A quick guide to a sure-fire marketing pitch in Singapore

It's the time of the year when clients are scrambling to get their marketing objectives and plans for the year in order and selecting the agencies to devise and execute marketing campaigns.

It's also a very apprehensive time for account directors of large and small marketing, advertising and public relations agencies in Singapore having to take the lead in pitching for new business.

There is a lot of work involved in a pitch, even before you win an account: you would have to gather from the client a comprehensive enough brief, select suitable people to work on the pitch, put together visual mock-ups, a comprehensive proposal, a budgeting schedule, a timeline, and then present them all in simplified form in a PowerPoint presentation and usually in just a few days.

This is all while juggling existing commitments and other equally pressing deadlines. And if you do win the business, you will have to ensure that you have the manpower to sustain the campaign from beginning to the end.

Here are some tips on what to look out for when preparing for a pitch so that you can increase your chances of winning the account.

The relationship game

Seasoned account directors know that above professionalism and the ability to deliver, winning new business often depends on how comfortable you and the potential client are with each other.

This is why even before the client-agency courtship begins and the pitch takes place, seasoned account directors research on the potential client and decide on whether they would want to work with them in the long term.

Seasoned account directors also do favours for the client that are related to the nature of the work that they are pitching for in order to demonstrate the traits that would make them suitable for the job.

This is also why it's often more difficult to win new business from a potential client, when they have already established a comfortable working relationship with the incumbent agency and it's always better to be recommended by an advisor or trusted third party than to cold call.

Pick your team mates carefully

Often, you will need to convince more than one person on the client's jury that you're the right agency for the job.

To do that you need to put together the right team mix to appeal to the jury's various sensibilities and represent their interests, that's why it pays for you to find out who you are pitching to and if possible, their roles in the organisation and the extent of their influence on the overall decision.

The client's jury might also make decisions based purely on common sense or instinct; an all-Asian marketing team may not feel comfortable working with an all-Caucasian social media agency, just like an all-ladies marketing team of a makeup or sanitary napkins company would expect the account servicing team to be mostly if not all made up of ladies.

If the chief financial executive (CFO) or a representative from the financial department is on the jury, ensure you have a conservative budgeting expert to represent his or her interests on your team.

Check that you have the muscle not just for the pitch but for the entire the campaign

It is not just your ideas that will win the potential client over enough for them to award you the business. You will need to have a team that is suitably large, experienced and efficient enough to be able produce deliverables in a timely manner, from the beginning to the end of the campaign.

You can assess whether a job is too small or too big for your team based on the work the incumbent agency has produced and delivered in previous campaigns and decide whether your team can at least match or better still, surpass it, given the budget and other limitations. It pays to take into consideration what other important deadlines you already have lined up that may clash with the new campaign, before taking on the pitch.