The Handbook: The Operations Podcast

Freia Muehlenbein: How to pitch to WIN

• Harv Nagra • Season 1 • Episode 12

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Winning pitches is tough. 

Ghosting has become a common challenge, and even when you win, clients may be commissioning smaller pieces of the project rather than the full program.

But that’s only part of the struggle - crafting pitch decks takes a lot of time and energy. Surely there’s a better way than packing slides with your best creative ideas. 

In this episode we tackle these challenges and introduce a strategic approach to pitching. The focus shifts from pitching tactics to showcasing value and ROI.

Joining us is Freia Muehlenbein, an agency growth consultant and owner of Be Reyt Consultancy. With over 15 years of experience in agency operations, Freia is an expert in the sales and pitch process, known for closing large deals. 

Freia shares practical advice on:

  • Developing a strong qualification process to truly understand your client's needs
  • The concept of a war room and how it helps in crafting effective strategies
  • Why prioritizing financials and ROI is more important than focusing on tactics


Follow Freia on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/freiamuehlenbein/

Follow Harv on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harvnagra/


Sign up for Harv's webinar with Agency Hackers on productivity hacks taking place Thursday 19th September 2024: https://bit.ly/thehandbook24

Stay up to date with regular ops insights. Subscribe to The Handbook: The Operations Newsletter.

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Harv:

Hi all, welcome back to the show. Before we get started, I wanted to mention that I'll be taking part in a webinar with Agency Hackers on Thursday, 19th September 2024. It's all about productivity in the workspace. I'll be sharing some tips that I've seen work really well to maximize a team's ability to do focus work and get into flow. I would love to see you there, so please sign up for that and get it in your calendars. Again, that's on Thursday, 19th September, 2024. You can sign up for free at bit.ly/thehandbook24. Again, that's bit.ly/thehandbook24. We'll put a link to that in the episode notes as well, but do sign up. Now, let's get back to the show. It's been a tough couple of years in the agency space. When sharing notes at various agency meetups, it's clear that a lot of agencies are still facing a real struggle with winning business this year. Getting sign-off from clients is taking a lot longer than it used to, with deals lingering in the pipeline. Projects end up getting split into multiple small commissions, rather than kicking off the full program. And ghosting is sadly becoming more and more common. After you've spent countless hours delivering and potentially even winning a pitch, not having that turn into a project that you can invoice really stings. And on the topic of pitching, I've got a laundry list of challenges and frustrations that I've lived through. I was going to list them all in the intro, but I might as well save them to put to our guest and see if she can help heal some of my past traumas. But more seriously, when I was digital director many years ago, I found pitches exhausting. And then as ops director, I found myself worrying about how much unpaid time we were spending on pitches, eating up studio time, and trying to optimize our win rate. It's tricky, and you might feel like you have no choice but to go down the pitch route if you want to bring in the work. So when you are investing so much time and effort, how can you maximize your ROI? That's the topic we're tackling in today's episode. Giving Ops leaders some ideas that you can take back to your own agency to make sure that you're maximizing your chances of winning. Our guest today is Freia Muehlenbein. Freia is an agency growth consultant and owner of Be Reyt Consultancy. Freia has over 15 years of experience in agency operations. She previously worked at Search Laboratory, one of the UK's top digital marketing agencies. She grew her own digital content and online PR department from zero to a hundred people over seven years. For another four years, she worked with the board of directors to lead the agency strategy and change programs, working across all departments to deliver short and long term strategic goals. One of her key initiatives was to revamp their sales and pitch process completely, aiming to sign larger integrated contracts. Freia will share some of those learnings with us today. In the past few years, Freia's decided to take what she's learned and help other agencies via her consultancy, sharing expertise across the spectrum on sales, marketing, ops, and client services. She's done workshops and masterclasses with Agency Hackers, Agency Collective, BIMA, The WOW Company, and loads more. And on a personal note, Freia's been so gracious with me. When I was dipping my toe into consulting, but mostly in house still, we had the opportunity to exchange ideas over a call and she introduced me to loads of great people in the agency operations space, some of who have already been on the podcast. I'm really excited for you to hear this conversation, so let's get into it. Freia, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for being here. With Ops folks, I love hearing about their journey into operations to begin with. So I was wondering if we could start there and you could tell us a bit about your story.

Freia:

Yeah, sure. by accident, I think like most of us, I actually came to the UK from Germany in 2008. And after I've graduated here, got a role in a digital marketing agency doing something completely different. It used to be called off page SEO, so kind of content marketing, online PR. And that team grew so quickly that really after a couple of months working there as a graduate, I had to start managing a team, of international people, people from all over the world, people from within the UK. And that team grew from just being me to a hundred people after a couple of years. So I think ops was just something I had to step into, not necessarily by choice or by applying for that role, but because the team exploded and we had to introduce processes, ways of working, better ways of doing things. So I just fell into it. Like I think a lot of us do.

Harv:

It almost sounds like it was, quite an accelerated path. You, you just had to kind of dive straight into a lot of these challenges based on how the agency was growing.

Freia:

Yeah, exactly. And when you haven't been in a role like this before, you just kind of, you kind of make it up, but you learn from others, I was lucky I had good, you know, people around me, but there wasn't a community like there is today of ops people, you know, ops networks, ops Slack channels, conferences, it wasn't necessarily a thing, so I think now if you get into ops, you have many more choices and opportunities to learn from others. I think I was just really making it up, but really enjoying it. So I, I stayed in ops for a very, very long time before I moved into more kind of of a strategic role with the board of directors. But yeah, it's, yeah, just, Just by accident, really?

Harv:

And so what made you decide to branch out on your own and start Be Reyt? And where does the name come from?

Freia:

So Be Reyt, if you say it in Yorkshire, which is where I'm based, Be Ryte,

Harv:

Hmm.

Freia:

basically just an expression of it will be okay. I've always loved ever since I've moved here from, from Germany. So I gave my company that name, but the idea of branching out, came from kind of personal lifestyle changes and wanting to be self employed, also I've worked with consultants myself when I was agency side hmm. and the learning curve of working with a consultant for just a couple of days was so much bigger than just being in the agency for a whole year. So I just really loved the idea of doing something that's kind of equally rewarding for lots of different agencies. So at some point it took me a few years to be honest, to brave it. but, like I said earlier, you know, the ops community is great, but the agency consultant community in general is fantastic and really supportive. So it was a really easy thing to get into. and now I do what I used to do, but for lots of different people. So it's, it's great and varied.

Harv:

Amazing. so our, our topic today is all around the theme of pitching and winning business. You talk to a lot of agencies. What kinds of things are you hearing at the moment with regards to new business?

Freia:

Yeah, it's still very up and down, isn't it? It's, and it's been like this for a while. I feel like everyone's a bit sick of talking about it, the ups and downs, I think people want to know how do we get out of it. But I think until the market and the general kind of environment changes, it's hard to give you the magic bullet that just changes everything. I think, definitely what I'm seeing is ghosting is happening a lot more. We need to be much more flexible with clients. We can't force them into our normal kind of contractual agreements anymore. a lot more focus because it's harder to win business on existing business. So growing clients, better account management, and also looking kind of inwards into processes, operations, utilization, efficiencies, profitability, because new biz is, is essentially revenue and revenue comes from lots of different places. And I think we historically have put all of our eggs in one basket to say, we need new business.

Harv:

Yeah.

Freia:

And now, because that's harder, we're looking much more inward into what, what do we have already, which is clients and processes and efficiencies, and we can make revenue from just making that better. So that's you know, a lot of what I do is new business, but also the inwards looking on to, growing revenue from what we have. but what I also find is clients say to me, Oh, there's a lot of ghosting. It's harder to win new business. But at the same time, they haven't changed how they close the deals that are coming in. So there's fewer opportunities but they're still doing the same pitch. They're not changing how they're pitching from process to deck, to narrative, to step by step communication with the prospect. So it's a bit of a funny situation where the client thinks it's out of their control. But actually, it's not, because their process isn't great, their deck isn't great, so they're not doing themselves any favors by not reviewing how they pitch. They have to pitch differently now because of this unique scenario that we're in. So I think I would always say to my clients is yes, it's a tough market, but what are you doing to control the opportunities that are coming in and to maximize the deals that you're closing? And usually the answer is not much.

Harv:

Okay. I really love that, about the pitch process hasn't changed. That's a lot of what we're going to talk about today. But what you mentioned, given the tighter market, tighter revenues and stuff like that, having to optimize, and create efficiencies. I think, that is a fantastic opportunity as well. It's forcing us to look at the way we work and improve that. So it's setting the foundations for a stronger future for a lot of agencies that are investing the time to sort that out now as a result of the market. There's so much to talk about here, I've got a laundry list of gripes with the pitching process, that we're forced to endure in agencies so, this is very much going to be a therapeutic session for me, where I put to you a lot of things that I've seen in the past that I've really kind of grumbled or felt frustrated about, so let's get into that if that's okay with you. the first thing is, I would have loved if we didn't have to pitch. One frustration I've had in the past is that we, even when we had really good client relationships, they would ask us to pitch and, you know, the reward for being, good was that we were considered as one of the candidates to participate in the pitch rather than just saying, you guys are nailing it. Here's a new project. I'm just wondering, is there a way to get past this to the promised land where you can just bypass that pitch stage? What are, what are your thoughts on that?

Freia:

I wouldn't say this is very common. I think once you're in with the client relationship, unless it's a very vague contract where you go from project to project where of course, the client can then say once the contract is done, which is a project that is, you know, they might want to go around again and let you pitch, but I would say that's not very common. What I would say is if the client is asking you to pitch again and again, and it's trying to pull ideas out of you, then that probably means you're not being proactive enough in the first place. And I'm seeing this with lots and lots of agencies where, once the work is in, and we've, you know, confirmed either retainer or project. We then just deliver that work. So we're not kind of in the driving seat of, you know, on a quarterly basis saying we've jumped into the data. We've got some insights here. We have some new findings to say, what should you be doing next to achieve the goals that you've told us you want to achieve? And that's, you know, that to me is client service. That's strategic thinking, being a trusted advisor. If we just deliver the work, that's when clients become annoying because they will then knock on the door constantly and say, what are you doing? What are you doing? How much time have we got left? What's next? We have an idea for a new project or a new campaign. Can you pitch to us how you would do it? And it needs to be the other way around. It needs to be that we're constantly coming forward with new ideas. We should never be in that position of the client comes to us because we haven't given them anything new or exciting or strategic to think about or to sign off. We want to say, here's the new idea. Here's how much that will cost you. And here's the ROI that we'll create from it. No brainer. Can you do it? So we need to know what kind of budget they've got available for the year. And then we need to think, okay, we've got part of that budget right now, but we can probably free up a lot more than that if we constantly come up with new ideas. And it's hard because our time gets eaten up by day to day and campaign delivery and fighting fires, but to me, client services is strategic thinking, spotting new opportunities and living in the data to make good business cases to our clients. And then they kind of calm down, they trust us, they let us get on with it and they wait for us to position your work. And that's really the situation that you want to be in.

Harv:

It's a great sales and marketing tactic to just demonstrate value and give them something and then hopefully they start seeing you as a partner rather than just something very transactional, right? So that's, that's really good advice. I have in the past found myself kind of stressed about the impact of non-billable pitches on our capacity to do billable work. Like in 10 years, I saw one pitch that we were paid for. Is there when you do have to go through these pitches, a way to strike that balance, you know, having to bring in freelancers because your internal team is so backed up on pitch work or vice versa is, is just not good for the bottom line.

Freia:

It's tricky. There's no magic formula to say, here's how much you should spend on a pitch. Even if there was, I would assume that agencies would just overstep that anyway, because you want the new business.

Harv:

Mm hmm.

Freia:

What I'm seeing a lot is, agencies are worried about the internal time or the costs of the sale or the cost of pitching, but actually that's not always the problem. The problem is that the pitch takes far too long in the first place.

Harv:

Mm.

Freia:

I think rather than thinking, how can I recoup the time or the money? It, you know, costs me to deliver this pitch. I would look at the pitch process and who is involved, because 9 out of 10 times, I would probably say there's far too many people involved and we're taking far too long to create something that could probably be done in half the time. Some of the reasons are, there may not be a pitch process in the first place, so it's chaotic. We're pulling a ton of people into the room to create something we don't even know what the client needs in the first place. So there's no process. We haven't qualified properly. So we don't know what the client wants to see. We don't know what the main goal is, who the key decision makers are and what they want to see. But I think genuinely what I see is the deck that we come up with is really heavy on tactical detail on the how. Campaign mock ups, 50 slides on one creative idea, a hundred page technical audit. Clients really aren't interested in that unless you're in a very kind of tactical contract with them. I would spend more time in the beginning. So qualification, strategizing, data, insights, so really fully understanding what the client needs, what the context is that they're in, what can we achieve for them in the first place and then pull the wider teams and when you can brief them properly. Because if you can say to the delivery team, for example, we have looked into this client, we've done our qualification, we've done our scoping. Here's the strategy they need to achieve X, Y, and Z, you and SEO, go away and find me the top five priorities for SEO that will achieve exactly those goals that I've just told you. Rather than you here in SEO, go away and go blind and tell me everything that's wrong with SEO. And then you will spend days and days and days and days on a pitch that really only needs five top priorities on something that your strategic people have found out in the beginning, but because the pitch timelines are so short in a lot of cases, we panic and we just pull everyone in a room without having done this first bit really well, then everyone runs around and just picks out everything we could possibly do for the client. And that's when it becomes expensive. That's when pitch decks get really long. That's when we get pitch feedback afterwards. So I've collected pitch feedback from brands on behalf of my clients for about six years now. A lot of the common themes are around, it's not strategic. I don't know what I'm buying. I know that you can do this, this, this, and this, and what's wrong with my account. But what am I actually buying? And really what they want to buy is ROI. And if we can't talk about that, and if we can't prove that, we're going to lose the pitch. So the first bit of the pitch prep, where we're strategic and we're using data and we're creating forecasts and numbers. That should be the heavy bit. The delivery teams, which is what the ops people are worried about is eating into people's time. That should be light and that should be very condensed And answering the question of how can we deliver these strategic goals for the client?

Harv:

Mm hmm.

Freia:

To round that up, long story short is the problem isn't always with, the amount of internal time. I think the problem is the pitch is far too complex because we're panicking and we're not doing it properly.

Harv:

Hmm. I've seen it kind of go two ends of the spectrum. One is you just kind of throw everything at the wall. Every individual in the room comes up with loads of ideas, whether it's on digital or online advertising or whatever it is, and creating like, brand mock ups and stuff like that. And then that turns into this really heavy, long process that you throw countless hours at. Right. And on the other end of the spectrum, as a reaction to that in the past, like I I've tried and had discussions with my team about whether we should go with a more method, method, I'm not going to be able to say that word now, mythol... oh my gosh. Method. Can you, can you help me? I think I need some... caffeine

Freia:

Attempts to help Yup yup I know.

Harv:

That, that's the word. So hopefully whoever's listening can figure that out. Okay. Apologies for that. but that kind of approach, which is also interesting, right? You're, you're telling the client, the how, and we're experts, but what you're saying is that, that also does not necessarily work that well. Because then it's all about, the process rather than talking about the value they're going to get out of it.

Freia:

Yes. So talk about, you know, how, how much detail should you put into the creative, for example, or like a mock up or the detail of a, of a campaign, I think you need to find out from your prospect first and foremost, what do they want to see? So for example, if you're pitching to a marketing director, like a CMO, they probably don't want to see that because they want to know that you as an agency have the ability to make them money through the channels that they are now outsourcing to you. So this CMO doesn't need to know the ins and outs of what the first campaign might look like, but they might want to see how have you done this before? What kind of data have you used to tell me that you're going to make me money from this? And with a lot of creative agencies, we go straight into the creative. So we want to shine with our creativity, but we completely forget the financial element. And at the end of the day, that's why people come to us. They want to make money. So I think find out who is actually involved in the pitch and who you need to wow and get buy in from. Sometimes you have all the people in the room, you might have a CMO who wants the numbers, the money, the forecasts, and maybe a head of creative who needs to work with you day to day and needs to know that you can do what you're saying. And in other cases, you might just have the CMO and you don't need to go as deep into the creative. So I think, again, it comes back to that first bit of qualification, scoping, understanding stakeholders of how deep do we need to go into each of these elements to win it?

Harv:

Yeah, absolutely. And I think, it's a way to cut through as well, because many of the other agencies that you might be pitching against might be doing one of these two approaches as well, you know, talking about the process or, you know, thousands of ideas in creative. And really you might be the ones that stand out by talking about the value and the, the ROI that you're going to be generating. So it's a really great way to cut through. Hmm. Yeah.

Freia:

And sometimes, you can do the best qualification in the world. You can talk to the client times and times again, and they will tell you, don't worry about concrete ideas. We just want to know the mythology, methodology, no need to do all the mock ups. And then you lose out on the opportunity. You do the pitch feedback call afterwards. And they say, another agency did the creatives and we knew exactly what kind of campaign we were buying.

Harv:

Hmm.

Freia:

you just kind of sit back and think, well, what was the point of all of this? Because you've told me you didn't want to see that. So sometimes it is just what it is. It changes. People change, a stakeholder that you didn't know of. Came to the pitch, changed everything.

Harv:

Hmm.

Freia:

So it's tricky, but I think, generally if I had to say what I'm seeing the most is dial down on the creative and the how and do more of the, building trust, proving ROI, the financial conversation about this type of campaign we know will reach X amount of people in your audience. If you want to sell these products by Black Friday. We think that based on previous campaigns, we can make you X amount of revenue. And that's probably all they need to know. The ins and outs of the, of a similar campaign can be discussed, but they want to see that we've done this time and time again, so we're confident that we can sell this product for them through this channel.

Harv:

Hmm.

Freia:

So I think just as a rule of thumb, I would say, for most agencies, do less of the tactical, more of the strategic and the forecast elements.

Harv:

Good advice. You touched on kind of qualification there already, but does that go beyond just the interviews you're doing with the team that brings you the pitch to say, what are you looking for? What kinds of things would you say need to go into that process?

Freia:

So, in some agencies, probably the smaller ones, qualification and scoping kind of merges into one. So it's often either the founder or maybe if you've got a dedicated salesperson, it's the salesperson asking lots of questions about what the client wants. But I would always split it and larger agencies usually split the process into starting with qualification, which is basically just that first step of what are our chances of winning. So these are the

Harv:

Mm

Freia:

the, details about is the budget actually signed off? What is the budget? Who has signed it off? Is there some kind of proof that there is a budget, ballpark figures, dates? The urgency, the stakeholders that are involved, what is the problem that they need to fix? Why are they going out into the pitch process? Who else is pitching? Why did they pick us to pitch? What do they like about us that maybe other agencies in the process don't have? What KPIs do they want to achieve? And then, you know, some agencies use like a scoring mechanism based on all of that. What are our chances of winning from 1 to 10 or from 0 to 100%? Just to gauge, you know, how much effort should we be putting into this? Or, is there like a red flag that we need to discuss? To say, are we really going into this? Because they haven't got a budget. Biggest red flag obviously is they haven't got a budget. But that's really the first bit. And then you take it a bit further into, I guess, scoping where you might get your account director on a call. Or a head of SEO or head of creative to just dig deeper into, okay, this is what we know about you already, but we've got questions. and you just find out strategically what are they expecting from us? So we're not going into tactics or, you know, like the nitty gritty. We don't need this, right now, we just need the strategic conversation. And then I would say the, the most critical bit is what I call the war room, where you bring those people that have spoken to the prospect into a room, ideally face to face, but you can do this online and you, you really think, how do we win this? And this is where I would spend, you know, on some, I've worked with some clients and we spend a whole day in the war room, just like mapping out what we know. And how we can use what we know to win the pitch. So what's important to them? Who is the main decision maker? Is there something like, have they been burned by a previous agency? So therefore we need to give them trust and confidence that this isn't going to happen again. Is there like, seasonality? So urgency to start sooner, and therefore we can go in with a higher price to say we can get this done quickly for you. So you really think about the winning themes, the narrative, you map it out, and it becomes like a skeleton for your pitch deck. And if you do a war room, you will probably see that the pitch deck skeleton is very light on the tactical delivery and very heavy on the"how do we win this narrative And they work so well. They need to be lead by someone who is good at like narrative creation, could be a salesperson, could also be, you know, anyone who's, who's good at that. But, that's where I would spend more time. And usually we jump from scoping or qualification straight into pitch deck creation, and that's when it becomes expensive and chaotic and not very good for buy-in. So, if, if you can do all three steps, I would say...

Harv:

That's really, really good advice. And, hopefully again, helps you kind of stand out amongst the field. I have often wondered whether we should recoup the time invested on a pitch in the project estimate. So again, I guess it depends on your process, right? So if you've had this like really long winded process, then the more money and cost you've sunk into this, if you're following this, this approach that you're suggesting, the pitch process is tighter, but what is your thoughts? Like, do you, do you recommend hiding some of those pitch costs in, in the project, in the strategy fee or something like that? Or do you think it really depends on your process and if it's efficient, then you know, it's like a cost of business.

Freia:

Yeah, both. I think first step is make your pitch process more efficient. Just cut out all this unnecessary chaos, actually make a process, and decide who should be involved in the process. So, like I said, in the early stages, it's your strategic people, your client services people, your people in the data to formulate some kind of strategic plan. And then it's the delivery people, but I think, no matter what you do, you can either back the money through, you know, the project cost, or if you don't do that, the, the clients are still paying for it because your rates are calculated with an overhead cost of, you know, a cost of selling to prospects. So either way the cost of selling will be made back by people paying you a specific fee. I mean, I don't want to come up with a really strong yes or no. You can do either, but I think it's more important that you keep in check and you keep tracking how much time you actually spend on your pitch process. And if it becomes unreasonable, then it's probably because you are spending too much time. So you need to pull it back. What you can also do is based on your likelihood of winning or the amount of money this contract is worth, you can decide how much effort you might want to put into it so it doesn't become unreasonably high in terms of cost and time. So again, if it's a small contract and you're not, you know, that bothered, if you're getting it or not, you could go in with more of a, not a creds deck. I would never go in with a creds deck unless people ask for a creds deck, you could then just do like a light level, like a soft touch level of what you would usually do if it's your perfect client, the type of retainer that you want at a certain value, Yeah, then put your everything into it. So there's, there's multiple options, but really at the end of the day, whether you're charging the client in the project cost or they're paying for it through the rates, it's it's kind of, they're paying for it anyway.

Harv:

That makes sense. Let's talk a bit about pricing then, you know, if you do determine what your client's budget is, is that one way to start and just work backwards and see what you can deliver within that? There's also, you know, pricing based on value versus pricing based on the time you anticipate going into executing this campaign. So what are your thoughts around this?

Freia:

So, a couple of questions there and one, I guess, something that I'm seeing a lot, like common issues with pricing is that we're not pricing everything in, in the first place. So you're talking here about value based pricing, which is like the Holy Grail of pricing. But actually most of the people that I work with, they're nowhere near the situation where they can get away with value based pricing. They're not even pricing in project management, account management, SLAs, nevermind, value based pricing. So I think for some agencies, it's really going back to the basics of, are you charging the right rates in the first place? When have you reviewed your rates? last

Harv:

Yeah

Freia:

Is your rate calculation based on some actual science of, you know, you've got an account director here who's costing you X, Y, and Z internally. They can deliver 70 percent chargeable work. You know, they cost me X in salary and X in pensions and national insurance and whatever, Yeah and therefore, I should be charging them out at this rate. Whereas a junior designer can do 80 percent of chargeable time, but it's costing me much less in internal costs. So therefore I should charge them at this rate. So there's, there's a formula to creating rates that actually make sense and then you should be charging your people out at tiered rates rather than a blended rate and for a lot of agencies, the progression over time of the maturity model of pricing starts with blended rate, everyone gets churned out at the same rate. And also we're giving away a lot of stuff for free. Onboarding is for free. Get some client management for free. Account management is for free. Project management is for free. So you're already probably not very profitable with your pricing. The next step is then usually, okay, let's price everything in. Let's build some confidence to actually position that work, as a, as a crucial element of what we're doing. Then tiered pricing, so charging different people at different rates. And then value based pricing is like a, it's a whole different game of you as an agency are so unique and so good and specialized in something that there's no one else out there and you can really get away with whatever you want to do. Because people come to you, they queue up because you can do something that no one else can do. And then you can move from, you know, a pricing sheet that's based on these rates or time and material to something that just has like an output in terms of value attached to a pound value of dollar value or whatever, but you have to be in that position of, we are so special and so great at something that we can do that. And agencies that don't price everything in and they don't have optimized rates, they're not usually in that spot yet.

Harv:

Yeah.

Freia:

I think it's a step by step, getting pricing more and more optimized over time.

Harv:

I really like how you put that actually that there, there's even a maturity process with regards to pricing. And there's a journey there for, you know, all of us to make sure we're maximizing what we're charging and how we're building those proposals before we even get to that point. So really, really good advice. So once you, once you deliver this pitch and this cost proposal, is there anything that can be done after that point to improve our chances, besides just the wait and see?

Freia:

Yeah. I mean, it's, it's a tricky one to answer because I would say, yes, there is, but don't just rely on what happens after the pitch. It's like a constant from day one. What's your communication plan? I would say is a better way of looking at it. If you just looked at the steps after the pitch, I would say, you know, have some next steps booked in. When you're in the pitch room, make sure that you leave some time, leave some slack in the pitch presentation to ask for immediate feedback, Q&As, discuss missing. If you can follow up with anything, so for example, again, the scenario of you might have a CMO and someone else in the room, can you create a board pack, like a one page summary of the financial return for the CMO and something else for the head of creative? So think about next steps, follow ups, Q&As, think about urgency as well. So for example, if you know the client is trying to make a certain amount of revenue in a kind of seasonal time period, that's really important for them. You could say, okay, if we start onboarding next month, we really have to agree the contract in the next three weeks. You know, what, what can you give the client to say, we can do this for you, we can pull this off for you, but we would need an answer by X or within X timeframe. So that would be after the pitch, but look at it more holistically from day one of if you're worried about getting ghosted, which is essentially if you don't hear anything after the pitch, you're being ghosted is kind of what you're saying, I guess, is really good qualification, are they serious about it? Is the budget signed off? I need to meet all of these stakeholders. If they don't let me meet them, then that's a red flag. So like basically remove all the red flags really early, to remove the likelihood of being ghosted right at the end and then stay in contact constantly. Nothing in the pitch should be a surprise. The pitch should be a summary of what the client kind of already knows because you're constantly checking in with them. You know them all, you know what they want to see. then hopefully if they're serious about it, there is a budget, you know, all the stakeholders and you check in with them and you have next steps and urgency and whatever else you might not get ghosted. But I've seen scenarios just recently where you still get ghosted. Because in this climate, when one thing changes. They changed their whole mind and suddenly they can't afford an agency anymore. Or they think they can't. Or the most senior person goes to a different company, gets replaced. Revenue in the last quarter, like financial results came in, now we can't afford the budget that we think. It's so quick now that people change their mind, that you might still get ghosted, but you can do some things to avoid it.

Harv:

Absolutely. There's a couple of things that just kind of in summary for me, kind of stand out, it's to demonstrate that value all along throughout the process. And just by, I think simply by even doing that, you are, you're being unique because I think like even those one pagers that you're recommending to give to various members of the, of the client team, right away, you're making sure that they're remembering you and remembering what you can do for them. So, I think it's a great way to stand out.

Freia:

And I think as well, the the human touch, but with an angle of getting buy in. So as an example, I've supported a client with a seven figure pitch. One of their biggest ones. They're, they're software developers, so they don't have small projects. They're all kind of at least six figures or if they're big, seven figures. And we did a war room, and we did the whole process, like I described today on this podcast. And it turned out that, this company was a father and two sons and the father actually kicked off the software development project because he wanted to make sure that when he exits the business, and/or eventually passes away, unfortunately, they are all left in a much better, more automated state of doing things. But then the two brothers were kind of not fully in agreement. So more than, showing a technical proposal, it was about a family who wanted to secure the future of a business through some technology. So we had to go in with a really human, like understanding this dynamic of what does everyone need and want and how much money are they all comfortable spending in a family unit, which could be even more complicated than just three random directors. So I think really knowing pain points and what keeps them up at night. And, in a normal company, what kind of pressure is their boss putting them under? are you worried that if you don't, if we don't perform, you're going to get sacked? Like what, what's the scenario here? Like really getting under the skin of how can we make their life easier and resolve this problem with them? rather than just, you told us you need XYZ, here's how we would do it. Like really go in like an advisor and tell them what they really need, not what they've told you, to make this happen. And that's where the, that value comes in. Oh, oh, we thought we need XYZ. Actually, yeah, you're right. Probably we need something else. And here are a couple of options and price points, how we can make that work.

Harv:

Definitely. I think a lot of us go into that process looking at the RFP and looking to make sure that we respond to all those points. And so what I really like about what you've said is that you have to go beyond that and really get deeper, deeper than that, because, that's not necessarily the full story. That's only what they've managed to put down on paper. I'm just wondering if there's any other advice you'd give to an agency or an ops director that's looking to optimize the process, or you feel like we've covered most of the bases that, that come with your advice around pitching and new business.

Freia:

Yeah, I think we covered a lot around the process. So if I was an ops director working with sales, I think it is really the, what should the step by step pitch process be in an ideal world? Not like what's the strict process that we all have to stick to? What's best practice that means we can do this effectively and without chaos. Who should be involved so I can go away and plan resource and plan resource accordingly, and I can earmark these on a pitch for X percent each month and these people for maybe a bit less. then also collecting pitch feedback, I think super important. Actually ops directors are great for doing that because they don't usually get involved in the pitch. The client never sees them. and I would say, get someone, you know, objective to jump on a call, half an hour, and ask some really good questions about your understanding of what the brief was, how well we did in the pitch. Did we cover everything that they need? how did we compare to other agencies? I am surprised, but I think in 90 percent of my pitch feedback calls, clients tell me who else was in the pitch. So I know exactly who we're pitching against and the same agencies come up again and again for certain clients. So really kind of digging into how good was this. We don't want to hear in an email we were close second. It's so annoying. We can't do anything with that. We want to really understand where we can improve. And then over time you will see for the, for the, you know, different elements of a pitch where you need to improve. If you get great feedback every time for your ability to show how creative you are, then that's great, but if you get bad feedback on your ability to prove ROI, you need to fix that. so I think those bits, learning from feedback, monitoring how long it takes you to pitch, making the process leaner and more efficient, and I'm not just saying this because I'm offering it as a service, but, get someone in for, for this war room kind of pitch doctoring, scenario of we need a, an objective view that represents what the client needs to challenge us to say, I don't get what you're pitching to me here. I don't know what I'm buying. I'm bored. Or, you know, I don't understand how much money you're going to make me. Literally getting someone in like that, it could even just be someone from within your agency who can do that for you. to look at the pitch and say, this is not good enough.

Harv:

Sometimes I think when you're in house, and familiar with your own process, that can become hard to be so objective. So getting somebody that's not as involved, like the Ops Director is one approach. But you offer this service as well. So you go in with an agency and, and work through that process with them. Is that how that works?

Freia:

Yes. So agencies get me in, they get a brief, they've got an opportunity. And if it's an important opportunity and they want to close it, they will get me in and I will basically, help them through the end to end process of, do we have the info that we need from qualification and scoping to create a winning pitch, and if not, I'll help them ask the right questions and then do the war room. And I'll also be the person that they pitch to in the rehearsal. So I'll kind of pretend to be the client and say, like, check that what we know about the client is actually covered in the pitch deck. So it's really just like a, an objective partner to tell you what you're missing because we will fall into default and just do what we've always done when we're stressed, and when we're pressed for time. So, yeah, it's, that's why it's called kind of doctoring. You kind of take pieces out, add pieces in. yeah, it's great. It's actually a lot of fun. If you can do it as the ops director, do it because it's, it's really fun and it's like a, like an investigation into oh, can we really win? How do we win this? It's like a strategic kind of quest, you know, like, uh, can't describe it. It's, it's fun. It's really fun.

Harv:

Absolutely. You know, I, just really quickly, I didn't comment on this when you said it earlier, but it was about using the last few minutes of the pitch or 15 minutes to actually have a conversation with your clients as well. And I just wanted to come back to that point as well, because, you know, when you get into that habit of producing like 200 slides and you've got 50 minutes to get through them, you're, you're ending up leaving yourself no time. And then it's like, okay. You need to leave because the next pitch party is coming in. So I think it's really important to cut down on that and making sure that you have time for that conversation, answer those objections right away and talk about next steps. So Freia, if somebody wants your help with this kind of pitch process or anything else in agency operations, where can they find you and how can they reach out to you?

Freia:

Yes, LinkedIn, my website, I think there's only one, Freie Mühlenbein on LinkedIn. yeah, just reach out, even if you don't know what you need or if you just want to chat, like you don't need to buy anything at all. just, you know, a conversation about what might be wrong with your pitch process. It's not just new biz, like literally anything around growth. If you're stalling, if you've been at the same size for years and you don't know how to get out of it, if you're not making enough profit, like literally anything to do with growth, ops, sales, people, just, just contact me on LinkedIn on my website. And I'm always happy to chat.

Harv:

Last question. So we were talking about your journey into operations, you know, with more and more of us having conversations about operations and, more and more events, hopefully we're inspiring people that want to get into the space earlier in their careers, unlike a lot of us that kind of stumbled into it. If you had to give anybody advice that was thinking about moving into the space, how would you tell them to approach that?

Freia:

So I think if you're in a role where you're touching a little bit on ops, but you're not responsible for it. I think I would just really, I would talk to the person responsible for ops, if there is one, about wanting more insight and to, to learn. And usually in the agency world, that is possible. So even if you just say, I want to learn more about operational KPIs and how we measure efficiencies within teams, that in itself is a learning curve. And I think just voicing that you have an interest and to get exposure to the types of things that an ops director would look at on ops, or even a head of, a head of a department is, is an ops person essentially. asking for learning opportunities and then just join all these communities. I don't actually know if I'm allowed to mention any, but,

Harv:

No, please do, please do.

Freia:

Obviously, like Rob Sayles is out there with the Ops Cohort. That's like the, I guess, the newest edition on, on the market, where essentially you're in with lots of different ops people learning from each other, there's podcasts like this one, there's other communities, there's conferences, I mean, the last time we saw each other face to face was at the Agency Hackers Clockwork conference. So I think just really look out for where are these people, learn from them and maybe get a mentor, you know, just someone like not paid for, even just someone to speak to regularly to say. What do I need to know? Where do I learn it? What have you done in your career? And then look out for opportunities and just be proactive.

Harv:

Definitely, definitely. And there's a lot of, great conversations happening on LinkedIn as well. So connecting with some of these people and following the kinds of things they talk about and I think reaching out to them. I think a lot of us, a lot of people are just so, you know, so friendly and willing to share their knowledge as well. So I'm sure people be very happy to jump on a call and explain what they mean by whatever they've posted about. So really, really good advice.

Freia:

The ops, the agency ops community is lovely. You know this, I still sometimes, you know, when you have like a, a phase of overthinking or imposter. I still reach out to other consultants. We're technically competitors, but no one cares. Like I reach out and say, I've got this scenario. What would you do? Everyone always helps people reach out to me. We help each other. it's, it's really, really lovely and friendly. So just no fear of reaching out.

Harv:

That is a lovely note to stop on. So thank you very much, Freia. Thank you so much for joining in this conversation. There's so much more that you have to say on loads of other topics. So I'm sure at some point, we, we would love to have you back and we'll dive into a different topic.

Freia:

I'd love to come back. Thank you so much.

Harv:

Hi all. I hope you enjoyed that conversation with Freia. I've also discovered that I can't say methodology or methodological without two espresso shots. There I go again. Pitches are loads of work. So I love the advice Freia shared about not going down the route of sharing dozens and dozens of tactics, nor focusing solely on creds and methodology, but rather focusing on addressing the client's problems and demonstrating the ROI you can help them achieve. A few of my key takeaways were getting deep into the qualification process to maximize your chances of winning. Creating a war room for the pitch where you discuss how you're going to win. And demonstrating value and in the process be the unique and standout agency where others might just be showing tactics. And finally a reminder that there's a newsletter that goes out every other week to correspond with the podcast episode where I talk about some of my personal experiences with the topic as well as key takeaways from the guest interviews so that you have something to reference from the conversations that we have. Please sign up for it at scoro.com/podcast. That's S C O R O dot com slash podcast. Scroll down on that page to find the newsletter signup form. And question. Have you shared this podcast with others in the agency and operation space? Let's grow the audience. Please share this episode with a friend or colleague that would enjoy hearing the conversation. I really appreciate your support. If you have any feedback, please reach out to me. linkedin.com/in/harvnagra. That's linkedin.com/in/harvnagra. And do leave a comment when I post this episode and its clips on LinkedIn and share your thoughts about what's worked well for you. That's it for now. I'll speak to you in the next episode.

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Harv Nagra

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