An advertising agency recently asked us to review one of their presentation decks after the fact, to see if we could help them understand why their pitch had failed.
The deck was a bit complicated and busy, but probably no more so than the winning agency’s. And the creative work was clear, fresh, and original. The problem: the strategy was based on several erroneous, and in this case fatal, assumptions about the marketplace.
The agency was dead in the water even before the first piece of creative was shown. It would have taken a major act of mercy on the client’s part, or the simultaneous failures of all the competitive agencies, to let the agency have the business under the circumstances. Yet a smidgen of well-applied market intelligence-gathering work might have saved the day.
When you go to pitch, you need facts, not just ideas. Advertising agencies typically face four or five other agencies when pitching new business. Great looking creative won’t win accounts, or for that matter sell products, if it isn’t founded on a solid strategic basis. This is even more true for public relations pitches, and especially so for purely strategic opportunities. Sure, strategic thinking is part science, part art. But the first step is discovery: getting the right facts. Formulating good strategies and tactics requires in-depth market insights typically not provided by the client in an RFP or obtainable through simple Internet browsing. But too often, communications firms stop there.
Optimize your market intelligence endeavors
The discerning product marketing team expects copy and graphics to echo positioning that is driven by market forces and competitive pressures. You’ve got to know not just what’s happening today—the static picture—but how the market is changing (the dynamics). How effective, for example, would a strategy be that emphasizes that a product is the first oral treatment for a disease, when the client knows three other oral agents are about to be approved by the FDA in the next six months?
This doesn’t mean you need to chew up valuable time in your pitch telling the client that you know what they already know. Instead, it means showing you know it, by selecting the truly differentiating benefits and features to emphasize.
Don’t leave it until too late
Of course, good discovery work like this takes time. Agencies rarely have the luxury of time when pitching new business. While market intelligence is logically one of the first steps to be conducted, paying clients, competing pitches, or other tight deadlines can put the whole pitch discovery process on the back burner. Then, agencies find themselves seeking market intelligence in parallel with other steps in the pitch process, sometimes even after creative conceptualization has begun. That’s scary.
Procrastination about initiating market intelligence creates a “fire drill” late in the pitch preparation process, when the team first realizes there are gaping holes in market knowledge. Information that arrives late in the process can tempt presenters to use it as “window dressing” to look smart with prospective clients, rather than applying it to ideas and executions that are smart. Woe unto the pitch team whose superficiality of insight and knowledge becomes exposed during the Q&A period. Many an agency’s pitch team has seen its ship break apart on those rocks.
Make early intelligence-gathering an integral part of the process
Instead of amassing data, reports, and statistics throughout the pitch process as questions arise, it’s wiser to have a structured, strategically driven information retrieval and analysis process in place from the start. Successful agencies start by assessing what is known – from the RFP, from staff with previous category experience, and from available market reports – then identify the informational holes that need to be filled.
The next step is to assign information retrieval expert(s), whether on staff or outside consultant(s), to gather and interpret secondary data. Market intelligence professionals like these not only have experience in search strategies, but also may have access to databases and information sources that go beyond those publicly available on the Internet.
For major pitches, such as a new product launch, such a secondary research process yields a thorough understanding of:
• Market size, trends, forces and dynamics
• The disease/condition addressed
• Key stakeholders
• The competitive landscape, both current and future
• The product’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats
Depending on the scope, you’ll want to do primary research as well with appropriate stakeholders. That’s a subject sufficiently complex that we’ll deal with it in a separate article in a future issue of PitchSmarter.
Define your strategic questions and issues well
In the absence of a well-defined process, obtaining market intelligence can suffer from a failure to crisply define the strategic questions. Asking for “some market background” will not yield an answer to “how well-satisfied is this market with existing products” or address patient demographics. If the broad strokes are what is desired, fine, but it’s best to have a standard list of key questions that the data should answer, or that should included in an analysis of the information.
If you’re working with outside intelligence-gathering experts, it’s also vital to define the scope of the work up front. How wide a net should be cast? Is the interest in U.S. or global markets? Is the focus on one particular drug indication or all?
Conserve resources—by sharing what you have
Preparing for an agency pitch is expensive, and agencies can save time and money making sure they’re not going outside for information people within their firm already have. Have you thoroughly read all the background material supplied by the prospective client? Are there staff category experts, or existing market reports in-house? Too often, the people asked to gather market intelligence function aren’t told about existing information. The result: too much of the same information, and unfilled gaps, missing facts.
When you do go outside for help, clearly communicate expected deliverables and cost constraints. Not every market intelligence assignment warrants the same depth. A pitch in a well-characterized, mature market may only need factoids, while an early-stage new entity may call for a full market assessment.
Analyze and summarize
Data only become useful information through analysis and interpretation. Unless someone boils down the ocean of data into a cupful of relevant knowledge, the team will be overwhelmed. The pitch team includes many members with varying backgrounds and tolerance for detail. Few will have time to read through everything amassed in the information-gathering phase. Data can even be contradictory. So appoint someone with strategic marketing expertise and a complete understanding of the RFP objectives to do the distilling and prepare a succinct summary that includes interpretation and analysis. Or reach outside your own organization for a specialist who can do this for your team.
Know when to stop
You’ll never know all the facts. The point is to dig wide enough and deep enough to ensure you have the main important ones. McKinsey consultants are taught the MECE acronym—mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive—and are tasked to come up with no more than three to five findings that, in a MECE way, account for why a market looks and acts the way it does. That’s about as much as anyone can keep in mind during a pitch anyway, and it really shows you know your stuff if you can explain a market powerfully in just a few words. It takes a lot of work to get there. But it’s a useful discipline for making your market intelligence efforts pay off smartly in new business wins.
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