Life's a Pitch (and OME wedding bells)

This is a personal take - I really don't like pitching for business and I don't think I (or we) as a business are actually very good at it. I think I can talk a little more about this - having won a few recently so its not sour grapes I don't think.

So why are we so bad (IMHO)?

1. We don't have a new biz team or even person - so we have to fit it into our day job - and as we all know pitching is super time consuming. And your current clients really ought to take priority.

2. The process doesn't showcase our strengths particularly well. We are all about saving money, improving results, effective media, lots and lots of sometimes small improvements, great service. Now they are powerful things but they don't always display well in a presentation to 4 strangers (indeed they can be quite dull things to talk about in the Beauty Contest). We rarely (if ever) present creative and that is sometimes the currency in this format.

3. As for the RFP documents - well they are horrible (sometimes necessary) and if we are going to do more - we have to employ someone to perform this function.

4. I really, really hate losing. In front of client, the team and any partners I smile and laugh along and make funny throwaway comments about - "their loss" or "better off without them" - and we carry on with OME client business. I then silently sulk for a week (fortnight....). the sulk definitely lasts longer than the ephemeral pleasure of the victory.

As I always mention (sorry)- we are blessed by this amazing referral network of clients (past and present) who go out of their way to recommend us in and the OME team are incredibly well regarded and connected people that pitches are far less frequent than a warmer intro into a client and opportunity to show them what we can do.
But we are the size now where we need to have multiple routes to the market so we'll still be in there swinging over the next year.

And finally the most important news item is that I had the pleasure of attending Chloe (OME head of media) wedding to the beautiful Amy last month - congrats to them both and looking forward to the London celebration next week!