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How To Get High Quality Clients w/ Joel Pilger
Chris Do and Joel Pilger reveal why you don't hate pitching, you hate losing, and how to change the game to win high-quality clients.
Chris Do
Founder, The Futur™ · August 6, 2024
You Don't Hate Pitching. You Hate Losing.
Most creatives are fluent in a specific dialect of professional despair. It sounds like, “I hate pitching.” It’s a complaint born from late nights, unpaid labor, and the gut-punch of a rejection email after pouring your soul into a project you never even started.
But this is a misdiagnosis of the problem. In a candid conversation with The Futur’s Chris Do, veteran studio advisor Joel Pilger offers a sharp correction. Pilger, who ran the motion design studio Impossible Pictures for two decades before advising the world’s leading creative companies, has a different thesis.
“You don't hate pitching,” Pilger states. “You hate losing.”
This single reframe changes everything. It shifts the focus from victimhood to strategy, from complaining about a broken system to learning how to win within it. The frustration isn't with the act of presenting ideas. It's with investing thousands, sometimes tens of thousands of dollars, only to be told, “Thanks, but no thanks.” As Do admits, “I hate even more the fact that I pitch and don't win.”
To stop losing, you must first understand the game you are actually playing. It is rarely the one you think it is.
The Anatomy of a Broken System
Let’s define our terms. Pitching, in its simplest form, is when a client invites you to present your ideas for a project. If they like your ideas, you get the job. But the modern creative pitch is a far cry from a simple presentation.
Do recalls a time, around 1995, when the motion design industry was still in its infancy. “People would just get on the phone with you,” he says. A conversation and a bid with numbers on it was often enough to land a $70,000 project. Soon, clients wanted a written treatment. This was still manageable. A few hours of writing, a clear vision, but no unpaid design.
Then the ground shifted. The request became, “We can't interpret the treatment, we want to see your design.”
This was the moment the industry crossed a critical threshold into the valley of spec work. Suddenly, studios were expected to produce detailed storyboards, design frames, and even motion tests, often for free. The cost of entry escalated dramatically. Do remembers spending upwards of $30,000 on a single pitch, only to lose. Pilger has him beat. “I once invested $50,000 in a pitch that lost,” he reveals. “And guess what? It actually was never even really a project.”
This evolution from low-ticket to high-ticket pitching changed the rules. The strategies that won a $50,000 job were liabilities in a $500,000 pitch. As Pilger notes, “I was taking the practices [and] principles that won jobs for me in low-ticket pitching and as I went into high-ticket pitching, I just started losing.” His response was to double down, producing bigger treatments and more creative. He still lost.
The problem wasn't a lack of creative firepower. The problem was a fundamental misunderstanding of the client’s decision-making process.
The Myth of Meritocracy
Creatives operate on a powerful and dangerous myth: the best creative wins. This belief is the fuel for countless hours of unpaid labor. It’s the hope that keeps you pushing pixels at 2 AM. And more often than not, it is a lie.
Pilger shares a chillingly direct quote from a contact at Apple: “Our creatives always have a favorite. The other two are just Hail Marys.”
Read that again. In many high-stakes pitches, the decision has already been made. The client has an incumbent they trust, an industry darling they want to work with, or a long-standing relationship they have no intention of breaking. You, and one other hopeful, are often invited to the party for one reason: to fulfill a procurement policy. You are the dreaded third bid.
“What they'll never tell you [is], oh jump into this pitch, by the way, you're the dreaded third bid. Good luck,” says Pilger. A client is legally or contractually bound to get three quotes, but they already know who they want. Your brilliant, expensive pitch serves only to validate their predetermined choice and check a box for their boss. They get your ideas for free, and you get demoralized.
This isn't an occasional anomaly. It is a systemic feature of high-ticket work. Do recounts hearing a story of a studio whose pitch was rejected, only for their creative concept to be handed to the winning, favored vendor to produce. As Pilger explains, this is a brutal example of what happens when you mistake a relationship problem for a creative one. “The best creative was produced by somebody else because they were the favorite vendor that they trusted.”
The first step to winning more is to abandon the naive belief that your creative genius is enough. You must become a detective, looking for signals that tell you whether you are the favorite or the foil. This is not about being cynical. It is about being a professional who understands the full context of the business decision being made. For more on how to frame your value, see Do's breakdown of value-based pricing.
Is Pitching Even Necessary?
The natural reaction to this rigged game is to declare pitching itself unnecessary. “They can look at our work and see that we're qualified,” is a common refrain from frustrated creatives. While understandable, this perspective often crumbles under the weight of genuine business risk.
When a client is spending hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of dollars, their career can be on the line. “Some problems are so nuanced and intricate or specific that that buyer cannot with confidence just look at what you did,” Pilger argues. A portfolio shows what you have done for other brands, on other problems. It doesn’t prove you can solve this brand’s this problem.
As a friend of Pilger’s from the network FX explains, there are legitimate reasons for pitching. “It's actually how we get our best work out of them [and] out of ourselves,” the buyer says. The competitive process, however painful for the losers, often produces the best result for the client by stress-testing ideas and partnerships.
We must distinguish between different types of services.
- Products: When you buy a $100,000 car, you can touch it, drive it, and read expert reviews. No imagination is required.
- Bespoke Services: When you hire an architect for a multi-million-dollar building or a surgeon for a critical operation, you are buying a custom solution.
Even here, there are differences. You don’t ask three surgeons to perform a sample surgery. You vet them based on their specialization and track record. The more specialized the expert, the less they need to pitch. As Do points out, “The more critical the solution is, the more likely you're going to shop for the most specialized person.” You feel privileged they even take your call.
The motion design industry finds itself in a peculiar position. It creates bespoke solutions, but unlike an architect whose building lasts for decades, its product often has a short shelf life and an insatiable demand for novelty. You can’t just offer what you did for Microsoft to Apple. This requires a constant reinvention that makes a portfolio an incomplete indicator of future success, which is a core challenge discussed in what creatives get wrong about originality and pricing.
The responsibility also falls on creatives. If your portfolio is a wide, undifferentiated array of styles, it is difficult for a client to know what they are getting. A lack of clear positioning invites the demand for a pitch. You’ve made it impossible for them to be certain, so they need you to prove it.
The ROI Lie and the Emotional Truth
When clients demand intense pitches, they often justify it with the language of return on investment (ROI). They are spending a fortune and need to ensure a result. But in the world of brand and creative advertising, ROI is often a phantom.
Can you really measure the direct financial return of a thirty-second Super Bowl ad? Or a network rebrand? As Do asks, referencing the HBO Max rebrand, “I'm still subscribing… at the end of the day they got Game of Thrones.” The content, not the logo, drives his subscription. He argues the packaging matters, but only to a point.
In most cases, the real return is not a number on a spreadsheet. It is what Pilger calls emotional contributions. The decisions are driven by factors like:
- Career Advancement: The Chief Marketing Officer wants an award-winning campaign on their reel to help them get their next job.
- Industry Fame: The CEO wants the company to be seen as a leader, attracting press and buzz.
- Talent Attraction: A TV network wants a “sexy” on-air brand to attract the best showrunners and content creators.
These are all forms of return on investment, but they are subjective, emotional, and deeply personal to the decision-maker. Pilger recalls pitching network rebrands by talking about ratings, the supposed hard metric of success. But he came to realize the truth. “They were making a very emotional decision called I just think the creative is cool.”
Understanding this hidden motivation is key. When you realize the client isn't just buying a commercial, but a piece of creative that will help them look good to their peers, get a promotion, or feel a sense of pride, the entire dynamic of the pitch changes. You are no longer just selling a solution to a business problem. You are selling a solution to a human one.
This is where relationship and trust become paramount. A client is more likely to believe the “cool creative” from a partner they trust than from a stranger, regardless of how objectively brilliant the stranger’s idea might be. This focus on the human element is a recurring theme in building a lasting business, a topic also explored in how to build brand equity.
Dethroning the Pitch: IP, Fees, and Radical Responsibility
Once you understand the game, you can start to change the rules. This begins with confronting the most controversial aspects of pitching: intellectual property and unpaid work.
There's a growing movement to demand pitch fees. The logic seems sound: if a client wants your ideas, they should pay for them. Pilger, however, offers a powerful counter-narrative from a friend who runs a major New York studio. This owner’s position is blunt: “Paid pitches are bullshit.”
Why? Because a paid pitch can be a trap.
In the United States, if a client pays you even a nominal fee, like $1,000, for your pitch creative, they may have a strong legal case that it constitutes work for hire. This means they own your ideas. They can thank you for your time, pay your small fee, and hand your entire concept to their preferred agency to execute. You've been paid, so you have little legal recourse.
“You should gladly pitch for free,” Pilger argues, channeling his friend’s perspective, “because guess what? You own your idea.”
If you pitch for free and the client steals your idea, you are a victim of intellectual property theft. While suing a major corporation is a daunting and expensive prospect most creatives avoid, you technically retain the high ground and ownership. Do clarifies his stance: “I actually think you are breaking the law… it's intellectual property theft.”
The solution isn't to always pitch for free, but to be strategic. If you are going to get paid for a pitch, it cannot be a token gesture. It must reflect the true value of the ideas being generated. Pilger once told a client the industry-standard pitch fee was $20,000, a number he invented on the spot. The client paid it. After presenting, Pilger’s studio was awarded the project, but they turned it down because they didn't like the client. They kept the $20,000 and walked away with their IP secured and their time compensated.
This is a position of power. It comes from taking what Pilger calls “radical responsibility” for your business. Instead of complaining about the system, you must ask hard questions:
- Why do I keep saying yes to doing free work?
- Am I being invited into this pitch as a real contender or as the dreaded third bid?
- What are the hidden, emotional motivations of the buyer?
- What signals can I look for to know if I'm winning or losing before the final presentation?
The answers to these questions are far more valuable than a bigger creative treatment. The process of uncovering them is how you begin to derail the traditional pitch and gain control. Learning to ask better questions is a skill explored in depth in The Art of Listening & Communication.
Winning the Game Beneath the Game
The path to winning high-quality clients is not about refusing to pitch. It is about transforming the pitch from a creative beauty pageant into a strategic diagnostic process.
The moment a Request for Proposal (RFP) lands in your inbox, the game has begun. Most creatives react by firing up their design software. The winner reacts by picking up the phone. Your goal is not to create the prettiest deck. Your goal is to figure out if you can win before you invest a single dollar in creative development.
Your job is to understand the politics, the relationships, and the true stakes for the buyer. Are you their Hail Mary, or are you their trusted advisor? If you discover you are just there to make up the numbers, you have three choices:
- Politely decline the opportunity.
- Submit a low-effort proposal to maintain the relationship without wasting resources.
- Use it as a paid practice run, negotiating a fair fee for the value you're providing.
Pitching only becomes a soul-crushing exercise when you are consistently surprised by the outcome. When you do the diagnostic work upfront, you are rarely surprised. You know when you are the favorite, and you invest accordingly. You know when you are the long shot, and you protect your time and money.
This is the ultimate mindset shift. Stop seeing the pitch as a finish line. See it as a tool for discovery.
The system is not going to change for you. Big clients will continue to mitigate their risk by asking for multiple proposals. But you can change how you engage with that system.
Stop complaining that pitching sucks. Master the game so you can start winning.
TRANSCRIPT
hey everybody what's up if you're in the creative space and you are pitching and responding to proposals and you're just tired of losing you might come to the conclusion that pitching sucks well maybe pitching doesn't suck as much when you're winning all the time and so you're going to want to tune in
to today's episode as I talk to Joel Piller he's going to teach you how to derail the pitch fair warning gets a little spicy and it's very nerdy we're going to get into the nuances of pitching and so with that let's get going my buddy Joel pilter who I've known for a long
time has an interesting take on the reason why people hate pitching so I'm super excited to chat with him today Joel for people who don't know who you are can you please tell them a little bit about you and introduce yourself in the process I ran a company called impossible pictures for 20
years and Chris you and I we were contemporaries after that experience in exiting that company I worked as a consultant for almost 10 years uh and then I I I realized I'm actually not a consultant Chris like you I'm a ER right like I don't think you consider yourself a consultant right I
don't know what I consider myself anymore maybe a content creator so I I sort of woke up to this reality of like you know I'm a Founder which means I work as an adviser or I call myself a thought partner to the world's leading Studios and a few months ago I launched a
new community called Forum where the best Studios and production companies the founders uh of those companies are coming together growing together learning together really my role role in the world is I come alongside business owners and help them run a really strong creative business and I think you work with a very specific
type of business owner right yeah it they're these are content creation companies so think of motion design animation Sound and Music experiential uh liveaction production companies they're they're all content creators uh in that space what's your take on this whole pitching thing well my my take on pitching and I'm going to ask
you a few questions because you've lived this same life right a lot of creatives have this thing they say called I hate pitching and my thesis is you don't hate pitching you hate losing and the reason I can say that without being a jerk is I've lived this life where when I go
back I mean we're talking 20 more years and I started jumping into competitive pitches okay so this is my company against another shop or even maybe I'm pitching against myself I learned that I thought pitching and winning projects and jobs and stuff was it was about one thing and it turned out to
be about something else through my career as I started to realize there are these these myths these beliefs that were holding me back and I embraced this new point of view about what it takes to win pitches I started winning and it made a huge impact in my business um and so I've
been gathering this knowledge over the years years and starting to share it more and more so that's really my thesis my thesis is I think creatives have pitching all wrong and if we can get it right we're going to win a lot more or lose a lot less and you know we can
unpack that obviously before we get into your philosophy on how to do this and what changed let's just talk about pitching first what is it let's define what pitching is let's get into this belief that pitching is not good for the creative industry so what is pitching SO pitching is when a client
invites you they say hey we have this project we would love for you to show us your ideas meaning pitch us present to us your ideas and presumably they will tell you if we like them we'll award you the job so that in its simple sense is what pitching is now there's a
creative Dimension to pitching meaning what's the stuff you're showing them what's your creative work your creative product but then there's this other thing that call the business side of pitching and that is how do you have this conversation and how do you the logistics of it and the planning and the preparation and
how you walk through that process and that's a whole different aspect of pitching that will become very important as we again as we unpack this for our audience who may not know Jon and I are very similar in age it's without revealing our individual ages where we came up around the same time
I think I started my company in 1995 kind kind of at the first generation of desktop motion design and there was a period in time in which people would just get on the phone with you and we would have a conversation about what it is that they want you would submit a bid
or I I guess it' be a bid and that that basically had numbers on it and that was kind of enough to get the job and then very quickly thereafter they wanted you to write a treatment and so this is words on a page and this is your your general approach now there's
a lot of maneuverability in a treatment because we're not designing anything per se and that quickly involved into well we can't interpret the the treatment we want to see your design and this is when we went into what I would say we cross over the valley of we're just talking as we all
do and now we're doing work for free and it's called doing spec work so we're speculating that our ideas are good enough that the client will give us a job and in those early days still even when you did spec work it was mostly just a single bid option so they were saying
we want to work with you but before we can work with you can you tell us a little bit about what you're thinking your vision so that we know what we're buying because there's lots of money exchanging hands here even in those days my early days we're talking anywhere on the low end
between $50,000 to $200,000 and I got numb to that number really quickly because I'm like 200 Grand whatever guys come on but that's almost a quarter of a million dollars that ex exchanging hands without any kind of confirmation as if you're the right partner or not and you would get work mostly because
they saw enough on your demo real which is an animated edited version of your work and it starts to devolve pretty quickly but we're talking about in a span of about five years so I went from getting on the phone call bagging at a 660 70,000 job just not even know what I
was doing just winging it yep to you know what we're doing full-blown storyboards and at some point even on occasion motion test sure which we are literally spending tens of thousands of dollars to produce in the hopes that we can get this work so it's not all good let's just put that out
there it's not all good all right so there is an evil to pitching which is to ask people to do work for free because you can't make a decision and I think there's something we need to talk about there before we get into the solution Joel what is your history with pitching my
history was this Evolution from what I'm going to call low ticket pitching to high ticket pitching and in low ticket like let's call it maybe 50,000 or $100,000 and Below it's like you described in the good old days hey can you show us a few ideas we see the idea we go oh
that's really cool let's get started when you go into high ticket pitching 100,000 up to you know a million or so dollars the game radically changes and what I realized was I was taking the practices principles that one jobs for me in low ticket pitching and as I went into high tick pitching
I just started losing and I would double down and do more creative a bigger treatment more storyboard frames you know the motion test and then then I would still lose and I'm thinking man I just invested 20,000 $30,000 into this job because it's 200 $300,000 if I win it it's worth it right
but you start to lose more and more and you're demoralized like as a creative I mean to the point of Tears sometimes that you're just so invested in winning this job and you've the money the the creativity you're you know you're putting your soul out there and as I started to get my
butt kicked frankly on some of these bigger pitches I just became determined I said you know there's got to be a better way and so I started really re-evaluating listening learning reading talking to other owners and things like this and this is where I started to develop sort of a new approach to
pitching but we should definitely talk about like the ethical or moral dimension of pitching because that's where a lot of people get hung up I don't know what your experience is like but when I first was coming up when we were bidding on jobs we worked on parts of the commercial and not
the whole commercial we would do the end tags or we would do what the industry refers to as super supers which are titles that are superimposed on top of picture we would add animated elements so we worked with directors liveaction directors I know there a stark difference between how liveaction directors work and
how motion designer or motion directors work most of the directors I've worked with let's say a couple dozen they wrote a treatment literally something that somebody wrote probably for them a ghost writer and they submitted that and they talked them through their idea the kind of camera angles that they might use a
filming technique and they would either get the job or they wouldn't and and when the motion design industry which is newer than the liveaction industry came up came up they modeled the way of working the way they worked with directors and they realized hey we don't understand what you're saying mostly because we
weren't equipped to describe things in a visual way with words it quickly devolved into we need to see everything and they realized that they can ask lots of designers and they would be more than happy to pitch so I want to draw the distinction because directors usually work with high ticket projects so
it's a condition that was imposed on and accepted but happily I think by many people in our industry and I want to talk about that for a little bit Joel what do you think about that well I'm going to say this that we don't necessarily have to play by those rules now what
you're describing is probably more true in advertising where you have an A brand that hires an agency that hires a production company that then courts directors and directors are asked to create treatments that ecosystem is wellestablished and well- defined it's tough because I would say to someone that if you don't like that
system I just wouldn't play in it frankly because the the the world that we're talking about is really the world of if you're a small Studio small production company maybe a one person maybe even a freelancer outside of that ecosystem because trying to change that ecosystem I think is going to break you
now if you're willing to play that game more power to you but I think it's a little bit like a I'm going to bet on the lottery or I'm GNA try and go write a hit record because you're entering a system where they're just expecting you to work for free you may get
a hit after a year or maybe 10 years or maybe never so personally I'm just not a big fan of that side of the ecosystem and I don't really participate in it frankly okay let me let me rephrase the question because I think you're answering a question I didn't ask okay but I'm
not getting the answer to the question I thought I asked which was in your recollection of coming up in the industry did you see what I saw which is live action directors wrote treatments and they won or Lost based on those things of you see that I did okay and I think as
far as I know because I'm not plugged into industry anymore if you're live action director it probably still is exactly like that it's a very established industry and that's kind of how you work is that right that's correct yes now my perspective on this is as a director of motion design and live
action or the compositing of the two I thought it was okay for me to write a treatment because it didn't take me that long to write a treatment I read the script I thought about some ideas I wrote it it didn't cost me tens of thousands of dollars to produce I was okay
with that it was when it went into let's do treatments and boards and animatics and that's it's costing me a lot of money to go after this job that I start having a problem with this especially if it's unpaid is it your position that you don't like the the business model of liveaction
directors writing treatments to get gigs there are people that are in that part corner of the industry and that's established and that's the way they work and they're okay with it and that's fine right that's their choice no one's forcing anybody to do anything right there's no threat of violence if you don't
submit your treatment so people that want to play that game that's fine I would get an RFP okay which is a request for proposal an RFQ attender is what the Brits call it which is some sort of an invitation to hey do all of this free work or we'll pay you some pittance
of a pitch fee and if we like your stuff we'll award you the job or we'll we won't and we'll award it to your competitor that's the game that I more discovered hey there's a much better way to navigate this than what most of us think is the way to navigate that you're
not a fan of the pitch process for liveaction directors writing treatments what is your bone of contention with that like how do you propose before we get into our specific industry what is your proposal of a fair alternative to them writing a treatment I don't it's funny I was actually at an event
here in New York about a month ago where um RGA hosted this really cool event and like how to bring in more diverse directors into advertising but I saw that same ecosystem on display and there were all these amazing upand cominging directors in the audience saying Hey how do I get break into
this world and it was exactly what you and I it was like well you know submit your treatments and do all this free work do spec work go create a spec commercial at your own expense you know my alternative to that is don't play in that world I think as a director there
are so many other opportunities out there for you I would just say go play in a different area of the industry so is your is your bone of contention Joel you know between you and me what is the problem with writing a treatment there's nothing really wrong with writing a treatment it it's
it's this that if you are say a live action director and you're creating treatments and you're doing free work and you're doing free work and you're doing free work at some point if you're complaining about I'm doing all this free work and not getting paid for it at some point you have to
take radical responsibility and say maybe I'm the problem like I'm the one who keeps saying yes to doing free work why am I doing that right but from the the buyer of creative work is it not egalitarian to say like the the best take on this wins we've seen your portfolios we've selected
three of the best directors to take on this assignment in order for us to decide and recommend you to our client without it blowing up in our face which is problematic from that point of view what is the alternative to that just to talk to people and look at their real and say
you're good to go it's a great question because I'll agree with you it's totally egalitarian and it's it's it's in a free market that's totally fine if you are a buyer and you're saying I need to look at three treatments three directors or whatever the number is what I've discovered is often on
its surface that seems like what's happening but in reality there's always a favorite and if you keep losing it's because you're the dreaded third bid and what they'll never tell you oh jump into this pitch by the way you're the dreaded third bid good luck so this is where often we have to
take responsibility and say if I keep losing maybe there's more to this system than just may the best man or best woman win and that's the issue I have is a lot of times you get invited into something and you're never going to win no matter how cool your idea is period you
are not going to win so why would you like Chris if you got invited to a pitch and somebody said hey do you want to jump into this pitch by the way you're not going to win are you going to jump in no but I'd ask him a question though if I have
no chance the win what do you need from me then and that way I don't give my hopes up and I don't put more resources against this than than what what is necessary but I'm just talking about and I've written probably 50 or so written treatments as pitches back when that was okay
I love doing that actually there was no issue for me because I sit down for a couple hours I'd write I think about the assignment I thought it was a pretty fair exchange of like you have something I'm going to do something and sometimes it win sometimes I wouldn't but what you're saying
is your your main issue is not everybody is showing you all their cards that you're invited to pitch on something which you have zero zero% chance of getting zero and if that's the case why would you want to play that game I can understand that so people are deceptively asking for multiple bids
because they're required from procurement cost Consultants advisors Etc they're legally Bound in their contract to have three bids but they already know who they want to work with which I find is sometimes the case but not always the case so I got that part right Joel yes you got it okay so in
a fair world there's not that much else that we can do because we cannot think of an alternative because when you're spending literally hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars I think you need to have some level of assurance that this is the right partner what are we to do now let's move
into the motion design industry now where now this is where I have a problem which is okay now you want me to do all this work you want me to do storyboards you want me to develop multiple ideas and this this is on the cheap side going to cost me $5,000 of Labor
uh we spent over $30,000 trying to get a new project before in the past and not get it I want everybody to listen to that and let that sink in we literally spent I guess you can buy a pretty nice Honda or entry level BM BMW for that kind of money and not
get the project it's a brutal World okay and so I started to hate this project so I started to hate this process Joel I said freaking pitching sucks this is stupid and I think I'm there with with you on your on your hypothesis which is it's not that I don't like pitching which
I I sort of don't but I hate even more the fact that I pitch and don't win so I hate losing because if you're going to do something the whole point of doing it is to win I've got you beat because I once invested $50,000 in a pitch that lost and guess what
it actually was never even really a project and once I discovered that I realized holy cow I just got snookered it's not even really a project and I just burned $50,000 I'm going to mention a few beliefs or myths i i i that maybe we're falling prey to so one is a myth
that I would call the best creative wins another myth is that pitching is unnecessary another myth is pitching for free or just pitching in general is immoral or unethical and then I'm going to also say the myth of well if we pitch aren't we cond doning an abusive system those are some of
the things that we as creatives bring to this process as the stakes get higher because as you said if I'm awarding you a half million dollar job like I need to know that I have found my perfect ideal partner vendor but we bring all this like yeah but this like creative pitching is
unnecessary and it's immoral and all these other things we bring all that and I think I think all of those are myths so first of all let me share a quotee can I share my screen you can share your screen but I'm going to say this is going to be a spicy conversation
I'm not sure I agree with you but let's go okay let's let's do it this is a direct quote from somebody at Apple who was telling a studio our creatives always have a favorite the other two are just Hail Marys if you're a studio or production company that jumps into pitches when you
hear something like that your head flies off cuz you're thinking what like how can that be that is such a r system and I would say yeah but you know it's a free market and apple gets to do what they want to do now I don't know about you Chris but when you
hear a quote like that how how do you feel if you're the studio jumping into a pitch I don't have the same reaction as your other people my head's not blowing off cuz I think that's probably what happens they found somebody they liked and they need to consider other options and there's a
possibility that you can win it and I just think that's just part of it sometimes you're the favorite and some sometimes you're not right okay it's good when you're the favorite you're a mature like you ran blind for so many years right you you you got to the place where you're like yeah
I get it I know that's part of the game I think the answer to this whole idea of like pitching is unnecessary right because a lot of times I'll hear a studio say well they can look at our work and see that we're qualified and we have the expertise and I'll just say
this I think that although I understand that because I was in that place of like look just look at our work you can tell were qualified to do your project once you move through your career and you start to get into high ticket pitching you realize that's a bit of a naive point
of view because some problems are so nuanced and intricate or specific that that buyer cannot with confidence just look at what you did because they're going to ask you well yeah I know you did all that great stuff for that brand and that brand and that brand but how do I know you
haven't failed just as many times but you didn't put that on your website I think there are legitimate reasons and if you talk to Major buyers like I have a friend at FX that does a lot of pitches solicits a lot of pitches and rfps and he would say he comes from the
the uh Studio side in his background and he says Joel there are really legitimate reasons that we ask Studios to pitch it's actually how we get our best work out of them out of ourselves and the process is I know it's painful for people that don't win but it does produce the best
results and I thought okay that's a good perspective to hear so we're going to try and take one of these quote unquote myths on at a time that a lot of people believe pitching is unnecessary because they should be able to look at your body of work and make a decision what we
do is we try to challenge his Thinking by saying in what industry where that's true where you can look at somebody's body of work and you can hire them can you think of some and then what is so special about motion design and directing that requires it whenever I think of an example
where pitching isn't necessary it's generally a low ticket industry right like if I walk into I don't know any store to buy something I just kind of look at the product and I say you know does that kind of look like what I need and and I walk out and I buy it
uh think about buying a car that might be a good example I'm spending $50 or $100,000 on a car does the does the dealer need to pitch me no know they say that's the car that's the price you want it or not but then you get into other industries that are service Industries
and where you're providing a bespoke solution every single time you start getting into things like if you're a surgeon maybe and if your child needs God forbid brain surgery you're going to go through a really rigorous process to vet and find the best brain surgeon now is that brain surgeon going to pitch
you probably not uh but they also probably have a line of people out their door and on their schedule that are paying top top dollar um so it's hard to I don't know it's hard to think of other Industries where they they subject themselves to pitching right like architecture would be one where
there's a lot of pitching a lot of free work being done a lot of rfps and tenders and all this kind of stuff so yeah I don't know if I'm answering the question yeah I can help you there first we have to distinguish when something is a product where you know exactly what
you're going to get so it requires no imagination so for example if you go to buy a $100,000 car you don't have to imagine what your car is going to be like because one already exists on the lot you can literally touch it and you can take it for a test drive which
I think people have already made up their mind before they get into that test drive anyways and you can read reviews I I depend on specialists um Auto enthusiasts or experts to give me a fair and balanced review of a car these days I don't even test drive it I just go on
the lot and said tell me that car and we just walk away and that's that because I'm relying on the expertise of others who understand the Nuance of this so we have to look at things that are made bespoke something that's custom made for the individual buyer and we also need to Define
what pitching is again as it relates to doctors doctors do not Pitch they don't perform the surgery for you they don't gave you a sample of the product before they operate on you so when what we're talking about when you say pitching meaning they'll talk to you they'll they'll try to convince you
that this is the right way to go but that's not pitching the we were talking about it's doing speculative work in the hopes that you get a client I have hired contractors who I've spent over a million dollars with I didn't ask him to build the building or a sample of the building
I looked at the references um I called around uh I I interviewed them but then I decided yes you're my contractor let's go I do have a bid and they do have to do work for the bid because there's a lot of calculations that go on with building a million dollar building I've
also hired multiple Architects I did not ask them to do any free work I looked at their body of work and based on how narrow the portfolio is if I can imagine them doing this for us then I would hire them but I do understand because we have Architects for clients they do
pitch a lot and they're designing things they're coming up with ideas and they're dealing with 10 to 100 million budgets and I guess that's become part of their business and their bane of existence so can we think of a high ticket thing where you get a sample before you start that's a bespoke
thing so we say let's say 100,000 and more 100K and up where it's a bespoke solution where they actually give you a sample I can think of one example is um I work with a stylist uh she's an Italian lady and she develops um she designs garments clothing for major brands in Europe
in that business if you are a fashion designer you go to a major brand so I don't know if it's Gucci or masimo DTI or something like that and you they say great show us your garment show us your shirt that you want us to carry and sell in our stores you have
to present a fully complete perfect prototype of here's the Garment which means you've invested several hundred, in several years because of all the relationships and the design and finding the materials and sourcing all these things and if they say oh we like it we'll carry it that's a pitch and yeah and and
talking to her she said oh my God the investment we make is so enormous and there's so much complexity even if they buy because you know where the deal goes from there that would be one example so I don't think that's a pitch Joel you don't no because what am I supposed to
buy if you're like I have a dress what am I supposed to buy and it's not really bespoke you're not making it for them it's you're making it for yourself and then you hope that they'll buy multiple versions of this dress you're not making it to a specific human are you no no
in this case the the buyer has said we are looking for you know a new dress for our fall season so we're looking for something very specific create it for us and show it to us and you have to make that investment and show it and if they like it they buy they're
sending out a request for a very specific need and if the right manufacturer of this thing comes up with this then they will buy it from you I understand there's a speculative part to that but there's also a beautiful part which is once you make one you can make 10,000 of them and
you can sell them again and again and uh otherwise you could just do it on your own making your own product and then bring it into the showroom and saying look here's my lineup for the next season uh would you like to buy any of these so it seems like it's a very
rare case here where someone who of this talent in this caliber would say well I'm I'm looking for your idea and then I'll design it for that because what most fashion designers do is they have a vision for the future and they make it they do a Runway which cost them a lot
of money and then buyers get excited about it and then they pre-order based on the show reception I think that's how the fashion industry works right I think so yeah okay so you're you're bringing up a very rare example here but some things to learn from this too um one is if you're
specialized enough and you have a Clear Vision that the clients can then assume what you're going to make for them then you don't really have to pitch I think photographers illustrators and artists work in this category they have a narrow Focus where it gets tricky for motion designer directors is you don't really
literally make the same thing over and over again because people would have a problem with that usually because we don't want what you did for my Microsoft because we're Apple we want something totally different so this gets into the nature of the Beast and we make it harder for ourselves when we have
such a wide array of work with no distinctive style or Vision then it's like what am I going to get okay so you you've highlighted a very special industry with one example of fashion but where else can you think where this might exist can I make one little observation that's important please that
you you brought up that I love is you said in the fashion example if that buyer does doesn't like your dress design and doesn't buy it you can go and sell it to another distributor right another company and that is a really important distinction because in pitching who owns the work who owns
the pitch the creative that's there and that's that's going to be important as we continue this conversation well I I know the answer to that question but yeah I I suspect you're going to have a different take on that so if we're looking around the landscape um you know anything that's high ticket
that's bespoke I can't think of too many where you have to pitch you make such a good point about the more specialized you are the more expert you are the more clear your positioning is like I think in the example of the surgeon the reason you don't shop and get pitches from surgeons
is you know exactly what that person does and you know before you even call the person this person is very likely my solution and you almost feel privileged when they take your call and they they they do the discovery with you you're like oh my God I'm so glad I'm talking to the
expert the more critical the solution is the more likely you're going to shop for the most specialized person so if you have a bad eye and we don't want to mess around with eyes we only have two of them and we need both you're not going to go for the bargain discount one
you're not going to go for the general physician you're going to go for the world-renowned eye doctor I think it's an Opthomologist right yeah exactly right it's like we're not we're not talking about um buying a soda pop we're talking about something that is very high ticket it's called the value of my
eyesight so now I'm looking for the specialist the expert getting back to this notion that pitching is therefore necessary I agree with you but I'm having a hard time finding other Industries where this is applicable and that's kind of a weird thing because then it's an anomaly within bespoke Services yeah necessary is
a tough word I'm going to say there's legitimate business reasons that pitching is appropriate is an appropriate process that a buyer might go through but the other I guess the other thing I might add to our the peculiarity of our industry is there is short time frames and there is an insatiable appetite
for novelty as well so you're not only creating something bespoke but you're not but you're creating something that has almost no shelf life so we're not creating a building that's going to be around around for 20 years we're creating something that's going to be on air or online for you know in a
few weeks and run for a few weeks and then it's gone poof and we need to get the maximum number of eyeballs or conversions or what have you off of this thing in that short period of time and also let's let's talk about this the buyer is looking for a return on their
investment so they may be pay if they award you the job for $100,000 they're looking for a million or 10 m million in sort of a return or a result so for them the stakes are also really high it's different when you're building a building because it's not like oh I'm I I
have to get a 10 or 100x return on this in the next month it's just a the economics are very different I have thought of an industry and I'm going to step out on a limb because I don't know that much about it do you have any tattoos Joel I do not are
you familiar with how tattoo artists work no but I'm very curious okay let's both speculate as two virgins of the tattoo industry I think a tattoo is a pretty critical thing that you don't really want to f up because it's very permanent and if you want to remove your tattoo that you don't
like anymore it's very painful from what I hear it's one of the most painful things is to get your skin burned off your body so tattoo artist let's say it's not high ticket per se but let's say it's a couple of grand for a piece you you look at their body of work
and you make a decision is the tattoo artist working for free do they do a drawing or do they what do they do beforehand what is your knowledge about how the tattoo industry works I'm trying to find one industry where it's common accepted and ethical and required well I think that's actually a
pretty good example because I'm going to again theorize speculate that if I was an A-list Hollywood actor and I was going to go and get a tattoo in a way I might solicit pitches so to speak or I might go to an artist and say hey what is the tattoo you're going to
put on me and I don't want just anything off the shelf it's got to be bespoke and it's got to be perfect because it's going to be on my body until the till I die so I'm going to be asking them for some sort of pitch some sort of give me an example
of what it's going to look like before we you know before you ink me this is where if I was a top tier tattoo artist said you can take a long walk off a short pier my friend I don't care I don't give an f who you are because it takes six months
to book a thing with me what would you like to do next what do you think because I imagine that's how it kind of works I'm guessing there's probably an army of tattoo artists out there right now that are saying yeah Chris I wish right so in the similar parallel here right there's
all kinds of artists animators designers whatever that might be listening us to us now and saying well sure when I get there Chris I'll definitely tell those people to take you know a long walk off a short bridge I'm not there yet I'm just trying to get my next project and they're saying
can you show me what it's going to look like so in a way I'm being asked to pitch yeah this is going to expose both of our lack of knowledge of how tattoo artists work yeah but I will tell you this I do know a few and I know friends and who work
with tattoo artists and there are some in our community that many of them that are good have a really long weight list some some can be over a year long and that's not an anomaly like when you've when you're on the come up and you've developed your name you have a distinctive style
people want that from you again this gets into specialization you have a long kind of body of work that shows you can do these things and there's a creative process most tattoos are not off the shelf I think unless you're getting like a flash tattoo where you pick it out of the book
because you're drunk with your friends but if you want a really nice piece that's thousands of dollars I think they're almost always custom so tattoo artists that are listening to this all four of you let us know in the comments if we got this right or wrong or or where where the truth
is cuz I'd love to learn I'm not here to prove that I'm right or Joel wrong or whatever but we just want to know okay put that out there now I want to get back to this thing about Roi on ads I can't remember what podcasts I heard this on it could be
one with the two Bobs or maybe I was my conversation with Alan dib when they talk about brand marketing versus uh direct uh what is it client direct marketing which is based on conversion so when we run an ad we're often challenged when people say well what's the ROI on that or what's
the ROI I on brand design they're like well tell me what the ROI on an ad is and you can't there's no such thing it's immeasurable CU what are you going to do like you're going to see a commercial and then three weeks later you're going to read an article or a magazine
and then you're going to go to the dealership and then talk to them and eventually three months later six months later you buy the car how could they even track that it's kind of impossible Joel when ad agencies are buying commercials are they really buying Roi not I would say an ad agency
not really cuz I agree I will agree with you a lot of these things are immeasurable there's Performance Marketing I think is the term you were looking for yes yes earlier yeah and in performance Mar marketing yes we can measure and there's definite rois but what I would say is in my opinion
regardless of whether the ROI is tangible or intangible um it's it's often called uh emotional contributions that for example a CMO or a CEO might engage a studio to present to create a brand new brand for their product that they're about to announce is the design of that brand can they tie an
Roi to it like if the brand is beautiful we're going to get millions of dollars if it's not very beautiful we're only going to get a few hundred thousand back no however they they have an emotional investment called if I do this this will forward my career this will make our company look
famous we'll get more press like there's all these intangible things that are a form of a return on investment even though there's not a number right it's a subjective return on investment as opposed to an objective one perhaps it's probably just more of a feeling than anything else mhm yeah when Apple launches
their conference and they kick it off and they Cee to the video that plays we don't even know I'll give you an example so I used to do big pitches for Network rebrands okay for like Discovery networks and and net GEOS and these types of people I would often go to them and
say hey we are really good at getting ratings CU in that industry ratings is where the money is and you know what's interesting Chris is I had a lot of people at TV networks that would say oo yeah I like that but they actually were awarding the decision based on how cool our
creative was because it was going to be on their reel and help them get their next job so they would pay lip service to this thing called ratings Roi whatever but the truth was they were making a very emotional decision called I just think the creative is cool well it's like even then
when we say like you do a network Rebrand do the ratings really move isn't it the program itself I mean if you think about it and they're making a decision based on nothing but gut because how do you know what you're going to roll out in 3 six months is actually going to
move the needle we put that more on marketing campaigns where you're promoting a specific show and that's usually a 360 campaign they're doing Billboards they're doing interactive ads they're doing print radio television everything in between and they're trying to get more eyeballs to it and there's a buzz factor to it and there's
lots of little things that they're doing press releases uh Digital Press kits those kinds of things so you're playing one part in a multi-part problem right well sure because I remember once a CEO of a network asked me Joel if we do this Rebrand how many more viewers like what's my Roi and
now I know the better answer the better answer is you are going to be able to attract more programmers and get more content because you are going to be in a sense the sexy you know channel on the Block because if I'm a Content developer and I I want my show to be
on Discovery not the network I've never heard of so these networks are always competing against each other for Content so there's other ways that they get a return on that investment that's not just their Core Business well let's talk about that a little bit further we're going down many rabbit holes here Joel
yeah there's a lot of rabbit holes yeah and I open the show with a nerdy disclaimer so don't worry okay thank you you may have a client and I may offend somebody but I think the HBO Max logo sucks dog okay I think it done by trollback and they do a lot of
really good work but I think it's ugly as hell and I think they tweaked it a little bit and it's still ugly it's just less ugly than it used to be but I'm still subscribing to HBO Max I don't really care how good their promos are I'm still subscribing because at the end
of the day they got Game of Thrones that and they have other shows that I really love and it's really at the end of the day the content and the packaging matters a little bit but it's not going to move me so Joo brand that comes out with a fresh Rebrand that I
don't know anything about and their content isn't good I don't really care Joel if I'm being honest with you and I'm I'm saying this from a designer's point of view yeah and I'm not gonna take issue with that with that opinion I think the big Miss of course is the word HBO being
taken out right and that whole debate that I think is in a way an indicative of a of an era gone by where 20 or 30 years ago the HBO name and brand and Logo was so important because it was a destination nowadays I just open up Roku and say I want to
watch Game of Thrones and I don't give a crap what network it comes from I don't even know I just want my show and so now the brand of the show becomes important and this is where I might be P be pitching on oh help me create the next brand or identity for
Game of Thrones season 9 right because that's the valuable place I need to invest I think in those instances it's because they're trying to announce something that there's a business strategy at play and so they're communicating to their customers and their shareholders that something different is happening it's not really the aesthetic part
that really concerns them as much as you might think yeah it's the news it's the it's the no the news something's going on there's a merger there's a combination of services there's a splitting off of businesses things like that myth number two says pitching is unnecessary so therefore the the truth must be
pitching is necessary but you're like that's not what I'm saying so how is pitching unnecessary then I'm just going to say that there's legitimate business reasons if you talk to Major buyers who solicit pitches they will make a really compelling case and I just I just encourage everyone to don't just believe something
because somebody said it called oh pitching is just unnecessary like if you talk to people whose careers and lives are on the line and they tell you here's why I need to have three different pitches from three different creative agencies you might develop a new level of empathy of like whoa those are
big Stakes there's a lot of risk if you pick the wrong partner right if the project doesn't go well like there's there's just a lot in play there so let's not be naive why is the best creative wins a myth it kind of gets back to the the Apple quote that we shared
earlier that very often I would say more often than not in high ticket pitching when a buyer is going out and saying hey you know Studio A B and C would you like you know please come into this pitch they already have a favorite It's usually the incumbent or it's the industry darling
it's the hotter than July shop whatever it is and then they say should we also invite blind and there's this conversation happens internally called I don't I don't know like yeah let's see what they got that is code for they're not going to win but I'm kind of curious I've even heard this
happen like just last week in in in my community there was somebody telling a story of they did went through the pitch they presented the beautiful creative and their creative they were not awarded the job but their creative was given to the preferred vendor and they said hey can you go make this
spot and that vendor said sure and they went and produced the commercial the of the other company's creative now I think Chris you and I as as as free market right Advocates we would say although that does suck that's their prerogative like there's no they're not breaking the law right but it's a
great example of the best creative was produced by somebody else because they were the favorite vendor that they trusted the other shop came up with a cool idea but you see the so this idea of let's not be naive and say well if I get invited into a pitch and I just have
the most awesome creative we're going to win the job sometimes that's true but often it's not so let's go in very wide-eyed and be looking for signals that tell us we're winning or we're losing so we can get into more of that I want to be clear in case you want to send
your angry messages that my position is clear on this because that's Joe pilter speaking I think you can tell the difference between our voices I actually think you are breaking the law when a company and agency solicits free work and you submit an idea that they don't pay you for they do not
own that idea and if you wanted to you could sue them and you might be able to win it's hard to show Providence of an idea but if you can prove that and it's going to be a legal battle for you so they take your idea and they give someone else to make
it they are doing something immoral unethical and illegal I believe it's intellectual property theft so this does raise an ISS and this does happen a lot more than we'd like it to happen I will share an example then I'm going to throw it back to you Joel okay we've had our idea taken
before and we've also been given other people's ideas to produce on one occasion one of our clients from a big Sports Network said hey um we have an idea we'd like you to do and my eyebrows went up and they said don't worry we've already paid them we're good we just want you
to do it now I didn't like sit there and like look at the invoices and all that stuff but I took them at their word and I said okay because I would not have done it I don't accept the creative work from other people to produce and I would never do this with
a new client I'd only do this with an existing client that I have a relationship with and they assured me that this was paid for and above board I also have another example one of our clients we've done a lot of music videos with Robert how said Chris uh I can't do this
job because I'm I'm overbooked and the band said can we just pay you for the idea and he's like I love it I love being paid for my ideas super and I don't have to make it awesome so those are my examples what are what are your what is your individual experience with
this I love the point you're making because this is one of my like big contentions in my whole derail the pitch philosophy if you will or method I'll give the example of there is a Studio owner is a good friend of mine runs a killer big studio in New York here in Manhattan
and he says paid pitches are and I'm like okay wow that's a bold position why do you say that and his contention is you should gladly pitch for free because guess what you own your idea as soon as somebody pays you a dollar per you know this is work for higher law here
in the United States that they have a great case that says we paid you a dollar we own your creative goodbye we get to do what ever we want and for the most part they're right so this is often the reason I get really upset when I hear people going on this bandwagon
calling no pitching for free we should always get a pitch fee and I say well be careful a pitch fee of a hundred bucks or a th000 bucks I think is an insult you if you're being paid for the true value of the ideas you're generating great okay I once told a client
who invited us into a pitch I said well of course you're paying an industry standard pitch fee right and he said I don't know what's an industry standard pitch fee just out of my backside I said $20,000 I made that number up and he said oh ah that's a that's a lot called
me back the next day and he said I got your money I go great guess what we developed the creative we pitched and they said we love your idea here's your $20,000 um we want to award you the big the whole project and I actually said no we pass because we didn't want
we didn't like the client we worked with them and we said you know what we're good we're done so just I think your point you're making is super valid that there are actually great reasons sometimes to pitch for free because at the end of the day I would hope that we each are
talented enough and smart enough that when we develop creative and if we own it and that client doesn't want to buy it I'll go sell it to somebody else okay Joel We may not agree with a whole lot so let's get into this oh my God guys if you're keeping score everyone just
make sure you know who's saying what I pitch for free I own my IP the likelihood that I can sell a bespoke solution a suit that fits one of one to someone else is almost nil I've never been able to do it I never even thought to do it it just doesn't work
generally speaking unless you do generic Solutions okay and if you come up with an idea that you really like the expression of it can be reused even if you sold that it doesn't matter because the individual expression no one can own but that specific look and feel you can say well we came
up with that the reason why creatives don't sue their potential clients is because a it's a long litigious process it's hard to prove most of us don't have the kind of money to be pouring into a lawsuit and see the real reason I think is your reputation in town is going to be
you're a contentious legal sue happy company no one's going to touch you with a 10 foot for now even if you're on the right side of the law it becomes really difficult so in the history of us doing motion designed for 20 plus years I've not heard of a single vendor who sued
their client for stealing the idea all we hear is they gripe about it because it's just not worth the mental legal headache if a client and we've been paid 20 $30,000 before for our ideas we're happy to do it and I'll tell you why it's because when it costs nothing for a client
to solicit creative work for free there's no limitations to how many people they'll ask but as soon as you start to put a budget together which is finite now because they can't solicit or they they probably most most likely will not solicit 10 companies and pay them 20 grand each because that's already
$200,000 hard to explain to the client proper Coca-Cola Pepsi whatever that we don't know who to pick we have no ability to foresee the future we have no procurement process we we just need you to spend $200,000 so we can find the right idea now if it was a $50 million production budget
that would make sense but most production budgets aren't that big when we sell or are paid for the pitch I feel pretty good I'll tell you why because it's going to cost me 105 Grand to do it so at least I'm at a wash and if they use it they use it and
they're going to use it anyways I'd rather take the money I'll give you an example there was a company I'll just mention it right now I don't care anymore you guys G4 Network you remember them oh yeah okay I work for some unscrupulous characters okay I would never work with anybody associated with
that pitch ever so here's what G4 did they said hey we'd love for you to pitch on us I'm like I'm into gaming man I'm going to work on this and we develop all these ideas and somewhere throughout the process like well there's the pitch fee I'm like fantastic what is it they're
like $ thousand dollar I said no thank you we've already spent 20 if you want to pay me for our thinking I'll be happy to accept it they're like Chris we can't do this I'm like well then we won't show up what do you want us to do and it was it became
already contentious so I'm already getting a bad feeling if you wanted to pay us for the pitch you need to mention that UPF front you can't bring it up Midway Midstream which is very unethical so there's a lot of unethical people attached this okay and then they said well okay fine just come
and Pitch we won't pay you I said yeah because these are my ideas and I I made sure that they knew these these are my ideas if you use them you'll be doing something very unethical and probably not legal they're like okay so we're already entering into the pitch the presentation part with
a little funkiness and I always feeling a little funky so I go in I present the ideas and I said to them we're going to leave these booklets behind but we're going to take these big presentation boards with us that's what we you didn't pay us anything and at the end of the
meeting they're like are you going leave the boards behind I like no I knew for sure we're not getting the gig because I was very adamant that this is not going to to work okay so for me they crossed all kinds of ethical boundaries if that Network never goes anywhere that's their problem
but the people there who make these decisions you know Karma the way it works I'm curious Joel with your specific example when they happily agreed to pay you your $20,000 and you made the decision that they're you don't want to work with them why would you continue working with them oh no I
did not continue working with them no no why did you accept the pitch fee and do the pitch oh because I was I thought it would be fun I said developing this creative could be cool and I also wanted to see what it would be like to work with this client so the
client thinks they're trying me on for size right they think that I'm I'm auditioning for them but of course what they later Learned was I was auditioning them and so we went through this process of developing this pitch they paid us to $20,000 we showed them our ideas they said this is great
we want to award you the project and I said you know I don't we're not a good fit for each other they were crazy makers okay you know what I mean by that and I just said this is this project is going to be a nightmare so just take our ideas and go
hire somebody else to go execute them so that's the story oh I see I see you knew when did you learn that they were a nightmare client yeah towards the end of the pitch process as we were going through the pitch process I increasingly realized these are crazy makers that are going to
make our lives miserable like think of a $20,000 project and then now multiply that times 10 or 20 in terms of budget and scope and all of the I just said no good luck thank you we're done my all here is when agencies procure treatments or ideas I think there should be a
finite number of people that they should talk to whether it's a favorite or not and I think there should be a fee attached that's just my take on it because that'll limit how many people they talk to and it should be a fee that would at minimum cover your real cost and uh
and better if it actually include a little for pain and suffering pitch fees that are $500 $2,000 are an insult like don't even talk to me about that that's I'm not going to take that if you want to pay for the real cost no problem and you're right I'll back you up on
this this one I do agree with that the best creative does not win people have their favorites for lots of different reasons and I'll just point to the one that I personally have experienced with there is such a thing as cronyism everybody there is such a thing as Kickbacks and this happens and
and we've been asked before we did not participate but there are characters in the industry where they want to hire their buds from college and they don't care care of the work is great because you know what there's a lot of folks who are in the Ad Agency who work really long hours
don't get paid enough money and in some ways could care less if this helps their big clients or not it doesn't matter they'd rather help their friends and sometimes it's it's illegal to do this I believe they send them money some money back and believe it or not Joel we've been asked by
one client in particular hey we want you to put extra money into the budget and just get that back from you I said sorry I'm not I'm not interested in doing that you guys guess what we lost that client afterwards and we had been working with them for years so there is a
connection there they found somebody that they would give them money and this is a big problem this is where corruption happens in Corporate America do you have experiences with this Joel I do and similarly uh I just decided early in my career that my peace of mind and sleeping at night was much
more valuable to me than any one project so when I bumped into I bumped into it maybe two or three times in my 20 years at impossible I just found a way to sort of Po lightly changed the subject and if we lost the job so be it if we found a way
to around it but I will say you are you know all of these little rabbit holes we've been going down I'll just say Let me let me suggest one overarching meta that we're really getting into and we've kind of touched on it it's this idea of asking questions early okay you probably heard
the phrase raise objections early and often so I'm just gonna say and you may have a few more things you want to unpack first but this is I think where we're ultimately heading is there's a way to go through the pitch process where rather than being afraid and being the order taker and
saying yes sir yes sir yes master I will follow your orders we're actually gently pushing back we're asking better questions we're being brave even though we're afraid that we might hear the thing we don't want to hear and this is very much this derailing the pitch is smoking out the client am I
the favorite or am I the third bid right or am I the 10th well did I ask did I ask how many people are pitching did I ask who I'm pitching against did I ask what the pitch budget is did I ask and most often creatives get into so much trouble because they
say well I don't want to ask those questions I'm afraid or I'm uncomfortable I agree with you and and I think we're going to share a lot of common strategies in terms of how to derail the pitch how you give yourself the best shot of winning or being able to filter out the
ones that you have zero chance of winning and I want to say this there's two parts to this number one I have had experience with all the things that you said where we are invited to pitch we felt funny about it like it was one of these diversity Equity inclusion movement things where
as a minority-owned business certified minority owned business we were invited to pitch on something and we had never done that before and after we pitched we got a negative review on the work that we did and we were told it was subpar they have to explain to the CEO who initiated this why
you didn't hire a minority based company instead they hired one of the good old boys and to not only spend money getting trying to get a project to not get it and to be accused that it was subar work was like three slaps in the face when we followed up with them and
we saw the finished product we're saying We Stand by work look at our work and look at that and you tell me objectively subjectively that that's better and I will apologize but it wasn't better it was worse so you think well who in the right mind would pick some work that's worse well
I just told you cronyism and also it was I think a silent protest towards management to say you cannot tell us who to work with we will work with whoever we want so rather than say Well we'd rather work with our buddies we were going to say that this work was no good
and that hurts our reputation that was the last and only time I ever went through the Dei door and used the minority owned certification because I thought for 10 plus years we've won work on our own Merit and we're going to continue living that way so I just want to put it out
there that's proof and evidence that this idea that the best creative wins it doesn't there are many factors and work is just one of them oh man I'm tempted to share another story like that but it's like it's big names it's a big brand it's a big TV network but let's just say
you are so right because the biggest biggest pitch this was a I think a $800 $900,000 broadcast campaign for an annual event at a major Network that we all know and love they awarded us this campaign and we were like this is the biggest one of our biggest win in history a new
CMO comes in and says you know what all of our current partners and agencies are fired because I want to work with my people so did the best creative win no we were unawarded unawarded can you imagine how painful that was it was so embarrassing for my client the producer at this TV
network to unawarded project that he never called us ever again so we lost the account because of this thing so trust me there are many examples of creative the best cre does not win I think of the the four myths that you brought up I believe that's the one that most resonates with
me and at first I was like are you sure I'm like yeah he's right about that one everybody okay I won you I won you over all right yeah you won me over you won one of four so far so the other thing I want to share is this line that I heard
from Neil degrass Tyson I think the line is something The Arc of the universe is long but it bends towards Justice and I think he was quoting Martin Luther King Jr The Arc of the universe is long but it bends towards Justice what do I mean by that well there are unscrupulous characters
in the industry that are asking for Kickbacks that they're using cronyism and doing all kinds of weird stuff or they're abusive to vendors and I have to say I know one of them horribly abusive to to vendor partners and then eventually was fired from the agency and then went out to the world
to see if anybody wanted to work with him surprise surprise no vendors no relationships no Partners quote unquote worked with him so he remained unemployed for a really long time and I've seen this happen multiple times the department head where some of this Kickback money exchanging hands was also found out was fired
and then went from Top tier agency to to third tier agency and it was trying to make his way back two different instances but the Arc of the universe it bends towards Justice it takes some time for it to play out so I'm just letting people know like if you get screwed over
just get over it learn something but just know that everybody gets what they're going to get yeah call it karma call it reaping what you seow and I'll also just I want to back you up with this Chris that in my experience I've been in this industry now a long time 30 something
years overall as you go up and work at bigger Brands bigger clients bigger Studios bigger production companies the People Are Awesome there really is this like good people are out there so if you feel like you're in a situation where you're having to deal with a really bad Apple like you described I
would just encourage you and say it's not like that across the industry and if you don't work with that person or if it's that person screws you over something like you're right life is long it's going to come back around you're going to be fine let's get into strategies because I think we've
teased our audience long enough now so you're saying okay am in an industry where pitching is necessary I want to learn how to win cuz losing sucks and I'll share a story and then I want you to stop start sharing with us some approaches okay so when I started first working with my
business coach Kier McLaren who I think you know he since passed away but I said man the industry has changed so much I hate pitching he goes well tell me about pitching and he said something similar to what you're saying which is you choose to be in this industry and those are the
rules that's how the crookie that's how the cookie crumbles my friend would you like to work in a different industry or do you want to learn how to win and with that had to flip my switch from being angry resentful thinking this is a horribly unethical abusive practice to learning how to win
and I've I've done a talk on this before how I learned to love the pitch and love to win okay the story that I'm G tee you up here what do we need to do to derail the pitch I will pick up your story about Kier right there and say that first we
got to take radical responsibility because no one is forced ing you to pitch okay so you enter into this game willingly of your own free will and agency so just know if you're going to get into the game just know the game you're actually playing and the game you're playing is not the
best creative wins the the creative has to be great undoubtedly my simple strategy or recommendation to everybody going into this process is know that there a way to go through the process that has nothing to do with the creative that as you go through the process you're going to be raising objections perhaps
gently resisting because you're looking for signals you're looking for affirmations that says yes Chris you're the favorite yes we'll go with you yes we will give you this concession yes we will play by your rules because I want you to win now the converse is the really hard thing for us to accept
and that is when I raise objections if they don't concede what does that say that is a red flag and what I'm going to submit to everybody here is as you go through the process and this is everything from asking questions like who how many agencies are we pitching against what's the pitch
fee when is when is the pitch presentation uh who are we pitching against right what about the rights what's and then the deeper questions of like what are the problems you're trying to actually solve why do you think we're the right fit I could go on and on and on I just want
to say at every turn I call that the the business side of the pitch or the account side of the pitch at every moment you're going to get a signal a response or no response and be honest that when you get a red flag take note because in my experience if you get
two or three red flags if you get four or five you're not going to win you are heading towards a loss now what does that mean it means you have Choice okay Insight gives you choices so this is really the big Grand theory that I've seen work wonders is if we go through
this process in a way and we're in a way smoking out the buyer and the client to say am I the favorite will you go with me will you follow my lead because if they say no or they don't say anything they're basically telling you Chris you're not going to win you're not
going to win you're not going to win then you get to decide what do I want to do about that that's the essence of what it means to derail the pitch I think one of the things that I read in Ron Baker's book implementing value pricing is that people who sell bespoke creative
service need to be more discriminating sellers we need to discriminate more not on Race religion or Creed or things like that but discriminating like who are we really good fit for the process is called qualifying the buyer so you realize that they're auditioning you and you're auditioning them so it's a mutual process
we're seeing it we a good fit for each other most sellers of creative Services give away all their power just out of the gate they're like whatever anybody you want to buy you have $2 have 200 or 2 million I'm going to take you so we created a process at blind to said
like if you don't meet all these criteria then we put well we we put you through one of three categories there's a definite no an absolute yes and then the May are the ones that are really tricky yep so what what are the ways in which you qualify a buyer of services Joel
what kind of questions you ask let's go through it well I love to ask the three Rs and the 3DS so three Rs are is this opportunity going to be a good fit for our real is it going to be a good relationship is there going to be a good reward then and
by real we mean portfolio is the is the creative work going to be awesome then as I'm going further through the process I'm asking things like the 3DS what's who's the decision maker is there a deadline what's the dollars in play okay meaning what's your budget and then I love this one I
call this one the shift it's just when I simply turn the tables and I say why do you think we're the might be the right fit for this project and now I'm putting the client in the job of having to sell me what I'll tell you is you're always looking for responsiveness because
when someone says I don't know or I don't know I Googled you or whatever that those are those are horrible signals those are red flags but when somebody when you say why do you think we might be the right fit for this and they say because my friend Jimmy who I trust told
me you are the best and I looked you up and I saw that you won a gold canned lion or whatever that's a really good answer like now I know why you called me there's probably another 10 or 12 conditions that as I go through a pitch process I'm asking the client and
looking for signals to qualify whether or not I'm the favorite or if I'm the dreaded third bid so it's it's it's those are some of the parameters hopefully that helps some that we use and I remember all of them we we literally made a flowchart for our executive producer to look at and
qualify every lead because okay guys let's just put it out there executive producers salespeople and they have happy ears they listen and they hear whatever it is they want to hear regardless of what is being said so when they're like you have a long shot so to win this project they he we
have a shot it's like yes what so we literally had to create this so that they could not Escape it and initially there was some resistance to this But ultimately we embraced it and we learned that if we remove all the non non- winable jobs we our our win rate goes up dramatically
so we ask a basic question right basic question is how many people are pitching on this how many pitches or bids will you ask for they don't know what our number is but if they tell us a number that's more than five we're out which is out because it's like you can't decide
we then we we're not the right person for you I love the happy ears uh point you made because I will also say if I tell a sales person oh make sure one of the qualifying questions is who are we pitching against nine times out of 10 the client will tell you oh
I can't tell you who you're pitching against right right and then the salesperson says what do I say then I say well it's simple you just tell them well that's that's unfortunate because we have a policy if we don't know who we're pitching against we can't participate so I look forward to hearing
back from you have a nice day wow now this gets back to Chris what we talked about earlier being the expert and being focused and being like you you're confident because at that point the buyer is in a really precarious situation because if you are the favorite and you just walked they're in
trouble they're like oh my God blind was my pick and they just said if I don't reveal this information that they're out and I have to go with the second or God forbid my third bid uh-uh so I'm going to come back to you and say okay you're pitching against the mill and
scop okay are you happy what did I just do I gave you a huge signal called a green light that says I think Chris is now thinking maybe I am the favorite because they just conceited so this is this is the process we go through is anytime we get a bad signal we
just take a note and we say huh the bad signals are adding up we're going to lose what do we want to do so you're looking for small concessions otherwise you're out and if you they don't give it to you it means there's a high probability that no matter how good the creative
that you create will not win it it's not quite that black and white I would say it's not necessarily that you're out it's that you you're just honest that we're not going to win what do we want to do because sometimes there's actually reasons to stay in a pitch that you know you're
going to lose because you might be laying Reas is that I'm like tell me more yeah so I have to give credit to uh to to PJ at at laundry who who told me some thoughts about this sometimes you're laying the groundwork to win the next pitch or to never pitch with this
again but win their business through a direct award because you might say you know what we know we're going to lose so therefore let's present the most incredible ridiculous bold idea that they will never ever go with and forget about showing them three or four directions we're just going to do one because
we don't want to overspend we want to leave an impression here called we know we're not going to win and you're going to award to somebody else but you're going to remember us more than anybody else and when the next opportunity comes up you're going to call me because you're going to say
oh my God that was the boldest craziest coolest thing we have this opportunity for you that we think is a fit and maybe I can get a direct award out of that so again it's just options it's gives you once you know you're going to win or you know you're going to lose
you can either double down and invest more or you can evaluate how do we want to play this out that's a very curious interesting take on this I have a lot of respect for PJ he's a great guy laundry TV everybody doesn't that go against the notion that the best creative wins yes
well no it doesn't because here's what happens right is when you present that crazy bold thing often the buyer says that's way too scandalous too bold too audacious like my CMO will never go for that but you remember wow if we if I could convince my CMO to go for that the next
time we might shatter all of our sales records or whatever the goal might be but you're trying to create you're ultimately trying to build a relationship with that buyer built on trust where they understand your expertise and you're creating this Mutual trust so the next time they call you you might say to
them I'm not playing your stupid pitch game this time if you want to work with me I showed you what I'm capable of do you want to dance let's go so there's a lot of there's just more to the story than just the one pitch that you're in right now the reason why
I think that goes against what you say is because here's what I take from the buyer perspective wow they went off the reservation on that one these guys just are wacky as hell the next time I have a really cool creative project I wonder if they're going to go off the reservation on
that too and I know PJ's work he does really amazing his whole studio does really amazing creative out there work and so what is the point of showing them yet one more out there thing because aren't you consistent with the kind of work that you do if you're positioned and expertly niched into
a market then you should be known as the the wild dreamers audacious creators that you are so creating a pitch that doesn't align with what they've asked for goes Way Beyond the scope and parameters it just signals to me you don't listen very well now do you and seeing one more piece of
creative work is not going to sway me that's at least my my response to what do you think about that Joel no I well I agree with I agree with the point that you're making I would just simply say that if you know you're going to lose a pitch you have options now
called hey if we know we're going to lose do we want to bail maybe we bail and we just say hey client you know what another client of ours just awarded us this big thing we're sorry we have to we have to bounce that's a that's a great story I love that story
right the other story might be you know what let's stay in this pitch but rather than doing these four five six ideas let's present one and whatever maybe it's bold maybe it's weird maybe it's totally showing our expertise that they did not ask us to demonstrate whatever it's just giving you choices it's
basically saying if you know you're not going to win you could do something with that knowledge so that you can be bolder to do what it is you're like this is what they really should do instead yes every once in a while that does work yes so even though you're put in they
cannot win all of a sudden they're like what the heck because what they have to do is they typically show their clients proper the agency shows their clients here are the three here's the one we recommend and if they show yours and yours is so weird and and solve the problem in the
way that they couldn't understand every once while it's a long shot but you can actually win it but I like this idea that information is power so if you know you have no shot you can make different decisions do what you're GNA do do you know the famous quote from Maya Angelou that
says when someone shows you who they are believe them the first time it's that thought that as creatives we're so afraid to ask things like who are we pitching against and what is the pitch fee and right and what is the deadline all that because we know that if they if they tell
us you're not going to win you're not going to win you're not going to win we don't want to hear it we're like no don't don't don't tell me that my encouragement is Don't Be Afraid like you said information is power so ask for it get it however you whatever this is like
your power and influence that you have in the process and then when people show you that you're not going to win just believe them it's okay it's okay much better than sticking your head in the sand and hoping and then only to be now overinvestment and now you've burnt like you and me
did I burned 50 and you burned $30,000 don't do that don't be me we've established how many people should pitch who are the people who are pitching those are critical what other criteria do you ask on the in the qualification process well I'm going to give you one of my favorite favorite moves
it's an ask but it's how you respond to the answer that is my favorite and here here it goes so this imagine if I'm the buyer I go hey Chris curious if you want to jump into this pitch we're really excited to have you and and let's say that you go okay you
because you're smart you would say we don't normally respond to you know rfps and pitches but tell me more right so you're starting to qualify me then there's going to be this point where you're going to ask me well when is the pitch presentation like when do you need to see my pitch
and I say June 15th that's the date when you're we need you to present to us my favorite move is no matter what you always always always say oh that's too bad that's not going to work for us even if it's even if your calendar is wide open you always say oh man
there's no way we can do that date based on our current production and the clients and all the work that we're doing if we could present the next day or the day after that would be amazing but if you can't I understand but we're going to have to pass now what you're going
to find out out real fast is are you going to get a green light or a red flag CU when they come back and they say you know I asked and we can't give you an extension that is code for you are not going to win no way no how so we don't
care if you're out but when they come back and they say we can give you an extension you can present the next day not only have they given you a huge green flag called we want you to stay in this pitch it's really important to us they've made a big concession if you
like to present last you just secured your place as the person who pitches last which might be your style might be your jam so that's an example of one of these you know there's about 12 or 15 of these that I like that I like to play with but that's a really simple
one that everyone can use is just by default wins your deadline to pitch and then say sorry I can't do it I need more time that's an odd game to play right okay that raising objections early and often my friend crazy I'm going to tell you right now that's crazy that's crazy crazy
crazy I told you it was spicy it is spicy because I'm the buyer now I'm like can these guys work with the deadline and are they going to ask me for an extension every important deadline in Milestone including the final delivery now I don't know about you but back in the day when
we made commercials there were hard delivery deadlines like it needed to be uh satellite to different Networks so that they can then run it on local TV stations and there were real consequences to missing these things media was bought and paid for and so they can't be effing around but I I like
this General mentality that you've developed which is I just want to test a couple of times to see how serious they are about wanting to work with me and if it's inconsequential for them to make these concessions then then we know okay we have a decent shot it's winnable we're asking tough questions
and not afraid of the answers and knowing that we're going to take those signals and say okay are we winning are we heading towards a win or are we heading towards a loss and what do we want to do um I know you know Ain sski who runs sski she just uses the
word responsiveness like I'm always wanting to check and see how responsive the the client is because when someone's not responsive like if they don't get back to you promptly or if they ghost you for a little while that's a horrible signal I what I would say to you about the spiciness of the
asking for the deadline extension is I would say this it's not that I'm flaky with deadlines it's that I am I am serious and that is when I say to you I can present to you the day after your deadline and if you can accommodate that I will hit that deadline without fail
we do not mess around and so if we go through the pitch and you award to us and then we agree on that deadline absolutely it's a lock cuz I don't know about you and blind I'm guessing at my studio we did not miss deadlines ever we would like fall on our swords
all the time because deadlines just were that was inconceivable that we would miss a deadline that's a good response to that I believe so well played you're dealing with serious people that have serious realities in their world called if the CMO can't be there on Thursday it's called he can't be there like
that's just we all live in a world of there are very big stakes and realities and Logistics and we're going to work together to figure them out and make a solution I have a similar time deadline variation to what it is that you're saying we've been in pitches before and you know you're
you're running sometimes three pitches simultaneously in a given week and resources are finite so there was one time when the executive producer checked in with me and said hey uh how we doing on the page I said we need more time I'm not happy with the work and the EP is like Chris
we cannot ask for more time and I said what would you rather us present work that I know is not good or to eat a little Humble Pie and go and ask for more time he thought about it he goes you're right I'll go ask for more time and I I want to
say this to creatives to empower you a little bit here if you're pitching for free you know what it is it is for free so you have way more leverage and power than you think and so it's better to say you know what uh I'm so sorry we're my creative director is it's
not feeling like we've solved the problem we're not comfortable now presenting on Tuesday can we get any more time from you and you know what every time we ask for more time they give it to you a smart producer on the other side builds into their schedule creative flakiness otherwise they're not a
good producer they don't tell you the drop debt is Tuesday and it's actually Tuesday it's like next week Tuesday and so they build this into their schedule and and those of us who know who are experienced understand that a smart producer already take has taken care of that contingency that maybe not everything
gets in on time and so they agree and we work on it and we finally have that moment where we can push through and find that idea and it's not hurt the outcome at all to ask for that so tell me if this is potentially an upgrade because I love your strategy there
okay is what if I turn it into instead of a problem to be avoided an opportunity to be seized my spin on that one would be hey client we need more time why well because we've been developing our ideas and we have these three approaches that we feel great about but we just
came up with a fourth idea that we are so in love with but we need more time in order to develop that and present it to you so it's really just it's a it's a different way of telling the story called oh my God something just happened it's a nonlinearity and if you
don't want me to to pursue that amazing fourth idea and show it to you that's fine we can still honor the deadline but what we know is no client can resist they're going to be like oh my God you have an even a more amazing idea and you say yes thank you for
the extra time well maybe you and I uh you're you're a little bit more flexible with the story than I am I like to just tell the truth Joel I like to sell you know because at the end of the day apparently yes at the end of the day you package information differently
the way I think of it is this and I it is a little bit of like a white lie halft truth kind of a thing but what I know is at every turn I am trying to produce the most incredible result for my client I have their back like crazy and sometimes I'm
actually trying to help them from screwing up right so is the way that I take this buyer through the pitch process even is a way of helping them if like if we're not a good fit I want to find out sooner than later so that I can not hate you at the end
of this process when you don't pick me and I've Wast all this time and money because I want to work with you in the future if we're a fit but if we are a fit man You' better not mess around with these other contenders because I'm your fit I'm your win so I'm
going to manipulate the situation best I can and maybe you know relay information in a way to take advantage of that because I know in the end if they pick me and we're the right fit everybody wins whether you want to say it my way or say it Joel's way just understand what
you're doing is you're framing the piece of information I think Joe puts a better frame around it I just like to speak very directly and frankly and I I will just tell my executive producer say something like this which is Chris has impossibly high standards and he doesn't think we've hit them yet
and we're asking you to give us another day or two so that he can work through the problem because he's not happy yet and we don't feel good about putting anything less than our best foot forward and so it's just there's different ways of frame it which I I think for me my
my truth meter just like I want to stay there but you're you're you're making sure you're communicating you have more power than you think and to be able to ask for a little bit more time in some instances is it's not going to be K it's not going to kill you because the
last thing you want to do is put work in front of the client that you know already is subpar now we're going to just skip ahead to let's say you've presented your ideas you've had the pitch presentation you got the extension you presented and now what do you hear oh thanks we'll let
you know and you're waiting and you're waiting one of my rules is never stop pitching and you know what that looks like you do the same thing again you say hey client you send a a note I know you guys haven't made up your mind yet you're not set to award until Friday
but me and my team just came up with the most amazing whatever we would love to share with you before you make the decision so I call this never stop pitching and I know of multiple Studios that have used this simple technique of don't don't dare sit on your laurels like you present
your work and then you just go okay can't wait to hear whether or not we won like you are tenacious and Relentless if you know first of all you're the favorite because by now you know second of all how bad do you want it like really how bad do you want it and
if you really want it you're going to just continually be like helping and solving and pitching because a lot of times the clients are like oh my God we can't award yet because Chris and his team just said we need to talk to them about this 11th Hour idea and it's a way
of keeping the conversation going being in the Forefront of their minds so that they just say you know what of course Chris you win let's go whether or not you have an 11th Hour idea you may not but you know what can you come up with one if your life depends upon it
sure you can you said you had about 12ish ways of derailing the pitch we've talked about a few I think we covered two major ideas and we spent a lot more time talking about it probably than what you had anticipated but I want to ask you for one more and then I want
to tell people my Chris's pragmatic way to qualify clients less less game playing here less packaging it's just really matter of fact and I think I wouldn't do our audience Justice if I just sat on my hands and kept them to myself so I will share that with you at the end of
the episode here so Joel give me one more if you can in ways that we can ask for a concession or qualify the buyer all right this is my which does this have a number number four in the concessions stage of a pitch another move would I as I call it don't give
them what they want so here's what that looks like often when you're in a pitch or an RFP you get a document that says oh here's the whole project here's the brief here's the deliverables we need in your pitch here's what we need to see right in your pitch presentation I love to
go back to that client and say hey we looked at this whole document and in these list of deliverables you need to see in our pitch we are going to give you you know 1 through eight but items 9 through 11 we're not going to give you those because those aren't really relevant
instead we're going to add 13 through 16 because this is actually going to show show you how the problem's going to be solved and and show you what we're capable of doing so what I've done there is I basically told them hey like a doctor I know I actually have diagnosed you I
understand the disease you have I know how to cure it it's okay that you asked for a pill but the reality is you need surgery and I'm going to show you what surgery looks like are you okay with that so this is a big concession because they're thinking well everybody else that's pitching
on this is just going to is following the rules but Chris over here just said no I'm not going to give you what you asked for in your RFP again bold what you find is is if a client comes back and says okay yeah we're cool with that that's their way of saying
I trust you you are the expert I will follow your lead again very you know bold but if if they come back and they say no that's the pitch those are the deliverables we need to see those things what they're basically telling you is we don't care if you bail we don't you
know we the third bid we don't you know just play by the rules Chris we don't we don't care real interesting I think it is spicy and and I like it and I have variations on this as well but I think you must be responding to broadcast where because where there's lots and
lots of deliverables usually commercial spots are they don't have an RP they just have a script and they ask you what are your ideas right yeah it's and it's also more it's also more campaign work right where often like if a brand is doing something it's it's a whole campaign it's whole in
launch it's sure there's a launch spot but there might be two or 300 deliverables that go with that but it's usually Network stuff um because in the agency days I don't ever remember getting an RFP ever and we've pitched on hundreds of commercials okay I I I'll give you the variation to this
we were working or we weren't working a large multi-billion dollar real estate developer reached out to us and said hey we heard good things about you we would we're going to send you an RFP and and of course it's like a multi-page document they're a nightmare to look through and they list everything
kitchen sink everything and one of it which we want your creative treatment on how to solve this problem for this property we're developing and we have a no pitch policy at this point so we're not even trying to deril the pitch we just don't pitch client direct work and we tell them we
don't pitch and here's the reason why and we gave them the reason and the reason is it is impossible to discern what is it that you want who your C customers are from a piece of paper like this and to operate on a document that that diagnoses the problem and prescribes the solution
we we just we can't do it if you want us to do it we're out and they made a concession this goes through your whole we're not going to give you what you ask for so they said well what will you do we will come in there and we'll present our capabilities and
they said okay great so they made the concession so everybody else is busy pitching Joel every single person is pitching so all I do not all I do what I do is I put together a capability stck which we have already it's templatized it's already to go I'm just trying to select the
three to four projects I want to include in this that I think are the most relevant to them now mind you I have no commercial real estate development experience I don't know that industry at all and there's nothing I can show but we go in and we talk about our work we are
presenting no new work is being created and we talk about our process very clear process and we show example and the stories and insights and we walked away and I felt pretty good and you can usually tell that you have them because they're literally leaning in they're not sitting arms crossed back they're
leaning in and nodding and I can tell like one of the younger guys there which I got to know later on he was smiling and trying to contain himself like you're speaking my language right now this is my love language and we did that and we got that project it was a $250,000
project that mushroomed into three more projects or four more projects that was W that W up more than a million dollars and we did that by a having no experience pitching nothing creative no spec work and just standing on our ground and saying we're confident we're expertly positioned in a niche space sort
of and we got the work I love that story so much dude because one of my steps is this like don't forget to ask why right just have the why conversation because you're the point you made I'm going to sort of reiterate what you said back there was they self diagnosed and clients
do this all the time they will show you a brief like here's the brief here's the things we need to see in your pitch and you know what it's really awkward for them to admit they don't know what the heck they're talking about right so you have to find a way for them
to save face but for you to tell them I think you've misdiagnosed or just you know jumped ahead in the process and what you did was you said let's back up a bit and let's have a coners ation called what is it we're even trying to do here and that can be extremely
powerful because at that point you're this is why I use the word derail like at that point you and blind were not pitching you were not in the pitch you were you derailed it and took it over there and everyone else is over there doing their dog and pony best they can and
there if you think about it they were essentially showing so showing their solve for a misdiagnosed problem for got to mention there two things that we did that was anti what they asked for they said we have $100,000 to do this and I said I could do something for 100 grand but not
everything on this list so that's why that job Grew From 100,000 to 250,000 and we didn't do any creative spec workor at all and the funny thing is when we went in for the meeting which I knew they had several of us slotted in like scheduled back to back with a little Gap
in between and we walked in there and I know they're like okay and they asked me so do you have some creative work you want to share with us I said no I'm sorry I thought it was clear that we weren't going to pitch on this and if that's what you're looking for
I don't want to waste your time and I'm getting ready to walk out and like no no no that's okay I'm just asking you were clear I said okay well let's get on with it and we did it and I have to say for some of you I've done this before I mean
I've done it multiple times when they said no no it's fine you're going to go do your thing and I start talking like no no no I thought you were really going to show us cre treatment I said no I'm sorry I started to close my laptop and then we said our Pleasant
goodbyes and we just left I don't want to waste your time I'm not going to share with you what it is that we do because you can't see the value I'm not a good fit so I'll tell a another Sim similar but another Twist on the example you just gave I'll say the
name Amazon because this was a project I won't say who the production company was but let's just say that I'm the production company I'm working with Amazon we've had this successful relationship for years doing projects after project after project and then one day edict come down comes down from on high we now
have procurement and we need to Triple bid every job and I say really but we have this amazing relationship they said sorry it's just how it goes so that big project that we had tentatively awarded to you we now have to put it out to RFP I'm thinking damn really so a few
weeks goes by and I go back to this client and I say hey how's it going I'm looking for your RFP and they said well it's taking us some time it's complex it's whatever and then I have the thought and I say you know if you need help writing that RFP I'm happy
to help you because we do this all the time right we deal with rfps and this the other and the person says really I said yeah well what are you what are you currently doing like what's the RFP that you currently have and they said I just went onto the internet and downloaded
a template okay so think about how ridiculous that is okay so this is what I want people to realize your clients they you think they know everything they don't they're not always the smartest people they're doing the best they can so I say I'm I'm happy to help you write this RFP send
it to me I start working on it start playing with it and he's like oh my God I'm so appreciate you helping us with this Joel and then about two weeks later he calls me back and he goes you know what forget all that we just need to get this project done can
you start so now think about what just happened I got them to break their own rules I became the trusted helper I'm the expert and now I'm doing the project so it's just a good example of there's more going on there's always more to be learned and asking good questions and being helpful
and being insightful and giving and all these things can can really produce some amazing results well people don't realize is there's not as much thought care and consideration that goes into rfps than you might dream a lot of is just boiler plate you can look at the language if you carefully read it
like wait a minute is this even appropriate to this job this is not what they copy and pasted a document that they used 10 times already and it's not specific to this so if it's not that specific why should you respond to this I'm not sure if it's myangelo who said this but
there's something that to the effect of there are no right answers to wrong questions so the question is wrong it doesn't matter how good your answer is that's good I like that okay so all right now I'm going to give you the more Chris do black and white nuts and bolts let's just
keep a real straight version of what Joel is doing but it's our version back when we used to do production work so in order for a client to schedule a call before we even look at the script or anything there has to be a lot of vetting that is done we have to
qualify our prospects our our our potential clients number one is is this a single bit situation we asked them and they're like who and they're shocked like what do you well if it's a single bid we'll treat this a little bit differently number two is how many people are pitching or bidding on
this and they don't know our number but our number is five more than five were out then we'll ask for who are they and depending on their level of transparency we get a feeling about whether they're going to be a good Prospect to to work with we ask them when is the pitch
due so we have a rule if it's a Friday request for a Monday deadline we're out it means they scramble to get one more person and we're just out we don't have a good experience and I'm not going to subject my team to working on the weekend your poor planning doesn't constitute an
emergency on my part and we asked them too about the kind of work they're looking for to see if it's creatively aligned with what we're doing what we want to do and so they have to go through this and then we ask them what is the budget and depending on how they answer
that question too is we're out if you're going to mess around with us we we really don't want to work with you and they will say something like we can't tell you the budget then we say well we have a minimum well what's your minimum it's this amount it doesn't matter what amount
you say they're like okay we have at least that when you say at least at least a little bit or at least by a lot love that so we're doing all that work because we don't get on and my executive producers told if you put me on a call and I ask these
questions later on and they don't line up you're not going to last very long here friend your job is to qualify the client and in doing so they unwittingly gain power and respect in a relationship that they desperately want power and respect from so instead of cow to to the clients the pro
the these agencies they're actually saying you know we have things we got to do you're one of many people that we can do it for and for us to work together we both have to feel like we're good fit otherwise we're not going to get on the phone and at first we had
this document put together and they broke the rule and I'm like that's your warning let's not do that again you just waste it all of our times one of the things that we came to the realization was when we are on a pitch new business call we do initial call to understand what's
going on and then we do the pitch so in order to get on that initial call we're putting together three or four of the most expensive people in the building on a call for an hour we can't do that when the budget's two grand we can't do that when the budget's 30 grand
Because by the time we produce this all that money will be gone so that's our very straightforward it's a flowchart it's not even like we're not even getting just scripts and nuances that Joel was talking about just very matter factly do you meet this criteria because we're going to put you into different
categories and then they politely bow out I'm sorry we're just too busy right now I'll show you my nerdy little document because you might say this is kind of fun I have this winning losing calculator so all I'm doing is as we go through the process these are the qualifying or the the
you know the signals I'm looking for and you can see there's like 20 different things that I'm asking and each time I'm saying is there a green light or a red flag and then what do we want to do about it and I add them up and sometimes I might say oh this
is a deal breaker so I'm out but just creating some sort of a simple tool that says what's our process how do we qualify and vet and confirm that we're winning or confirm that we're losing it sounds silly because it's just a dumb spreadsheet but it's amazing actually how powerful it becomes as
it reveals information that you can use to make better decisions Joel we've gone really deep we've gone down multiple rapbit holes and got spicy and fiery I appreciate you sharing this with us and if you made it all the way to the end of this podcast and you're more interested in learning how
to derail the pitch and what Joel is saying is is Raising eyebrows in your in your head and you're like wait a minute there's a better way for me to pitch because it's not so much that we hate pitching we don't love it but if you're going to pitch pitch to win everybody
pitch knowing that you have a shot of winning because it's just a percentage at that point Joel how do they find out more about you or your program you can Google my name uh you'll find me on mostly on LinkedIn or Instagram under just the handle Joel Piller um my website's Joel pg.com
which is real simple and you'll find everything there um for people that actually run a studio or a production company I would encourage them to check out Forum which is this private space where all these owners people like Chris and I in in my in our former lives are hanging out and growing
together so that's that's where I would Point people keeping with the theme of the show the conversation that we've just had how do you qualify people who are good for Forum it's simple I would say is it someone who is running a business that's interested in growth so it's not necessarily the lifestyle
business person it's more the person that's saying I know that my fullest potential is going to be realized by running a really Killer Business that's going to enable me to produce my best work and our team's best work so if they're marketers or coach is form a good place for them no it's
really for Founders so it's for Founders or leaders at Studios and production companies and agencies and those those types of companies so Joel who's the perfect fit for this if we're qualifying our broad audience so they don't waste their time and just muck up your whole system who you looking for I would
say the ideal member of forum is someone who is running a business whether that's a founder or a leader and these are content creation businesses businesses so think Studios production companies agencies music sound design experiential but these are companies that have clients and they're doing projects for clients thank you very much for
hanging out with us for humoring me and my many pesky questions I appreciate you being here dude I love it I love the spicy uh questions and the challenging and I love it when we disagree it makes the conversation way more interesting so thank you my name is Joel pger and you are
listening to the Future
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“You don't hate pitching, you hate losing.”
— Chris Do
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