Pitch invasion: how agencies disrupt their own pitches
Disruptive ideas can be the path to growth for both an agency and their client. But when an agency’s pitch style is as disruptive as their idea, it can cause a client to reject the right idea for the wrong reasons. Marketing trainer John Scarrott explains.
Let’s start with how a pitch gets disrupted. Imagine your pitch as travelling down an invisible phone line from your mind to your audience’s mind. What you’d like, ideally is for the line to be really clear, no crackles or disturbances. This means that the client can question the idea, disagree with any aspect of it and you can respond because you’re both clear on what that idea is and where the difference of opinion lies.
When you pitch an idea ‘disruptively’, you behave in a way that inadvertently create a noisy line. Your behaviour disrupts your message. An added complication is that it’s possible for neither party to be aware that this is happening. This explains why bad news is often a surprise. Why some clients just never get back to you after a pitch. And a large part of why potentially great ideas are rejected.
I wonder how the pitch in the photo went, as the presenter explains the content on an apparently blank screen.
Well, nobody can accuse that slide of being too complicated.
Perhaps the presentation tech had failed, or maybe it was an introduction to dark matter 😉 The other thing I notice about the (somewhat set-up) photo is the way the audience is orientated towards the screen. Half the group are comfortable whereas the other half are contorted and have only a partial view of the screen. Not ideal and something worth noting when you’re going to present to a group.
Hi all, thanks for reading. I’d be interested to hear what distracts you. What do you notice in others that distracts you from the idea they’re presenting?