The problem

It seems extremely common in advertising and marketing to:

• receive an RFP (request for proposal) from a brand or larger agency to pitch ideas for an upcoming campaign
• have a very short period of time to respond with a significant proposal
• work in a crazed frenzy to come up with creative ideas and strategy for the proposed campaign… for free.
• often be unable to talk to the client directly
• have very few opportunities to get answers to important questions you have about the project or the business goals
• be unable to change the concept/pitch at all if you win the business, or even worse, your idea has been altered in a way that compromises the project, and if you want to do the work, you’ve got to accept it.

There is so much that is broken about this process:

• There is rarely any ability to truly learn in any depth about the target audience, the brand goals, the success metrics or anything else that is required to create great strategy.
• There aren’t often opportunities to talk about a variety of different executions with a client to get a feel for where they are comfortable and what best meets their needs — you can pitch your one or two big ideas and that’s it.
• There is rarely conversation.
• There is no collaboration — you’re pitching into a void.

And often, agencies have to respond to so many RFPs that they can rarely put their best work into any of them. The pitches commonly end up as short paragraphs and teasers. And ideas that were rejected from one RFP are later recycled and repurposed into a new one. There is a lot of copying and pasting from one RFP to the next.

How does this benefit either party involved?

The result

It’s like throwing darts with a blindfold on. The agency has no REAL idea what the client wants and the client isn’t being guided through a process to help them arrive at a creative solution that meets their needs. The client ends up getting a lot of half-baked ideas thrown at them by multiple agencies who don’t yet understand their business, but are responding to unreasonable deadlines in the best way they can.

We COULD pitch creative and exciting ideas, but what if we get the business? And then, too late, we find out that our creative and exciting idea ISN’T the best solution to the business problem? And by then, everyone is already sold on the idea. And so we have to make it, knowing that it isn’t going to deliver the best possible success for the client. That’s not good for our clients or for our own business.

The alternative — Process, not Pitches

Maybe it’s because we come from a media background, but we believe the best results are achieved by doing the exact opposite of pitching ideas through an RFP.

We believe in process, not pitches.

We believe in collaborating, not guessing.

The best solutions come from our expertise meeting our client’s expertise. We are always better working together from day one, whether it’s in the same room or the same Slack channel.

We work best when our team and our client’s team work as a single team. We work best when there is no hierarchical relationship because we both recognize and appreciate the unique strengths and expertise brought to the project by each side.

Defining true creativity

Creativity isn’t about coming up with a laundry list of ideas that win you the business. Creativity is about solving problems. And most RFPs don’t define the problem in enough detail to know how to solve it properly.

You can’t pitch a solution if you don’t know what the problem is.

Collaboration is the key

The only way to arrive at a fantastic solution is to work together to truly understand the problem, to have permission to explore a variety of possible solutions, and to strategically work to find the best of those solutions… together.

We need to own our expertise:

• we know how to make podcasts that people love
• we know how to put audiences first
• we know how to promote and build audiences for podcasts
• we know how to read data about podcasts and what it means.

We need to listen to the unique expertise of our clients:

• they know their brand
• they know their products and services
• they know their target audience
• they know their own corporate culture and how to work inside it
• they know their business challenges and what success looks like.

I believe it is impossible to find true success without true collaboration — both parties bringing our unique and specialized expertise to the table in search of the best possible solutions.

Our process

So we don’t pitch. We have a process. It’s built on collaboration, strategy, and THEN creative solutions to the business problem or challenge.

Every engagement with a new client starts with a two-day strategy session at their office. We start by digging into their brand, their values, their business goal / challenge, who the audience is, and how they will measure success. Then we go through a collaborative program development session that explores a variety of key strategic decisions about podcast formats to see which options best solve their problem and are aligned with their brand. Every single time, this process of learning about the brand and working as a collaborative team to come up with the show format works better than if we had pitched them in an RFP. Every single time.

We also spend a lot of time talking about how their organization works and how to best leverage their strengths to develop audiences for the show when it launches.

And perhaps most important of all, we spend serious time talking about how we will work and collaborate together when we leave the room.

That’s our process to arrive a fantastic podcast that meets business objectives and that audiences will love listening to. It’s a lot more work than a pitch — on both sides. It is always worth it.

We tell prospective clients that all our successful results are based on this specific process and that if they don’t follow the process, they won’t get the results they are looking for.

And if potential clients aren’t okay with that, we’re okay not working with them.

Process is designed for clients

I hope this doesn’t come across as self-centred or creatively precious — oddly enough, I am approaching this through the opposite lens. We focus on the process instead of the pitch because we believe it is in the best interest of the client.

We want to set every client up for the best chance at success. And if we can’t, we think it is in THEIR best interest that we are honest about it, even if it means that we can’t work together.

By focusing on process instead of pitches, we are actually putting our clients first and respecting their needs and challenges with a way of working that delivers the best results. And in the end, that is what our business is all about.

It’s not just one client. It’s the whole industry.

There is a bigger picture aspect to this philosophy, too. We want EVERY company we work with to have an amazing experience in the podcasting industry. If we take work where success is compromised from the start, we are not only jeopardizing the success of a new client, but we are also jeopardizing the future of the podcasting industry as a whole. After all, if a lot of brands have miserable first experiences in podcasting, they’re not going to come back for more.

The road less traveled

I know it’s hard to take the risk of hiring a company to do work before you know what the idea is. I know it’s probably easier to have ten ideas from ten companies and you can just pick the best one.

In the end, for every brand, it comes down to a choice.

Go down the traditional route of putting out an RFP and get a bunch of pitches. Or… find an agency that has a strategic process designed to solve your business problem.

From our perspective, it’s worth going down the road less traveled to find a true collaborator who understands your brand and becomes a trusted part of your team.

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