The Standards: How We Pitch
Joe on saying what we need to say, when we need to say it.
Show, don’t tell. Ask then listen. How do we pitch? Glad you asked.
We’ve already written a bit about why we can’t afford not to pitch for free, but in short: pitches are the only way to get a foot in the door for a small agency like Love and Money. A pitch is an opportunity to demonstrate our understanding of a client’s problem and how our processes and skillset can help remedy it. To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. That’s why it’s so important to ask a whole lot of questions the first time you say hello. But what do you do with that information? This is the Standard for How We Pitch.
At Love + Money we created The Standards as a manual on creating exceptional work that works, every time. It’s a set of processes that leverage a proven structure to blend inspiration with experience, freedom with discipline, and experimentation with certainty.
Every business is different and every challenge is nuanced, but investing in a bespoke pitch every time is overkill and resource intensive. Instead, like a lot of things we Maximise Room for Magic™ for, we leverage the Pareto principle to work within a structure that allows us to improvise and best resonate with our audience throughout our presentation.
Our pitch focuses on two questions:
Why do you need a brand?
How do you need to use it?
Rather than immediately spouting a barrage of proprietary jargon, we try and leave our prospect with one piece of new knowledge and ourselves with at least 12. Here, a pitch is our chance to demonstrate our proficiency in strategy, branding, brand operationalisation and website development. After all, a pitch should feel like the very start of creative work, not the end.
The Setup:
As with all things, preparation is everything. To ensure we’re getting the ball rolling as smoothly as possible, we begin by duplicating out the appropriate pitch template in Figma, and set up a cost estimate in StreamTime to walk our prospective client through.
Structuring our proposals within our latest presentation deck format ensures we’re saying what we need to say, exactly when we need to say it. This takes the guesswork out of the overarching beats we need to hit and allows us to develop our presentation to a higher fidelity faster. It also means we can better allocate additional time to best tailor our approach to the needs of the prospect. Broadly though, it’s broken down into four key areas, although by the time you read this, it’s likely we’ll have iterated on how exactly that plays out at a granular level:
Conversation: A recap of what we discussed on the ISWH conversation about brands, and what they want from theirs.
Challenge: The problem that we believe they’re facing, as well as an in-depth case-study on how we’ve solved a similar one in the past, with qualitative and qualitative evidence to support it.
Collaboration: An overview on the process we follow to create award-winning brands for our clients, and an early idea about what that looks like for our prospect.
Credentials: What it says on the tin.
While each pitch is designed to thoughtfully respond to the particulars of our prospect, all of them are grounded in the four key pillars of Love + Money’s approach to building brands: Couple Goals™, Brands are Memes™, ToolKit™ and Always Beta™. Instead of trotting out the latest, sexiest piece of work, we’ll pull relevant, previous engagements to demonstrate these pillars in action:
Couple Goals™ is all about aligning our work to the client’s goals for their business, not just for this project. As such, we’ll share key metrics and OKRs from previous engagements that demonstrate we’re making work that works.
Brands are Memes™ is the firm belief that for a brand to truly succeed, it needs to be more than a fresh coat of paint. It’s a big idea that other people choose to hear, and then share if we do our job properly. Here we have the chance to demonstrate how creating a foundational Brand Meme can provide clients with a guiding light to direct their efforts and allow for an evolution that feels on-brand, campaign after campaign, year in, year out.
While much has already been written about how ToolKit™ helps operationalise brands, this allows us to provide prospects with a live demonstration on just how effortless that is, and how tailor-made these can be.
As with everything we do, we’re firm believers that we’re Always Beta™; that our approach needs to be one rooted in constant dialogue, development, and iteration for the work we create. Unsurprisingly, we respond and adapt our pitch content and structure in response to the opportunity in front of us and the lessons gleaned from previous pitches.
Our Partnerships team is incredibly lucky to be able to throw the full weight of the studio at helping us prepare pitches. As we’ve written about at length, we know the value of pitching. It’s why we have four hours of time allocated each week to take an idea and spin it into a proof of concept. Being capable of leveraging an award-winning team and the processes that help them work best allows us to translate a sliver of an idea into a full argument at breakneck speeds. It allows us to speak fluently across word and image to best convince a prospective client of our strengths. In doing so, it means we can more accurately tease the strategic and executional capability of the studio to a prospective client. Plus, everyone likes to see their logo animated.
These are usually turned around within a matter of days, so there’s no labouring and agonising in pursuit of perfection here - that’s what the engagement proper is for, after all. Within the pitch, this will be delivered with a hearty caveat that “this isn’t the idea, but it’s an idea”. Sharing this early in the process helps demonstrate not just our chops, but our desire for Hypercollaboration™ as we open up the dialogue for them to discuss our approach.
The Pitch:
Unsurprisingly, how we deliver this pitch is just as important as what we deliver. Our preference for pitching is doing it live via Google Meet (or similar), allowing us to compliment our proposal with a presentation deck and maximise engagement and discussion, especially around the level of investment required.
As our presentation decks are live Figma prototypes, it means we can tweak the information and rhythm of the presentation on the fly, to best capture what we’re hearing and respond. IRL, that’d probably look like the other members of our team furiously scribbling notes and sliding them into an ever-changing stack of cue cards in our hands. Good thing we make great cyborgs.
Not wanting to keep things too formal, we’ll often break out of the Figma prototype and fly a client through any appropriate project files (especially if there’s a Creative Sprint happening), demonstrate the capability of ToolKit™, and potentially jump into our quoting system to build out a quote live on call.
All of this improvisation is only possible because we have the structure of the Standards for us to play on top of. Without an understanding of the overarching structure in place, nobody would know where the tangents we take are going, and importantly, where they need to land.
Follow Up, Follow Up, Follow Up:
Post-call you’ll receive an email from us with a link to the prototype you just saw, a recording of the pitch, and a formal quote based on what we shared. Basic hygiene really.
You’ll have some thinking to do and possibly a decision matrix to consult (hell, it’s your process). If we’ve done our jobs correctly, we’ve gained an understanding of what those deciding factors are going to be, and made you comfortable enough to share where we’re falling short so we can discuss bridging the gap.
In our minds, a strong relationship begins well before anything is signed, and the way we pitch is the ultimate expression of how we work. If we can demonstrate an accurate understanding of who we’re talking to, what their solution looks like and the potential of our partnership, then the meme of Love + Money will continue to survive in this eternally competitive environment.
Over the coming weeks we’ll be publishing a series of articles on what some of these Standards are and how they help us Make Room For Magic. If you like what you’ve heard and want to see us in action with your next project, you can book a time with Joe (South Hemisphere) via this link or Adnaan (North Hemisphere) via this link.