What's It REALLY Going to Take to Win?
Losing streaks don't end until you stop fooling yourself
Welcome to the latest entry in The Workaround. You’re in good company with thousands of fellow entrepreneurs and innovators!
I’m Bob, your host. My mission here is to share personal, behind-the-scenes stories of the ups and downs of my career leading tech startups and corporate innovation.
I write to make you think, smile, and discover a shortcut to success or a trap to avoid.
Here we go…
The more I learn about myself and the world around me, the more I realize the majority of this knowledge is the result of repeatedly getting kicked in the ass.
Success is an awful teacher. Being born on third base ends up being a bummer.
And even when we build up critical skills and are on the verge of success, an X-factor can keep us glued to the silver medal platform. But breakthroughs and victory are possible when we look deeper into ourselves and see the truth hidden by our ego.
If you choose a business career, there’s probably no better way to learn this than in the creative agency business. A few months ago, I shared some lessons from this experience. Today, I’m going to dig deeper. The mental scars are still there, but now I’m able to smile at them. Maybe you will, too…
Welcome to Agency Sales
In 2004, I left my brand management job with Mr. Clean to join a group of friends (and former brand people) leading a small digital agency. They were in the process of turning the business around and asked me to join the exec team to lead Account Services, Strategy, and New Business functions.
As an experienced brand manager, I knew Strategy very well. Account Services was new, but at least I could rely on my client-side experience. New Business—i.e., Sales—was new to me, especially in the advertising agency game.
To understand the agency sales process. Let’s first start with how you probably think about B2B sales today: You have a pretty specific need to fill, look up a small number of industry players, compare their features and pricing, and soon after purchase, you can evaluate the value.
Got it in your head? Now imagine the opposite: A wide range of unknown needs, a massive list of companies to choose from, no clear difference in features and pricing (everyone says they can do everything), and it can take years to assess if you picked the right partner.
So when a client finally hits that point of needing a new creative agency, they typically engage the Procurement Department, which runs a process similar to this:
Request for Information (RFI) - is sent out to 20 or more agencies. This is usually an Excel sheet with over 100 questions about everything from your hourly fees to the job titles of each employee to five clients who are willing to be referenced. We all know most people won’t read this, but at least they tend to ask the same questions so we can cut and paste.
Capabilities Presentation - 5 to 10 agencies will be invited to walk through a PowerPoint deck of their unique perspective, process, and people. Never mind that nothing is very unique, to be honest. There may be 15 or more clients involved and they might have some scorecard they fill out. But none can sit through as many as ten ~90-minute presentations.
Creative Presentation - the final list of 2 to 5 agencies will get a “test” in the form of a creative brief for an actual brand project. You might get to sit in on a 30-minute overview by a brand person ahead of time, but mainly, you’re doing your best as an outside observer of the category.
As you might expect in reading this, a sales role in an agency is, well, unusual. There’s little reason to do a bunch of cold emails, buy social ads, or work on SEO. Mostly, you do enough connecting with marketers in hopes that someone on a brand team remembers to add you to the RFI list. You also hustle to appear on “Best Of” lists in industry publications like Adweek and Advertising Age, as clients often use them as shortcuts to pick worthy candidates.
(Note: this is why these publications continue to thrive when the rest of the media world is folding!)
“What’s it Going to Take to Win?”
My office chair was barely warm before I started receiving RFIs for some pretty big brand opportunities. Each was over $1 million in potential annual revenue, and we had the chance to land and expand with other brands and projects at these companies. While the odds were long, we had some great strengths and client work to brag about.
As an outsider to the industry, leading sales for the first time, I returned to my strength in strategy. I looked back at historic pitches for reasons behind our losses and wins. It seemed obvious that we lacked consistency in preparing for a pitch. Our win rate was low, and we burned shocking numbers of billable hours. This inefficiency burned out our team and took them away from current clients, which risked hurting our relationships and revenue.
Over that first year, I introduced some key tactics to improve our performance. We used a scorecard to judge each incoming RFI, which helped us decide whether and how much time we should put against it. We did a better job of managing skills and time availability with each pitch. And we assigned clear ownership and decision-making roles.
These changes made a difference, and we improved our game. But the biggest boost came from a question we began asking ourselves at the start of each pitch:
What’s it going to take to win?”
This question came up after we debriefed a big loss. In sorting through the aftermath, the team and I realized we did a poor job of getting into our clients’ heads. Sure, they gave us a scorecard of the 15 things they sought, but it wasn’t a useful guide to our work. We noted that we would have gone further on a few specific pitches if we had considered the bigger picture.
We needed a north star for each months-long pitch competition, and “What’s it going to take to win?” seemed to fit the bill. We started each team's kickoff with this question and put it at the top and center of all preparation documents.
And it worked!
Our preparation was more efficient, our decks were tighter, and we were much better at casting the right team members for each potential opportunity. We breezed through almost every RFI and got into more than our fair share of final, creative presentations.
Interestingly, the answer to our “What’s it going to take to win?” was often Strategy. As we put ourselves more into our clients’ shoes, we saw that their businesses didn’t need to build complex websites or spend millions on celebrity endorsements. Their overall brand strategies just didn’t fit with the digital age.
We hired strategic planning leaders from the client side and consulting companies like McKinsey to start each final pitch. This established our smarts and showed that this little agency from Cincinnati could sling slides like the coastal captains of Mad Avenue.
But we keep losing…
Second Place is the Biggest Loser
It’s been a week since our latest big, final creative pitch for the Sprite digital agency of record business. This was our chance for a massive, sexy client and foothold into Coca-Freaking-Cola. I’m staring at my phone and email, awaiting the client’s decision. Creative pitches, like houseguests and fish, smell rotten after five business days.
The team smells my fear, too. No one wants to come near my cube. And if my CEO asks me one more time if I’ve heard anything, I’m going to strangle him.
Then I get the phone call. The Procurement person says hello and gets straight to the point:
“I’m sorry to say that your team did not win the pitch. The Brand thought your strategy was great, but the winning agency, VML, brought a creative idea that just blew us away. You were a very close runner-up.”
I’d heard this same line a few times already, and once again, that competitor, VML, has beaten us for the prize. I know them pretty well, as we are in the same holding company, but I can’t figure out how they do it.
I don’t have time to cry about it. We have another big creative pitch later today. This one is for Pampers, which happens to be in our town and is owned by our biggest client—and my former employer—Procter & Gamble. Our clients on the other diaper brand, Luvs, love our team and have said wonderful things. If we win this one, it will more than make up for the pain and lost business from Sprite.
So I put on my big boy pants, force a smile onto my face, and round up the team to carpool across town for another big show.
At the reception desk, I get a little sneaky and look over the vistor sign-in sheet to see what other agencies have presented that day—clients never tell you who you’re up against. Damn, the VML guys are here again! I keep my poker face and don’t share this news with the team—no reason to risk throwing them off.
We’re shortly ushered into a conference room full of client judges, many of whom are familiar faces. Despite the recent bad news and nerves, we hit all our marks. Again we started with a strategic framework that got our clients’ heads nodding and set up our creative well. Everyone thanks us for our time and hustles us out so the next presentation can begin on time. My team decides to do our debrief over beers at Tina’s, the nearby dive bar that’s become a second home for our agency.
Two days later, I’m back at my desk, playing the waiting game again. Sooooo much is on the line: Huge revenue, case-study-quality work, added embeddedness with our biggest client…and my own personal reputation as a decent leader of my company’s new business efforts.
The name of P&G’s agency procurement rep, Sophie, pops up on my Blackberry. We’ve gotten to know each other well over many ups and downs in the past few years. She’s impartial and gets to deliver the brand team’s decision. She gives it to me straight: We’re in second place again because the winner “Wow’ed them with a creative idea.”
The Reality Check Comes Due
I email the team, sharing the bad news and thanking them for their time. I try my best to keep them encouraged. After all, another pitch is coming soon. I hear my CEO yell, “Fuck!” from the other side of my floor. Nothing else good can come from sitting here today. I chuck my laptop into my bag, grab my keys, and exit down the stairs in hopes of avoiding people.
I drive home, letting reality cycle through my brain. Second place is truly the worst—we’ve expended the maximum possible investment only to lose. And when you finish second, it’s easy to fool yourself into thinking that the difference was some small, unknowable detail or just plain bad luck.
But as I pull into my driveway, it hits me: Our strategy is to blame. And it’s been staring us right in the face all along.
When asking, “What’s it going to take to win?” we almost always said, “Strategy.” It got us a long way, but not to the final win. In the early stages, our strategy was key, but we didn’t focus on creative in our final pitches.
My executive team and I were far too biased toward brand strategy. Most of us came from this area, and it was what we knew best. This prevented us from seeing the real way to win: kick-ass creative.
Our clients weren’t looking for strategic consultants. That was their job, and they were confident in their businesses' strategies. What they needed—what they couldn’t do themselves—was creative work. They missed this from our work and it was what they loved in our winning competitors.
The Big Test
This epiphany leads to a complete agreement among our executive team, and we leap into action.
In the following months, we make several moves to improve the creative in our presentations and our agency overall. We bring in some new talent and elevate our top designers, copywriters, and directors. Our creative teams share more work together and seek out experts to open their minds. We establish monthly creative reviews among teams so they can learn from each other. We set goals to win creative awards, including a Gold Lion at Cannes, home to the top global advertising competition.
I spend less time in a room by myself building strategic frameworks and more time finding ways to inspire my creative teams.
In our pitch kick-off meetings, we list “Creative” at the top of the whiteboard. One big test of our new focus is a pitch for the U.S. Dannon business, which my friend Raman helped get us in the door for. We make it to the final test after the usual rounds of weeding out. This has four separate test assignments in our final presentation, and we bring absolutely killer ideas to each one.
Our recommendation to make the kid-focused brand Danimals more fun and engaging is the most memorable. Our creative idea combines the digital and physical worlds to let kids play big. The result is a cannon that fires yogurt.
Trust me, there is a great insight and strategy behind it, but all our clients will recall is that we actually created a REAL yogurt cannon in a lab and let them pull the trigger through a mobile app.
We win the pitch, and great work and revenue follow. More wins start to mount. A few months later, we win a Gold Cyber Lion at Cannes—a first for our P&G client.
We established our agency as a creative leader…that also does great strategy. This helps us grow past $40 million in annual revenue and employ nearly 400 employees from our little office in Cincinnati.
Still Learning Today
“What’s it going to take to win?” is a concept I’ve carried with me through multiple startups and countless client pitches since those agency days. Other former team members also employ it. My friend, Jonathan Richman, wrote a great post on the topic recently.
But the bigger lesson is that we need to admit when we have biases in answering the question.
Just last week, I spoke with a 20-something marketer who regularly advises CMOs on brand strategy—as a side hustle. I was amazed by her insights and ideas, but mainly at how she commands the attention of senior business leaders so early in her career.
For a hot second, I felt a wave of jealousy—after all, it took me an expensive MBA and decades of work to get to the kind of influence she’d already reached! But then I smiled and leaned in, curious to learn how she managed it and realizing she’s got skills I still haven’t mastered. She’s bringing creative ideas along with strategy and has the perspective of a social media native. I’m eager to find a way for us to work together.
The funny thing is that our conversation is what made me remember this old agency story and life lesson…
Winning comes once we see the truth, which may mean we’re not the smartest person in the room or the best one to do the work. You can go a long way by putting your ego in the backseat and letting the great ones drive.
How we might work together…
Are you interested in launching your own consulting or service business or need help taking your current services business to the next level? Fleet is our holding company for services, and we’re actively looking to build business partnerships with winning leaders. Let’s talk!
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BONUS: Cool Content of the Week
A little something I found meaningful. You might agree…
The Social Juice
At the risk of looking like the old guy at the club, I’m cheering the return of Web 1.0 in certain areas of the Interwebs. Here on Substack, it feels like the good old days of blogs, when people lingered for long reads and supported each other with recommendation lists.
A few weeks ago, I discovered a Substack account that took me back in time. The Social Juice is a weekly summary of news from the marketing and advertising world. Over my coffee every Sunday or Monday morning, I can scan everything from recent agency wins to the commercials that everyone is buzzing about. No wonder it has attracted over 20,000 subscribers in a little over 3 years of regular posting.
News roundup posts like this used to be prevalent on the Web but went out of fashion with the rise of social feeds. Those feeds used to be a lot more useful. Now, that leaves room for passionate creators like Jaskaran at The Social Juice to bring us back to the future.
Now you just have to get me a literary agent :)
Of course, maybe the book just isn't any good. Or no one wants to read it. There's always that.
"This New Internet Thing" (find it on Amazon).