Hello Advertising Agency Leaders: Do Not Pitch That Account – Yet!

Please, Don’t Do It!

The following blog post on when not to pitch for a new account is from my book, The Levitan Pitch. Buy This Book. Win More Pitches. I suggest that you buy the book if you want to (do I need to say this?) win more pitches.

Buy the book – > Here.

Virtually all of the advertising search consultants that I interviewed for the book said that advertising agencies pitch too often. Many agencies seem to pitch almost any account that knocks.

They are inclined to pitch most incoming because (pick one or more): they are feeling the pinch of lower margins; they just lost their big account; they are generally nervous and don’t know the next time they will be invited to a dance; don’t have a serious new business plan that attracts the right clients; haven’t actually identified the types of clients they really want to work with, etc. This pitch anything that breathes mentality really reared its head big time during the recession, but it has become omnipresent in our new world of projects vs. AOR searches.

From the book….

Just Say No!

Before you embark on a new pitch, you should be asking yourself one extremely important question…

Should we be pitching this account?

I know what you are thinking… Levitan’s kidding, right? We’ve made it through the RFI and RFP stages, and now he wants us to ask if we should even be going to the finals?

It’s still ok to say “no”, and now is the time to take a deep breath and review a go-no-go decision. You are about to spend a great deal of time and money. Are you sure that you should go through the next step? Are your colleague’s groans getting louder? Looking in any way ambivalent about the pitch will not help your pitch team feel good about charging into it. Passionless pitches don’t win.

Pitch or not is usually one of the most difficult decisions agency manage- ment has to make. There is a good chance that you think that you’ve already answered this question if you participated in an RFP that led to your selection as a short list candidate. I believe that even if you’ve performed a sound decision making process, now is the time to stop to determine if this potentially expensive pitch is worth the time, effort, and human and cash cost.