http://www.ooyes.net

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.

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.

Checkout a post by zeldman on why designing for spec is bad:

http://www.zeldman.com/daily/0104h.shtml#spec

-s

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!

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 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.