Irresistible New Business Pitches
With An Unfair Advantage!A Unique Insight
In this highly competitive world, the ability to pitch for new business in a way that truly connects and engages the client has never been more essential, especially as new business pitches (NBP’s) are such time consuming and costly affairs.
So imagine if you had something of an unfair advantage, an insight that enabled your team to construct and then deliver NBP’s that really drilled into the very essence of exactly what the client really wanted – and not just what the brief said!
What A Prospective Client Really Wants
For well over a decade now Brilliant Training have been assisting some of the UK’s top agencies to understand that a NBP is SO much more than simply a platform to present your ideas, initiatives and concepts. Of course, these things…your creative intellect, are vital for success – but so too is understanding just how the prospective client is thinking and feeling leading up to, and during the pitch.
Create Three Very Defined Emotions
Imagine you are about to start your new business pitch to a prospective new client – but first let us press the pause button and ask three questions:
1. As you start your pitch – would knowing how the client truly thinks & feels be of help?
2. Would knowing what they really want be of interest?
3. Would knowing just what is going on in their head help the cause?
In his corporate life before forming Brilliant Training our CEO, Mark Lewis, was involved in the selection and appointment of four PR agencies and three Marketing agencies here in the UK, as well as being involved in similar processes in Europe. As a result, Mark has sat through quite a few beauty parades!
Mark has been ‘the client’ – and this experience has given him and Brilliant Training a pretty unique insight into just what it feels like to be on the receiving end of a NBP. We know how clients think and we know what they feel – and ‘feelings’ are very much at the heart of it.
Armed with this unique perspective we understand that the aim of any new business pitch is not just to tell the prospective client what you can do for them ideas wise, but more to ensure they ‘feel’ three very defined and very specific emotions. Create these three emotions in the person or people you are pitching to and you will almost certainly win the pitch process. Fail to do so, and by the same measure you will almost certainly fail – no matter how slick the delivery or how creative the ideas!
Connection & Engagement
Experience (and independent research) tells us that if an agency presents to a prospective new client in a four-way beauty parade then upwards of 90% of their ideas, initiatives and concepts will be pretty much the same as the ones presented by the other agencies. Therefore, unless you are the first agency to pitch, they will almost certainly have heard it all before!
So, if the content is pretty much the same across all three of four agencies just what is it that sets one particular agency above the others? How does the client come to their decision? What does an agency need to do to win?
The answer to the above is both complex and simple, but perhaps the first thing to understand is that no matter how complex the brief, and no matter how intelligent, how analytical and how scientific the prospective client may be in their approach to their decision-making process, emotion (and feelings) will play a big part in things.
The amount of money they are looking to invest in PR will not be a small amount and they can almost certainly only spend it once! They have to make the right decision and they know this. As a result, a whole host of ‘emotions & feelings’ will be attached to their decision making process.
The BIG conclusion?
A new business pitch should be seen as a platform to create certain key emotions in the prospective client, and not simply an opportunity to tell them ‘stuff’.
Interested?
If this sounds of interest and you would like to know more about how to pitch for new business in a way that has the client’s phycology at the centre of things please get in touch.
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