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Sell Yourself: 5 Tips to Better Position Your Pitch

Over the past 10 years, I’ve sat on all sides of the marketing table, from being a freelance creative associate selling concepts to senior level clients, to running RFPs for FORTUNE 500 corporations in search of global agencies. During a recent stint at The IdeaLists, a company that acts as a liaison between all of the above, my vantage point became even more interesting.

One of the most common questions I got from our creative community was how to position their offering to better appeal to clients. Here are five tips that I’ve picked up myself after watching thousands of others pitch their services over the years.

1. Get Your Story Straight

While clients respect the deeper philosophical underpinnings of your work, they are busy and need to quickly understand exactly what you do and how you do it. If you’re a UX designer, say so – front and center on your homepage and in the first paragraph of your proposal/email/deck/etc. Save the details of why UX is the path to spiritual enlightenment for a follow-up meeting or blog post.

2. Lead with What You Do, Not What You Don’t

Clients want to hear what you’re doing now, the exciting things you plan to do in the future, and where you think the next smart moves are going to happen in your industry over the next few years. Beginning your presentation with a history of what your company used to do, but doesn’t do anymore can be confusing. Your background is important, but not at the expense of distracting your audience.

3. If You’re Not Qualified, Sit It Out

As an open marketplace, one of the ongoing challenges The IdeaLists faces is striking the balance between offering our creative community exciting new opportunities and making sure our clients only speak to fully qualified candidates. When a client has specific needs that require specialized skills like e-commerce, mobile development, or high-end luxury branding, you absolutely must have demonstrable skills in that area. Spin things too much and you lose credibility, which decreases your chances for future work. In other words, be ambitious yet realistic.

4. Spell Check!

Being a visual thinker is no excuse. Even minor typos broadcast a lack of attention to detail. Proper spelling and grammar is a deal breaker for many people, but is easy to avoid. Always have a second set of eyes look at anything and everything you’re putting in front of a client.

5. The First Answer Is Always Yes

In improv comedy, one of the first lessons is called “Yes, And.” In a nutshell, no matter how crazy the scenario you’re presented with is, the answer is “yes,” and you build on that. Saying no shuts the scene down and leaves nowhere to go. Even when you disagree with a client, there is almost always some valuable information you can extract by keeping an open mind and letting the dialogue continue. Build on that seemingly outlandish question or idea; if you’re a real pro you can even steer things right back to where you want them. 

(This post originally appeared in slightly different form at freelancersunion.com.)

This Agency Model Is Broken, But Should We Fix It?

Product development is the new marketing strategy. Innovation is the new creative currency. Curation is the new content. Marketing and advertising have evolved over the past five years and the shift is accelerating faster by the day. Networks like SAY Media and Glam Media are working directly with brands, giving them direct access to content. Disruptors like BuzzFeed and Percolate are taking it a step further by co-creating new content and curating entire social footprints.

Long story short, the traditional client to agency to media telephone game is a broken model. And everybody knows it.

The alternative models for success are obvious with brands like Burberry, Nike and Levi’s making great content, creating digital products with real utility, and truly partnering with their agencies. But for every Red Bull Space Jump, there are still hundreds of campaigns that are dying on the vine because consumers are exhausted from years of being talked at rather than being engaged with.

What’s the solution? Taking a page from the startup scene and borrowing liberally from The Lean Startup methodology, it’s time for agencies to pivot, test new ideas, and be ready to fail upward.

What’s Your MVP?

The first step for any startup is to define its minimum viable product (MVP) — the simplest, most concise and compelling version of the product offering. Deceptively simple, this is no easy task.

Let’s apply this methodology to agencies. Is a viable MVP writing 30-second TV spots and then outsourcing the actual making to a production company? Is it designing print ads for magazines with fewer subscribers every day? Is it creating Flash banner ads that the most affluent demographics can’t watch on their iOS devices? Framed this way, it doesn’t sound very compelling.

Now let’s take a closer look at what agencies do best: They understand brands better than anyone else and they know what consumers like. They’re also full of creative, talented people. Put that together and there’s an MVP in there somewhere. Perhaps it’s making the creative director a curator-in-chief and starting a dedicated multi-channel content factory for the right client. Or maybe it just means giving your tech director six months of freedom to create a game-changing mobile app.

The good news for agencies is that the cost of most of these experiments is basically a rounding error for your holding company. So why not invest in their own talent and put some skin in the game?

Now Pivot!

“Lean.” “Agile.” “Pivot.” Agencies use these buzzwords liberally and often advise their clients to make aggressive moves and embrace drastic change. So why not apply these principles to the agency itself?

Winston Binch and Bud Caddell are trying just that at Deutsch LA by putting digital at the forefront of the agency and refusing to separate creativity from technology. Alex Bogusky got to the top of the mountain and then ditched it for the Common project. But for every agency leader who’s ready to make a major pivot, there are ten Global Strategy Directors pitching innovation at client meetings, while secretly outsourcing the actual work to three guys in a loft in Brooklyn.

Agencies need to be ready to fail upward by experimenting, learning from mistakes and making smart pivots.

Partners Not Vendors

Of course, no agency is set up to be quick, nimble, or great at everything. In fact, as consumers’ attention becomes increasingly scattered, and campaigns become  microtargeted, it’s impossible to do everything well.

Agency producers have been quietly amassing Rolodexes of secret weapon vendors for years. Now that brands are actively seeking out media opportunities with the aforementioned disruptors, and working with non-agencies like Breakfast and Fake Love, the curtain is starting to lift. It’s time for transparency and scale.

Once again, startups have benefited from this communal worldview for years — quite literally with open source frameworks like Ruby on Rails, and more recently with the increasing popularity of shared spaces like WeWork.

Exposing these relationships, and treating them as partnerships rather than procuring services from vendors doesn’t mean cutting agencies out of the equation. Nor does it mean resorting to gimmicky crowdsourcing stunts or simply awarding jobs to the lowest bidder on oDesk or Elance. It means we are entering a new era of transparency with a wide array of in-demand specialists collaborating with brands and agencies to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts.

(This post originally appeared on Adotas.)