Adventures In Advertising: How To Blow A New Business Pitch Before It Starts

Every advertising person has stories about how their agencies have blown new business pitches, often because someone said or did something stupid.  There is a classic story about an agency which pitched a car account but not one person showed up at the client’s office driving the client’s brand.  There is another story of an agency pitching a watch account, but the president showed up wearing a Rolex.  

(I would love to collect your stories if you can top the one that follows.  I know a lot of them are funny in the telling.)  

When new business prospects come to visit a prospective agency, they can always sense and feel whether there is good chemistry among the agency participants.  In many cases, even agency principals who do not like each other, are able to hide their antipathy towards each other.  

Not this one.

A mid-size shop that had a history of good work was pitching a food manufacturer which had allowed its agencies to do excellent creative.  The account is one that would have been perfect for this particular agency.  The agency had been trying to get this client in for a very long time. They finally got the client to come in to the agency.  The first meeting was a credentials presentation and was attended by seven people – two from the client, the agency president, the agency chairman (a co-creative director), the vice chairman (also a CD), the head of account management and the head of strategy.  The agency had rehearsed the pitch well.

The meeting was intentionally informal with everyone casually sitting around a conference room table; the entire meeting, including the seating, had been carefully orchestrated.  But, as things happen, early in the meeting, the client asked a particular question, the answer to which had not been rehearsed.  The president responded with a statement that had nothing to do with what had been rehearsed or what the agency wanted the client to know.  It was way off script.  To make matters worse, he talked and talked. The more he talked, the more the agency participants were shocked because this particular response actually killed the entire agency positioning and the remainder of the presentation.  No one knew what to say. And the president droned on and on. 

There was no recovering from this particular gaff.  In one way or another, everyone from the agency tried to get the president to shut up: one person subtly tugged on his pants to get him to stop, another made the cut sign, crossing his index finger across his throat. The president kept going.  Finally, the chairman had a solution.  The chairman was so flustered and angry that he picked up a pen and literally heaved it at the president, calling him an ass-hole, right in front of the client.  He, like everyone else in the room, knew that the pitch was dead. But it did shut up the president.

The two clients looked at each other and nodded.  With that, they got up and walked out.  The senior client made a great comment: “We appreciate an agency that can argue and disagree with each other.  But we cannot and will not work with people who obviously hate each other.”

End of story.  The entire meeting lasted only about ten minutes.

If Companies Want To Increase Profits And Lower Turnover, They May Have To Provide Counseling For Many Managers

There is a true saying, “People don’t leave companies, people leave managers.”  While a small percentage of junior executives do change jobs in order to obtain higher salaries, the majority of job hopping, at every level of seniority, occurs because people are managed badly.  The problem is that there are a lot of bad and abusive managers.

Often, bad managers are seen by their bosses as valuable employees and do a great job for their clients, but are horrible to their people.  If they are good at what they do and are poor managers they can and should be retrained in order to control and lower turnover under them.  Turnover is expensive.

I once worked for a notoriously abusive manager, who was a group head.  I knew it when I took the job. On my second day on the job he was dissatisfied with something I had done and came into my office and wagged his finger in my face while I was sitting at my desk.  I grabbed it.  I stood, while holding the offending finger, and told him that I would not tolerate having a finger shoved in my face.  For the next five years we got along well.  There was never another negative incident with me.

I watched him interact with others who worked both for and with him.  Most people accepted his antics, just mumbling under their breath.  Others, after a time, simply quit because they could not take his abuse and did not have the inclination to fight back.  Agency management knew about his behavior but did nothing about it.  It is a shame on two fronts.  First, because he caused talented and valuable people to leave and second, he was a brilliant advertising person who was heading towards self-destruction (in a few weeks I will post about how he self-destructed.).

Ad agency management puts up with bullies because they think they have to.  The excuse is that, “The client likes him [or her].”  That may be, but it is not an acceptable justification to accept bullying.  There are many advertising executives who are known to be “screamers”, some are abusers, and many of them are CEO’s and Chairmen.  However, titles are no excuse for bad behavior towards others.

There is no excuse for threatening, bullying, harassing, screaming or belittling employees.  There is a famous story of a well-known ad agency chairman who was in a client meeting with his staff.  During the meeting, for no apparent reason, he demanded that the most junior person in the room go out and shop for a bag of peanuts.  This young executive knew not to raise a question and went out to go shopping. When the person came back with the peanuts, the chairman opened the bag and threw several peanuts at each agency employee (not the client), and as he tossed out the nuts, he said to the client, “We have to feed the elephants and keep them happy.”  Everyone, including the clients, were appalled.  To their credit, two of his employees stood up and left the meeting; in fact they quit their jobs.  The HR Director tried to talk to the chairman, but was also fired.  To my mind, the entire agency should have left.  There is no justification for accepting this kind of behavior.

I can think of one agency which employed a notorious screamer.  He happened to be the general manager. I was constantly asked to fill the same jobs working for him, often multiple times within a year.  A new and very smart HR Director sent this manager for counseling.  It worked.  I always thought they put him on meds, but nevertheless, after a few weeks he became a model manager.  It was an inexpensive way to lower turnover and keep a valued employee.

All companies should offer counseling for valued employees who have management issues.

Sometimes I hear stories about more subtle abuse – managers who take other people’s ideas for their own (fairly common) or making all of their group employees stay late every night just in case they are needed for an emergency later in the evening; they are usually not needed.  Or managers who call, text or email employees during the weekend and demand that they leave their families and come to the office, often for no urgent reason.  This kind of behavior can and should be controlled through counseling or re-training. (Good for the French, who just passed a law making it illegal for firms with over 50 employees to email after hours.)

Ironically, even reluctant managers who receive counseling are usually thankful for it.

All companies should have management training for their employees; that training should include how to manage people. Since most of us learn from the people who managed us it is critical for companies to have exemplary managers.

Companies that ignore poor managers are costing themselves money because of avoidable turnover.