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Inside My Book On Advertising Agency Pitching

Peter · September 16, 2014 · Leave a Comment

What’s Inside My Book On Pitching?

As some of you know, I am speaking at HubSpot’s Inbound 2014 conference. I am talking about how to write a B2B book in less than 6 months.

Since I am not actually talking about the art of pitching for advertising agency new business that is the subject of The Levitan Pitch. Buy This Book. Win More Pitches. (which I wrote in 5 months), I thought that I should share what’s inside the 251 page book. I find that people dig the title but still wonder what they are actually going to get. How will this book actually help them win more advertising pitches? Can’t blame them. There are a few books on pitching out there and while I know that I’ve designed my book to be insightful and easy to read, how can anyone other than a reader know this without picking up a copy. So, here you go… (from the book’s introduction)…

Chapter One

In Chapter One of this book, I discuss the very high cost of failing to run well-crafted, efficient pitches. The costs of failure include poor agency staff morale, individual employee burnout, and the financial cost to an agency’s bottom-line that comes from the cost of participating in four-month agency searches and funding an agency’s annual business development plan. There can also be significant costs to career advancement, as you will see from my personal experience in my Saatchi & Saatchi story about “The Worst Advertising Pitch Ever”.

Chapter Two

Chapter Two offers an escape hatch. You should not pitch every account that comes knocking. I give you a handy tool to gauge both the value of the prospective client and your agency’s chances of winning. This is a rather good exercise to do before you embark on the path of winding up the agency to build your finalist pitch.

Chapter Three

Chapter Three begins to help you position the pitch for success. We look at the essential facts of the pitch and dig into understanding the client’s mindset by understanding the type of assignment, type of relationship they are looking for, and what type of agency will fulfill their needs.

Chapter Four

Chapter Four delivers my list of “The 12 Deadliest Presentation Mistakes”. These are identified pitch killers that come from my personal experience and the experiences of agency CEO’s, clients, and search consultants. The accompanying cartoons wouldn’t be as funny if these mistakes were not being made over and over, even by the most sophisticated agencies.

Chapter Five

In Chapter Five I lay out thirty short but very sweet suggestions for how to build a brilliant presentation that I know will greatly increase your odds of winning. These ideas cover three core elements of a successful pitch: process management, content development, and how to deliver a standout presentation. Each rule is supported by a tip or insight that offers a fast way to achieve your objectives. One of my favorite insights is how to use LinkedIn recommendations to understand the personalities and interests of the clients that will be in the presentation. This insight isn’t what you think.

Chapter Six

Chapter Six is all about don’t take my word for it. This chapter brings in valuable learning via fourteen interviews with a range of communications industry experts. It is informative and often mind-blowing to hear the pitch related experiences and advice of agency search consultants, compensation experts, an ex P&G procurement executive, a negotiation trainer, the 4A’s, the Association of National Advertisers, a silicon valley presentation guru, a leading agency strategist, an ex-Nike and W+K executive on building chemistry, an IP lawyer on who actually owns your pitch ideas, the CEO of a London advertising agency, and the CEO of an independent agency network who has been on both sides of the table.

Chapter Seven

Finally, I’ve included insights about all too common agency pitch mistakes from 16 of the world’s leading search consultants.

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That’s it. Hope this sounds like a book that you’ll want to read. My goal is to help you win more pitches. I can almost guarantee that if you pay attention to the book’s advice — you will win more. By the way, take a look inside the book on Amazon.

Interesting Inbound And Outbound Marketing Numbers

Peter · August 10, 2014 · Leave a Comment

I’ve Been Looking At My Network And Its Inbound and Outbound Marketing Potential.

Why? I am going to be marketing my new book in September. The book is about the art and science of pitching for advertising, digital, design and PR agencies. However, the essence of the book will be useful to the very broad B2B market. We all sit in rooms trying to sell something and we all make the right and wrong sales related moves. The book is designed to call these mistakes and opportunities out and immediatly grow your odds of success.

I will be employing both inbound (think of this blog) and outbound (think email marketing) to reach my target audiences.

Some numbers: 5,245 and on, and on….

Guest Post For Fun & Profit

Peter · August 4, 2014 · Leave a Comment

Yes Kids, Go Guest Post For Fun & Profit

Just in case, this is what guest posting is (C/O TrackMaven):

Guest posting is creating content and publishing it on another person’s website. Blogs are a very popular platform for guest posting. This is a great way to build an online reputation and for a company to get its name out there. By posting on another person’s blog, not only will a company’s followers see its content, but anyone who follows the host blogger will see the company’s content as well, thus reaching an audience that might be unaware of your brand.

I did the guest post thing last week on Agency Post, Business2Community and the Portland Ad Fed websites.

Agency Post On Procurement

My blog post, You can’t Avoid Procurement, But You Can Learn How To Sell Them, appears on the fast growing ad agency blog Agency Post, which was recently bought by HubSpot. As I say,

Few words strike more fear and loathing in the hearts of agency management than “procurement.” This P-word gets its rap from being viewed as an impediment to an advertising agency’s ability to sell its strategic and brand-building creative expertise. Instead, agencies have to sell on price.

However, the role of procurement isn’t that simple.

It has its own ying and yang.

The major point I make is that clients of all sizes and shapes (regardless if they have a procurement department or not) are interested in getting the most bang from their ad agency buck. Yes, its that ROI thing again. I suggest that agencies have a compensation plan and a POV on agency-client financial management (“we care and pay attention to details”) that they can share with prospective clients.

Get ahead of the issue and… look much smarter than the other agencies.

Business2Community On Meeting Management

On the well-read and high Page Rank website Business2Community (Page Rank = 6) I wrote about meeting management in How To run A Smart Meeting. We waste hours and cash on poorly run meetings. it is brain numbing. As I say,

Effective meetings deliver three key benefits:

Effective meetings focus on and achieve meeting objectives.
Well-managed meetings take up a minimum amount of time.
Participants leave the meeting feeling that a sensible process has been followed and that their time has been used effectively.

This post was easy to do as it is a slight rewrite from my soon to be published book: The Levitan Pitch. Buy This Book. Win More Pitches. I did the same for the Agency Post guest post. Repurposing, with thoughtful adjustments for the new platform, is a good thing if you want to reach new audiences.

Portland Ad Fed On Guest Posting

For the brand new Portland Ad Fed website I wrote about the value of guest posting. The article Go Forth And Guest Post discusses why I, and you, should guest post. Get over the thinking that guest posting’s primary benefit is getting a link back to your site to make Google love you (Google makes too many algorithm revisions to count on this). Just love the fact that YOU are building awareness by having your pearls of wisdom on other people’s well-read website. As I say, yes again,

I admit it. I am a habitual guest blogger.

I do this for a few reasons. One is simple ego-boosting. But the most important is awareness growth for my agency consultancy. It works because I can get way past my current blog, Twitter and LinkedIn readership to introduce myself and my thinking to a much larger advertising audience. I trade articles for audience.

Matt Cutts On Guest Blogging

Matt is in charge of spam at Google. He is one of the most read people on the subject of SEO in the industry. In the article, The decay and fall of guest blogging for SEO, he discuses why guest posting is and isn’t a good thing. Bottom line, it is a good thing if your posts are high quality and you are seeking marketing awareness. It is bad for the industry when posters act like poseurs. Read on,

It seems like most people are getting the spirit of what I was trying to say, but I’ll add a bit more context. I’m not trying to throw the baby out with the bath water. There are still many good reasons to do some guest blogging (exposure, branding, increased reach, community, etc.). Those reasons existed way before Google and they’ll continue into the future. And there are absolutely some fantastic, high-quality guest bloggers out there. I changed the title of this post to make it more clear that I’m talking about guest blogging for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes.

I’m also not talking about multi-author blogs. High-quality multi-author blogs like Boing Boing have been around since the beginning of the web, and they can be compelling, wonderful, and useful.

I just want to highlight that a bunch of low-quality or spam sites have latched on to “guest blogging” as their link-building strategy, and we see a lot more spammy attempts to do guest blogging. Because of that, I’d recommend skepticism (or at least caution) when someone reaches out and offers you a guest blog article.

My advice: go guest post for fun, pleasure and fame.