigger deals way faster. I want you to grab this free resource I just put together at agencymastery360.com slash strategy. That's agencymastery360.com slash strategy and you'll learn how to flip the script if you want to get paid for your expertise instead of giving it away for free. Hey, Tom, welcome to the show. Speaker 2: Hello, Jason. Good to be here. Thank you for having me. Speaker 3: Yeah. Excited to have you on. Speaker 1: Tell us who you are, what you do. Speaker 2: Well, I'm Tom Denford. I'm a co-founder and CEO of a business called IDcoms. Might be a powerful little company that a lot of people never heard of, but maybe in your world, because we interface with a lot of agencies, maybe a few might've heard of us, but we're an advisory and analytics business working for brands. So all of our customers are marketing and procurement leaders in Large, mostly consumer facing brand businesses within the kind of advertising capabilities internally. And we help them be good at media and we help them in three ways. We help them build internal teams and systems to manage media. Media is complex and a lot of brands are in-housing that. We help them find and contract and manage agencies. So we run a lot of pitches, agency pitches, so we've run I think I've probably been in more pitches than is healthy. Certainly, I've done probably more pitches than probably most people on the planet. And the final thing is the analytics side of our business. So we track all the investment, all the media dollars that go all the way from the client, all the way through agencies, through to vendors and platforms and publishers, and make sure that for the marketer, every dollar that they're investing in media, and that's where we specialize primarily in media, every dollar is working as hard as possible. So we take that very seriously. Speaker 3: Well, I want to talk about pitches, especially since you've been on a ton of pitches. And I want to start off with a great pitch. What is included in a great pitch or what do you think a great pitch is? Speaker 2: Good question. I mean, I think media pitches are a strange You know, I mean, on the creative side, we're quite used to it being quite subjective and you fall in love with people and ideas. And it's quite kind of an emotional media media historically has been very rational, right? You know, you look at capabilities of agencies and the media agencies dealing with a lot of the money. So it tends to be a lot of kind of forensic analysis of that. So I'll talk to the media side. What makes a really good pitch is what we try and do is we try and find The agencies that have the capabilities to meet the client's need, that's the first thing. It's an obvious thing, but not all agencies have the same capabilities. So once we've identified a scope of work or an ambition for that particular brand, do these agencies in a long list have the capabilities potentially to service that scope? Number one. Secondly, we try and take money off the table. What we mean is that we don't want the final decision between agencies to come down to a price. So we try and get them up early on to be very clear about what media rates they can get, what their staffing plan is going to cost, what their terms and conditions are going to be, whether they are happy to proceed on the contractual terms that that client wants to work to. So you get all of those terms and conditions and commercial bits off the table. So what you want is to end up with three or four agencies that are capable and have the same capabilities pretty much or comparable capabilities. And secondly, that they can deliver within a certain range of price, which is acceptable to that client. Get that off the table. So any of those four, and then you've got to give space and time for the client to kind of really fall in love with the people. Because it's the relationships that ultimately are going to matter. So even though some of the pitches we run, we run, you know, big billion dollar kind of global pitches, sometimes it could take months and involve dozens of stakeholders, which is a challenge in itself, like trying to kind of align everybody. But ultimately they've got to feel the culture of an agency and they've got to kind of love the people. And so we want, always want that to be the differentiator, not the price. That's what we're trying to do. Speaker 3: Now, are these brands still expecting for agencies to give them their best ideas in the pitch without any money transferred? Speaker 2: Yeah, this is an interesting one. I mean, you know, there's a lot of discussion on this. Again, it seems more sensitive on the creative pitches because I think creative probably feel like that is their intellectual property. And to do spec work in a pitch and give away ideas and be expected to sign those things off, I think is not Really appropriate, you know, when you ask, when you're looking at platform ideas, because it has been misused by some advertisers who set up terms in advance. Our agencies do all this work and they never move the business. I never award the actual scope and it's just been a gathering of free ideas, which is obviously wrong. On the media side, normally, I mean, pitches do tend to come with conditions where the advertiser has a right on the work. But I think on media that feels less sensitive. Speaker 3: I always look at it as when these big brands would call us and they would say, Hey, we want you to do this RFP. And they would give us our terms like, and these were with the biggest clients in the world from, you know, Coca-Cola, which would always go, you can't say Coke. You have to say a large beverage company with a red logo in Atlanta. And then I just want to like rub shit on that logo. Right. Just because I knew they wanted to get free work out of it. And we would always change it. And we would say, look, we're not going to pitch to you, but we'll walk you through Our process will walk you through, you know, how we come up with things and then we actually will work with you, but you're going to pay for us to work with you for a couple hours where we're going to sit down and we'll brainstorm. Anything we come up in these meetings is yours, but you're going to pay for it. And then we would lead to something bigger. And some of the brands would say yes, and some of the brands would say no. And we'd be like, no problem to the brands that would say no, because I always had a problem when agencies would put a couple hundred thousand dollars Of work into something that they have no guarantee for. Like I was, that, that really irritated me because some of the, like the agencies are trying to step up to get that well-known recognition to get that brand logo. Cause they think they need that logo in order to get to the next level, which they don't. Some do based on where they're wanting to go, but it would always just aggravate the shit out of me. Speaker 2: Yeah. I understand the tension there, but also I have to push back on it. There's lots of suggestion that says, because it's all down to the chemistry, why don't you just sit in a room with a client and then they can just see how good you are and that's fine. But we're talking about companies that spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year. They can't meet 50 agencies. We've got to create a high bar to start with, which is that we've got to look at your capabilities. Whether you can even be capable of doing the work, and then we have to test those capabilities through a process. And it's fair that the customer here, which is the market to making the decision, who's going to be spending millions of dollars on agency fees here, It gets to stress test the agency's capabilities. Gone are the days where you just believe the bullshit that's put on a PowerPoint slide and watch an agency tap dance and serve like some nice drinks and snacks during a meeting and that's it and the clients whisked off their feet. I say to every CMO, you don't go shopping for an agency anymore. This is not a beauty pageant where we're going to wheel these lovely agencies in front of you and you're just going to pick one. What you're going to do is I want you, CMO, to write down in a very clear brief exactly what you expect of an agency in their capabilities, their culture, their people, their attitude, all these things that go into the brief. And then we'll bring that to an agency or an agency group. And we let you, as the agency, organize and mobilize your own resources to meet that brief. So I'm not picking agency logos off Madison Avenue. I'm not taking people on a tour of agencies. We let agencies come and explain to us how they're going to deliver that for the business. They have to engineer that. So there's an exercise. It does take time and it does cost money because we're asking agencies to And we're here to pitch for serious work. You know, these are multi-year contracts worth millions of dollars. So this idea that you should just kind of have drinks with a client and they can fall in love with you. Speaker 3: And that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying, especially if you guys are eliminating or really narrowing it down to three agencies, right? Especially Coke or Aflac or any of these companies. We're going to spend hundreds of millions of dollars. All I'm saying is if you're going to work on, let's say a week long project, like what we would do is we would say, look, Coke or whoever you are, there's going to be three possible outcomes from working with us for a week to test us out. And you can do that for three companies, right? To say the first one, you love the plan, you go execute it yourself. You'll pay us for the work of like our cost, right? So we're not, you know, we're still wasting our time a little bit or we're risking our time, but we're not coming out at zero and losing, you know, our shirt. Say you'll love the plan. You go execute it yourself. Number two, you'll love the plan. You go, you want to work with us and we can talk more about that, right? Because then it's just the ability to work. Or number three, you don't like the plan at all. You get your money back. So there's nothing for you as an advertiser to lose. But I just want to see how serious you are. Now, I know the well-known brands in the world like the Nikes and the Cokes. Everybody wants to work with them. So they can kind of call their own ship. But a lot of times like when we used to do a lot of work with Aflac and we would say, no, we're not going to do that. And then they would be like, why is Solr not going to do that? And then we would kind of come and while everyone else is doing the free work, I just like to kind of try to make it fair for everyone. Where the advertiser is still protected. I'd love to know your thought on that of like, hey, we're going to pay you for this week worth of work or month worth of work, however long it takes. And then if the advertiser doesn't like it, like, I want my money back. Speaker 2: Perfect. Speaker 3: Here you go. Right. So it's just like, everyone's got some skin in the game. Speaker 1: What are your thoughts on that? Speaker 2: That would mean a losing agency still does work and doesn't get paid. Speaker 3: But that's only if the brand, they don't like the work that was done for them. Speaker 2: Yeah. I think, I mean, again, I think it's more, that's maybe more acute on the creative side. And I understand agency, I understand creative agency saying, listen, we have a, you know, we have a way of working and a pitch doesn't kind of even come up with the best work. Right. Because it's just, it's a very condensed and unreal way of working and I know a lot of creative agency owners and founders, and you can be a lot bolder, I think, in saying that we don't pitch, or we don't pitch that way, or we want different terms. I mean, 90% of the work that we do is media, just because of the sheer complexity and the heavy lift often on a marketing organization to run a review for media. Media is highly consolidated. I'm working with big international Businesses, I mean, it's a relatively small choice of agency you can go to. There's a handful, a half a dozen or just a little bit more kind of networks. In the U.S., where I'm based now these days, there's a very good mid-size independent media agency thriving. There's a huge amount of brilliant kind of what we might call kind of mid-size agencies that increasingly advertisers are looking at. But normally with media, the long lists tend to be not as long in media. You know, you can get down to a kind of short list fairly quickly. And then we've tried to give the client, the marketing and procurement team or the stakeholder team, as much time with each agency as possible, but get into a smaller list, you know. So we'll cut down to only four agencies, typically four or five agencies might actually even get the brief. And then towards those last kind of strategic planning and final presentations, it's two or three agencies, you know, and then two that go into final negotiations. We try not to waste agencies time, you know, and, and even those that don't make it, we're very transparent, the process, how decisions are made, when decisions can be made. If you are cut from a pitch, you know, within 14 days, you get a full debrief from us, like with all the scores, you see how you performed against all the different scoring elements. You know, so that I know that an agency CEO, even when they lose and it's annoying and it's disappointing and it maybe it's cost them some money. We've got to make sure that we get them as much out of it as we're able to by helping them see where the gaps were really clearly. Speaker 1: Hey, agency owners, if you're sticking with one platform for every project, you're probably stuck in a growth bottleneck. 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It's like, and then they bring in the whole new team and right here, the whole new dog and pony show. I'm just like, that's why for a lot of you guys listening. In order to get to where you need to go, you don't necessarily need to work with the biggest brands in the world. That's the beauty about it. Like advertisers, you can set your own terms. Agencies, you can set your own terms. And I like how you look at it in the very beginning going, look, let's take this 50 list and make it down into five and then narrow it down to three to not waste everybody's time. You know, the biggest thing I want everybody to realize is, and this was something that I got wrong in the very beginning. I thought in order to scale and to grow and to feel good about myself when I would go to all these bullshit other agency events and the agency's like, who are your clients? And be like Coke and Affleck. And like, I'm like, Oh, I felt like I had to say that. You don't. You don't need those big clients if you don't want to. The biggest thing I want you guys to think about is where are you trying to go? Who are your perfect clients you can actually help? Or one of the exercises I always tell people to do is I want you to think for about an hour of going, if I was only going to be paid on performance only, who would I work with and what would I do for them? Speaker 2: It's definitely true that, you know, there's an advantage in being one of those kind of big, sexy brands because you, you know, you obviously, and you, you, you, you've, I'm sure I hear it. You agency owners talk about logos. They talk about, I just want, I want that logo on my creds. I want that logo. And it's fine. And of course, as a business owner, you're going to make a decision is what, you know, what are you prepared to do? How important is that? Not from ego because you've got to separate yourself. I know you want to win. Speaker 3: Oh, that's tough for everybody, especially in the agency world. Speaker 2: Yeah. As an owner of a business, you've got to separate your ego from that because you want to win. But do you need, does a business really need to win? What are you prepared to do? And if you're pitching these things, I mean, you also, you're telling your people that you're just shooting kind of wildly for things driven by your own ego. And that's not great leadership. Now, if you can make a rational case as to what we, you know, if we got Nike and we're prepared to go in at very thin margin on, on, on a business like Nike, because it helps us deliver our ambition as a business, because it's going to get us to X, Y, Z, then fine. That's okay. But you, I mean, that's the decision that you take as an owner. You'll take, you know, boring brands every day of the week. I make good money and you'll turn up at those agency events far more profitable than any other agency in the room. You're not going to worry too much about your ego at that point. You've got to always take care of the business, number one. We see definitely agencies taking part in pitches sometimes and you know it's ego driven. They're kind of chaotic. They've got no real idea of why they want to win that business. They just want it. They're very different from the agencies that you think, oh, actually, these guys really have capability that this client needs. And they're focusing on the capability. Speaker 3: I love what you said is take out the ego. And especially when you're doing agency in the very beginning until you've kind of been beaten the hell out of. You can finally start making a decision without ego and where you take the personality out of it or the emotion out of it. And if you think about like, what would you give advice to me? Like a friend. Now you're going to make something, you know, a decision without emotion. And usually that's a lot better a decision rather than saying, I have to get this brand. Well, what was it going to get you? Speaker 1: Right? Speaker 3: Like, like you said, it's. The bigger brands, everyone wants to work with them. That hasn't been put through, you know, a lot of the ringers and, and it is low margins. And, you know, a lot of times the terms are in their favor, 90 days, right? Like that's a lot of money to float for a long time. And they also have a lot of lawyers behind them if anything ever goes wrong, which is, which is tough, but it's kind of like, what do you want? Do you want to work with them? Speaker 1: Great. Speaker 3: Go for it. And it could be extremely profitable. Like there's agencies that do amazing work and they love all their team loves working with those big brands. Go for it. Speaker 1: I've been beating up. Speaker 3: I'm like, no, I'm good on the smaller side. I was telling you in the pre-show, like I love to work with the billion dollar brands no one's ever heard of. They're kind of like the, you know, the girl in the room that. Speaker 1: Wasn't the prettiest, but she was the nicest. Speaker 3: She was the coolest and it was like crazy people go over here. So this has been a lot of fun, Tom. I appreciate the back and forth and I always love putting people on with different perspectives and that kind of stuff. Is there anything I didn't ask you that you think would benefit the listeners listening in? Speaker 2: Something that we get asked a lot by agency leaders is how to make decisions about what to pitch for. And so knowing that I was coming, and I said to Jason, your customers are not my customers. I mean, we just work with the brands. And so if there's advice I can give to your listeners, These are stories that we know. If I sit with a CMO, a brand, and they kind of ask, you know, how do we get the most out of an agency? How do we get the best out of a pitch? I can understand where an agency CEO is thinking, right? When they get your pitch brief, and this is what a kind of good CEO, I think, in our view would say, we think there's like four questions. The first question you've got to ask yourself as an agency CEO is, is this winnable? Because there's a lot of pitches out there, and I'm sure you and many others have seen those. You get the brief, and this isn't actually even a pitch. It's like some, again, beauty parade. It's clients just trying to get ideas, just gets, you know. So you can, don't accept a face value brief when you get the brief, right? Call up A company like yours, if there's an advisor or a consultant involved in running the process, call us up. I mean, people just call me up and say like, okay, what's the story behind this? Like what's going on? What do they really want? Try and dig around and figure it out because you've got to figure out, is this actually a genuinely competitive process? And then you can start to make those decisions. Are we willing to invest our time and our money and resources in this? Is it winnable? Secondly, do we want to win this? Because again, you could take your ego out of it. Do we actually, for the business, do we actually want to win this? Does this help us? Yes, it's revenue. Yes, it's a pitch, but you're far better pitching three times with a better conversion to a great job than trying to find 10 pitches that you can do and drive yourself crazy. And you probably can protect your margins by pitching fewer times, but to better clients or the right clients. And it's good for your team. To lose less, you know, you win a greater percentage of what you're doing. So do we want to win this? Is it going to be a competitive conflict with something that we've got at the moment, right? Is the client miles away? It's going to cost us a fortune. You know, T&E and we haven't factored that in, whatever it is. Thirdly, can we win this? Okay. So is it winnable? Do we want to win it? Can we win this? If the brief's not clear, be really clear what the capabilities you think that client is looking for. And if you genuinely don't have those capabilities, don't stretch, like you're going to get found out immediately in the process. So don't waste your time. Like, does it, do we have the capabilities to meet the brief? So can we win this? And then the final question, killer question, how can we win this? And really that is, do we absolutely understand how the decision is being made? Okay. And it's very easy, and we find this particularly on the creative side, agencies kind of rush in thinking it's all about the ideas, but then if you knew, on my side of the table, The clients probably put like creativity is like 20% of the score, you know, but it's like 40% is something else that you're not thinking about. So how do we win this is what's the, what are the criteria of evaluation? Clients should be telling you that we make that transparent in all of the pitches that we run. Right. Speaker 3: You tell them this, the 20% on creative, 40% on execution, that kind of stuff. Speaker 2: Yeah, so we call that we call them the evaluation criteria. There's probably there's a more normally a more detailed version of that as a scorecard for the client to fill in. It will have specific kind of questions of things that we're looking for. But those are things that we know that the business is calling out. We'll always give agencies, at the very least, what the roughly weighting is between what we call capabilities, cultural fit and values, and then commercial terms. At the very least, you'll get a split of those three. Often we'll give actual evaluation criteria within those. And if you know that as an agency leader, then you can make a decision. Well, I know how we're going to win because I know we can optimize ourself against that score and we can address those important points. Speaker 3: I love those points. I wish I, in the early on in my career, I remember I was, I was pitching, uh, this, uh, this huge pizza chain that will be unnamed. And, um, I still don't eat their pizza, but if I asked those questions, I think I would have, we would have backed out or I would have done things different. I remember they were based in Atlanta at the time. And they lived out in the middle of nowhere. And they, for what I can remember, they were like, you got to show us how creative you are. And, and they came up with this, like those little map that they sent out to us. And they were like on a farm or something like that. And so I was like, wow. You know, if I ask the criteria of how you're going to rate us, like I thought they were going to rate us based on creativity, the biggest. So like I literally showed up as a camper, like a hiker with the big backpack, the big socks hiked up to the knees. Like they thought I was some hobo off the street, you know, coming in and they're like, wait, you're the agency pitching us. And then I would like went into our pitch and that kind of stuff. At the end of the day, their main criteria, they wanted to win Addy awards. That's it. And I go, you want to win Addy Awards? You know, you're not looking for the creativity or the execution or ideas or any of that. And, uh, the points that you said are so important to not waste your time or figure out like, yeah, I'm willing to invest and gamble a little bit. Speaker 1: Let's try to do it. So I appreciate that. Speaker 2: That's cool. And if you, if you can answer yes to those four questions and go for it, you know, and then, and then you can, then you say, I'm going to put my whole team and all our effort against these ones, right? Cause that's what really, what we want. I say it all the time to marketers is when we run a pitch, an agency pitch, I want to make the decision as hard as possible for you. So it's not about us making the decision easy. We want to make it as hard as possible because we're going to find you two or three agencies that you're going to find it hard to make a decision because they're pretty matched on capabilities. We've got them in a similar kind of area commercially in terms of the terms. Now you're going to make decisions based on people and culture and ideas and values and great stuff. And I want that to be a really hard decision at the end of the day. So I want agencies to come in fully fired up and ready to be really competitive. And the only way you can do that And that's my advice to the top level of the largest agencies in the world down to kind of small founder owner businesses is just be more selective about what you pitch for, because then you're going to be better at pitching. Speaker 3: Well, Tom, thanks so much for coming on the show and providing us your insight and time for coming on. And for everyone listening, we put out some really cool resources on the other episodes. Make sure you check those out at the Smart Agency Masterclass. And we even put out a lot of videos for you on YouTube. So make sure you go to our YouTube channel, youtube.com slash Jason Swenk. Until next time. Speaker 1: Have a Swenk day!