You know the scenario — a fantastic brief arrives in your inbox. A great client with a challenging problem is interested in working with your company to fulfill their business objectives. The only snag — they want you to work up some ideas and present them at a pitch. Oh, and while they’re at it, they’re inviting 5-7 of your closest competitors to do the same. But don’t worry you’re in with a good chance, they like the “cut of your jib”. The budget? Well, that’s with the board, who need to see your ideas in order to release any money, but it’s [insert figure to keep you interested here].
Many hours of hard work later you arrive at the pitch and stun the audience with your brilliance. Fast forward a couple of days and all the pitches are over. The client calls to inform you that the ideas weren’t quite there, but they were very, very close. Can you make xyz changes and resubmit the work? A few more tweaks, you tell yourself, and the work is yours. So you make the changes and resubmit the work.
Time goes by and you hear nothing. You call the client, they’re unavailable. You call again, still nothing. Finally, you get ahold of the client who informs you that you weren’t quite right/the project got pulled/is on hold/got a much lower budget/etc. Gutted, you count the cost to your business. A few months later, the client does launch their site and, hey, isn’t that funny, it looks an awful lot like the one you proposed …
The same old story
What I’ve described above isn’t new. We’ve all been there and it’s been part of winning work since the dawn of “work”. But there is growing concern within the digital industry about the spiraling cost of pitching to clients for new work. After all, it wasn’t always this way.
A few years ago we had the dot-com boom. Clients commissioned work from a new growing digital industry with little regard for their return on investment. Over the years the industry has matured and our clients approach to commissioning work has changed — dramatically.
A now over-serviced digital marketplace has led to increased client choice. And as digital budgets rise, clients are putting increasingly high demands on the agencies pitching for their accounts. Add to this the reluctance of clients to support agencies by paying for pitch work and it’s easy to see why agencies are feeling the pinch.
Recovery fuels client choice
After the initial fallout of the dot-com crash it’s clear that the industry has recovered and in many ways is booming again. Countless new agencies are opening their doors each week, yet the potential client base appears to be growing at a much slower rate.
Due to the ratio of agencies to available work, pitching agencies often find themselves included in large pitch pools with loose, fluid briefs based on embryonic marketing ideas rather than solid campaign objectives. The fictional scenario above isn’t really that fictional. It’s not at all unusual for individual agencies to be pitching against 5-7 of their contemporaries in the pursuit of a piece of work. Not the best odds.
It could be argued that the growing digital industry itself is to blame for this scenario. These loose briefs are potentially a product of the over-serviced industry, where agencies approach work without placing reasonable demands on their clients regarding upfront project information.
When the competition is so fierce it’s almost impossible to push back on the client and, as a result, simple requirements such as scope and budget are swept aside just to get a foot in the door. If we are prepared to receive poor briefs from our clients it stands to reason that the quality of their content will decline as time-poor clients spend less time preparing them.
Increased competition increases level of effort
This intense competition among agencies means that the level of effort required to win work has increased exponentially. Gone are the days where the pitch content consisted of a presentation giving a flavor of the pitching agency, their culture, their values and a demonstration that they understand the brief and the reason for the project’s being.
Clients now expect near complete solutions backed up with full strategic thinking and planning — none of which they are prepared to pay for. For the unsuccessful agencies this represents a huge loss in time, money and effort. Not to mention the opportunity cost of the work that never quite made it.
Even for the successful agency, the work given away during the pitch represents a large loss — especially when we consider the relatively low margins seen in the industry. We give away so much for free.
It’s clear that in the long run something needs to change. It’s difficult to think of another industry where this amount of unquestioned client demand and wastage is acceptable. Especially where so much work is done up front and the final selection by the client is often based on individual preference or luck.
Potential solutions
So, if the current situation isn’t working, where can clients and agencies look for advice?
Within the industry, for both clients and agencies, there is a general lack of considered guidelines with regards how to approach the activity of pitching. Every agency approaches a pitch in it’s own way and every client offers work out differently, making their choices against different metrics and fueling confusion and wastage. Unlike other industries, to my knowledge, our industry does not have any accredited bodies who can work to resolve this situation.
I don’t believe that clients are purely to blame for the current situation. As an industry I believe we need to work towards developing a set of common guidelines — embraced at least in part by agencies — to help potential clients get the most out of the early stages of the relationship building process, setting expectations and building long term partnerships with their agency partners.
The problem with putting common guidelines in place is bringing agencies together in the first place. And then ensuring that the guidelines are followed. There will always be market forces at work fighting against this as agencies put their bottom line first over common working practices. Competition between agencies will always be difficult to overcome, but as a maturing industry I believe that this is the logical next step that we have to take.
Standard guidelines exist in other industries here in the UK such as the kite mark, the PRINCE2 standard in project management and the international ISO standards for business processes. So it stands to reason that they could be developed to stabilize the pitch process for interactive work.
“Let’s make them pay!”
Many agency owners have suggested that pitches should be paid for. I don’t believe that paid pitching is the answer, but it is clear that agencies give away too much of their experience for free. I believe that common guidelines would work well to set expectations for both agency and client.
For this to be successful, clients would need to be more honest and open about their budgets and objectives, and agencies would need to offer more upfront support to their potential clients to help them make decisions and set realistic expectations about their budgets.
The pitch process should be a more collaborative activity between the client and a small number of potential agency partners. Perhaps we could also look to provide impartial industry assistance to clients, provided by the body responsible for setting pitch standards.
Issues often arise in the early stages of projects due to the fact the client is not particularly web savvy. Providing generic guidance has been very successful in other industries, such as architecture, where here in the UK the RIBA assists in the selection process for large contracts by commissioning work through a central RIBA organized board comprised of both industry experts and the client, working as a team to ensure the best possible client, architect match is found. This process was used to great effect in the selection of an architect for the new Scottish Assembly building.
Conclusion
I’ve covered several of the reasons for the problem and a couple possible solutions that could help stem the tide — but I alone don’t have the answer. That’s why I’m hoping this article might spark a discussion in the comments, because I’m very interested to hear the views of my contemporaries and the experiences of designers and developers around the world. There have been previous movements such as the no-spec campaign that have attempted to change the process, but I don’t believe that these have gone far enough. So, how can we work together to tighten up the pitch process? It’s over to you.
I disagree.
If you have a compelling proposition that offers good value, you will win enough work to maintain profitability. If your competitors can’t afford to provide the same level of service as you for whatever reason, they are clearly not as competitive. That’s the market at work.
The bottom line is that the reason for this situation is that the supply side is heavier than the demand side. There are too many agencies and not enough work being tendered. Leave it to the market to decide which agencies are not competitive enough to survive, and balance will be restored.
Magic!
What you are describing sounds like it could be geographical in nature. I know the internet has caused web-designers to have global reach, but if you are like me word-of-mouth is how you network and that’s definately going to be geographical…
The other thing I’d like to note, is that there is an influx of people who have the technical know-how to build and design websites, but they are not professionals, they are freelancers. When the desktop printing industry took hold 10-15 years ago I heard the same argument then as we do now. And low and behold the people with real world professional experience and like Ben says “good value” are still here….
I’m with Ben on this one. Competition weeds out the market and the best agencies rise to the surface. I don’t make these decisions with the company I work for, but I personally would only take pitching so far (in terms of hours spent preparing), and I wouldn’t have my stream of projects dependent upon pitching, RFPs, etc.
Contracts, have them sign contracts and bill the client for everything.
I find the idea of unpaid pitching abhorrant and explotative. There should be some form of regulation in place.
I’m thinking that as with most discussions the truth lies somewhere in the middle. As a young agency we often suffer at the hands of what has been described by Andrew. But this is natural. We have to learn and grow from these experiences and become leaner, meaner and fitter.
On the other hand (this is where Andrew’s piece struck a cord for me) it can often be the quality of the output that suffers. Doesn’t this breed a situation where the unrealistic budget in the unrealistic timescale wins? Haven’t we all seen our ideas materialize elsewhere but not executed very well? It’s hard to convince a client of the importance of quality when a unrealistic budget and unrealistic timescale is being waved in their face.
We all want to do our profession proud and we all want to have happy clients. Perhaps coming up with a mutual set of standards would give us something to evangelize, share success stories about and constantly hone. This could in turn help us convince and give confidence to clients as well as make what we do that little bit more enjoyable.
Well thats my two cents, good article Andrew.
The No!Spec website talks a lot about this very thing and it has some very good points. Why should clients force designers to do work for free. We are professionals and we do have a service they want and/or need.
One wouldn’t take a car into a mechanic and say “see what you can do and I’ll decide whether I’ll pay you or not…” Our portfolios should speak for themselves, along with our client list. If our clients want to see what we can do, our past work is there and should be the example they need. We also, as the providers, should be willing to discuss the project openly with the client and find out what they need, and maybe even guide them a bit. Many of my clients have not always fully understood what they were asking for. So if we are straight forward, honest, and do good work, we should get the job, not by doing the job first.
Great article and a very good point. Thanks Andrew.
For myself, I work as a freelancer and I don’t have the capitol or protection that a small or medium sized firm offers. Loosing a contract in this manner is a very big deal to me. This is the kind of thing that determines where money goes this coming month, mortgage payment, bills, whatever may have to be jumble around.
After being burned a few times and even looking at legal steps, I flat out refuse to do this kind of work. The personal and financial damage it costs me is far to great.
At the same time, I think I have a bit of a reputation now as this elitist designer who has no time for shenanigans which is fine by me.
My firm never ran into this situation (thankfully), but did have an approach.
First, we were fortunate enough to be running fairly well in the black, so any very large jobs that came along would be gravy and require bringing on additional staff, so it would be great to win it, but we would be OK with out.
Second, we decided not to spend the time developing nearly all of the campaign for the client for free. That was a bad business move. We would justify this to the client saying we cannot create a campaign in a vacuum–we need to talk to the client at length for a project to be successful. What we would do is present similar cases we had worked on and how we would apply the same skill and methodology to this client.
Third, we would put some kind of legal contract in place for them to sign acknowledging what we were presenting was our IP until such time as the client paid for it. So if they took our ideas but did not hire our firm, we could pursue legal action. We did not want it to come to that, but did want to demonstrate up front we were serious and meant business. Part of our thinking was if we went in willing to let the client call all the shots at the beginning, the client would have all the cards, which is bad in any relationship–business or not. So, we wanted to level the playing field a bit.
As stated, we never put this strategy into play, but thought I would share.
A great post and some very interesting comments. I’m lucky enough to be able to see this problem from both sides of the fence.
On the one side I’ve been a client many times. On the client side you have the issue that you’re investing often considerable sums of money in something you do not typically understand. Seeing some design ideas up front will certainly help to alleviate some of the pains of uncertainty and shouldn’t be an enormous overhead for an well run agency - ideally this should be part of the pitch process. This is the same in any design service isn’t? You wouldn’t hire an architect without seeing or at least talking through some of his/her ideas first. Same goes with a tailor, you’d want to look at some cloth, a few previous suits he’s made etc etc. I like Eroom Tam’s idea about holding onto the IP until it’s bought and paid for, very sensible.
On the agency side, the few projects I’ve run have been on quite low margins as client perceptions of the time taken to prepare documents, make changes etc are well out of whack. This requires a careful explanation and education process when the client signs up. However, contracts should be careful not to be too draconian at this stage.
I agree overall with the idea of a common set of standards but I’ve no idea how these would be created or adhered to in such a fractious industry.
Clients, be prepared to at least cover some expenses for your web designers if you want to go for an overly long pitch process.
Designers, you’ve got to speculate to accumulate (to use an appallingly trite expression) so give a little, after all these could well be long term clients.
The IP idea that you mention is a good one, it’s also covered under copyright law, smashing magazine just had a great post on the ins-and-outs of copyright protection and use. The work you put in a pitch is your work, and protected since you are the creator until you “assign” the rights to the client via purchase or other transference…. at least in the US, not sure where all you guys are from…
I also have to say that I don’t get any sense of scale with any of the projects anyone is discussing. If you are pitching on a $500,000 project then your probably going to have to put in a ton of work upfront and pitch your ass off. If the project is $5,000 then why on earth would you ever do any part of it on spec…?
Great article and great topic. I’ve never come across this scenario (surprisingly) but all this being said here is very usfeul information to be kept in mind. Great comments from everybody as well.
I like Mr. Stan Grabowsky’s approach. My portfolio and previous projects should be enough to tell the client what level of professional/agency he is dealign with.
Re: “…they are not professionals, they are freelancers.” (comment #2).
Freelancers are professionals, too — “freelance” means self-employed, not “amateur.”
My company has lost work by refusing to free pitch which can be a hard decision, especially if work is slow. But I stick to my guns.
Free pitching ruins our industry and produces poorer work
I came across a new approach recently. An agency prepares it’s pitch by using a freelancer. The pitch doesn’t work out and the agency simply refuses to pay the freelancer. Brilliant. Everyone’s a winner. Except the freelancer. Me.
Still. Live & learn, eh?
Don’t do it - it’s just a beauty contest aimed at impressing the client. Surely a design should serve the client’s target audience’s needs.
Re the tailor example above - so you would expect a tailor to make the trousers for free and if you liked the, you might just pay for the jacket!
www.no-spec.com
i dont believe in unpaid work full stop. for me its the agencies agreement to do this kind of pitching that is the problem… the difficulty is there will always be someone willing to do it which would cut out anyone who doesnt.
tell you what, how about we pay the client to have our work done for them… im sure they’ll be up for that. Whos got the biggest amount of money to give away?
… whats that you say? ‘but we’d be constantly working at a loss’ well DOH… what do you think is happening now for many small studios because of FREE PITCHING!
It’s one thing to do a quick analysis of an RFP for free. Spending an hour or two and giving out some free advice might make business sense. Going beyond that to prepare a presentation and give an in-depth presentation for free is just stupid. Okay, maybe if you’re bidding on a $5,000,000 contract you should expect to invest a little more time. But on typical agency projects in the $10,000 to $100,000 range, you shouldn’t need to do that.
The bottom line is the pitching process doesn’t really help anyone. It measures who can give the most convincing presentation, which rarely has any correlation to the project. Meanwhile, it narrows the field artificially because many of the best people will simply not play by those rules. It also creates artificial expectations since no one really understands the business requirements well enough at that stage. A good sales person will make a convincing argument, but the devil’s always in the details, and things will likely implode later.
I don’t think the client should have to lock themselves into one agency for an entire project up front. A successful project requires a significant of time up front planning the scope and angles. By the time a project is far enough along to even give a reliable quote, a lot of work will have already been done. They should definitely pay for that work, but if the agency turns out not to have the chops, they should have the freedom to take whatever they’ve paid for somewhere else.
This ‘tale’ is nothing new. Clients (or prospective clients) have been playing the ’spec work’ game with agencies / design firms since the dawn of advertising. Your past work and reputation speaks for itself.
If your client doesn’t understand the time, effort and other resources it takes to define a solid strategy and develop a web interface then they don’t understand what they are asking for. If you try and explain to them the process and what it does take, and the client’s eyes glaze over, then maybe it’s not a good fit for you and your firm.
You can always try turning the tables by asking the same of your prospective client. They’re an auto manufacture; ask for a free car, they’re a furniture maker; as for free furniture. See what their response is.
Get paid for your time, period. One thing I’ve learned over the past 35 years in traditional and the past 12 in interactive is that there will ALWAYS be someone out there that will do the work cheaper then you will.
The thing that really gets me is the number of agencies being asked to pitch. we regularly (more fools us!) get asked to pitch for a piece of business alongside 6/7 competitors, often just for regulatory purposes. If there was a nominal fee for each pitch (a few hunderd pounds), it would focus the client on their process by limiting the number of tenders they create AND the number of agencies they ask to tender.
I’m sure clients assume we recover our pitch costs on jobs we win, which is unfair - ‘cos I’d like to recover my costs on pitches we don’t win!
so, until we are good enough to turn cleints away, we will have to live with the system as it is!
Back in the Web 1.0 days companies also got people to pitch to them just to get ideas for their own team
Andrew,
Checkout a post by zeldman on why designing for spec is bad:
http://www.zeldman.com/daily/0104h.shtml#spec
-s
An interesting opener on a complex topic area that is definitely ready for some fresh ideas.
In general on the above I’d say I’m somewhere in the middle ground, I don’t object to pitching for free but I’d try to keep the new ideas presented down to a minimum when possible and instead base my pitch on previous work and our general fitness to deliver on the brief.
On medium to large projects we often propose a research and specification phase as the first phase of the project when pitching. This will have designs and wireframes or whatever may be appropriate as it’s deliverables. Usually we might suggest around 10% of the overall budget is used for this phase and that either party can walk away at the end of it or revise the original brief as may be required to add features or reduce cost.
Another aspect that I think people may have touched on a little in comments above but I’d like to see a lot more discussion (as I feel I’ve come across this a few times now) is: How to deal with less scrupulous agencies simply telling clients anything to win a pitch very often by undercutting on cost, over-promising on delivery or simply being happy to disregard quality. Now, I think everyone’s immediate reaction is to say that if a client is foolish enough to choose an agency based on price and bluster alone they deserve what they get and their is a lot of truth to that. I would say though that it’s not that easy if a client is not o-fay on the intricacies of building a website and if we want to see our industry flourish I think we need to figure out for everyone’s sake how to ensure that quality is an important consideration when choosing an agency for a project. I’d be interested to here any thoughts on how we can better educate clients about quality considerations and general approach when we are pitching.
I did recently came across some guidelines put together by the Design Council for companies commissioning a website and fairly well written as far as they go, we also encourage our potential clients to read PAS78 and our in-house Build Standards document before or after they engage us to do some work.
well, rational and irrational both. though i have to read twice. anyway, great article. aye, hope to see u publish more article here.
I agree that this is a huge issue.
We recently were going to do a free pitch with another firm. We were talking to the clients’ liaison and discovered that one particular competitor was offering $0 up front and 3% of revenue which at best could come to around $200-500/month - on a twelve month contract.
We decided that we would no longer offer a pitch (we only gave a ball-park price) as we couldn’t come close to that but we did explain that no one - not even an Indian firm could produce a quality result for that price. Hopefully they’ll come back to us based on our existing relationship with the company.
With regards to IP ownership - it’s good but I’d like to know how enforceable it could be. I mean, 6-7 firms all pitching similar ideas? It’d be quite difficult to legally prove that an idea was yours.
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