April brings the yearly celebration of excellence in healthcare advertising.  As in years past, Filament clients are well represented.  2010 marks the ninth year in a row that at least one Filament client has been nominated for Agency of the Year.

Filament clients have been nominated in a number of categories including:

Agency of the year Categories I and III
Most admired
Best Medical Device Campaign
Best Consumer Advertising Campaign
Best Self Promotion Campaign
Best Interactive Physician Campaign
Heart Award
Vision Award

Congratulations to all of our clients on a great year!

4As has asked Filament to conduct their Presenting and Selling Creative Work to Clients workshop in New York City, Minneapolis, Raleigh and Rochester, all within the next few months.   The workshop has been so well received that 4As is stepping up the number of times the workshop is offered.

Here is a quick overview of the workshop.
Presenting creative work to clients or prospects is not as much about presentation skills as it about selling skills. Clients need to be transformed from “creative evaluators” to “creative champions.”  If your clients are discussing the color and font, they are still in creative evaluator mode and this workshop will help you to turn clients into champions of your creative work instead of killers of great ideas.

This all day workshop, conducted by Brian Schnurman of Filament, Inc., explores how to turn creative staff from presenters of work to proponents of work, and how to sell the big idea instead of the details.read more

The following article entitled Let Junior Staff Speak ran in Med Ad News’ December 2009 issue. Mark Schnurman writes a monthly column entitled Pitch Therapy for Med Ad News about pitching new business. You can follow Mark’s blog, Pitch Therapy, athttp://pitchtherapy.blogspot.com/

Let Junior Staff Speak

Most ad executives I speak with agree that bringing junior staff to a pitch is a good idea. After all, the day-to-day employees are going to be doing the work, and clients are likely to expect to meet the team. And bringing junior staff to pitches – with small roles – is a great way to develop the next generation of pitch superstars. With all of this going in their favor, I would expect to see pitch teams overrun with junior staff. But that is not the case.

Most ad executives I speak with agree that bringing junior staff to a pitch is a good idea. After all, the day-to-day employees are going to be doing the work, and clients are likely to expect to meet the team. And bringing junior staff to pitches – with small roles – is a great way to develop the next generation of pitch superstars. With all of this going in their favor, I would expect to see pitch teams overrun with junior staff. But that is not the case. Most of the resistance seems to boil down to two issues: presentation skill and knowledge.

When it comes to presentation skill, management is simply concerned that a junior person will lay an egg and lose the pitch. But in reality, it is virtually impossible for a junior person to lose a pitch. First of all, the bar is much lower for them. The client does not expect them to be perfectly polished. Second, if the junior person flubs but the rest of the team is great, the client will simply ask that individual not to be assigned to the account. On the other hand, if the junior person does a stellar job, now the client thinks that everyone at the agency is as smart as the junior person.

A bigger issue around presentation skill has to do with senior staff as opposed to junior staff. My suggestion is that agencies scrutinize all of their presenters, not just the junior ones. Poor senior level presenters do not get the same latitude as their junior colleagues and may cause much more harm to the chances of winning. Over time, a client may recognize the genius of an individual who is not a great presenter, but in a pitch, the client does not have the time or inclination to recognize that genius. They just see an inarticulate senior staff member.

When it comes to knowledge, not bringing junior staff because they do not know as much as the senior staff seems a little foolish. No client expects the day-to-day account/creative person to have the same expertise and insight as the VP of account services or the creative director. Clients expect the day-to-day staff to be smart and easy to work with and to know where to go when they don’t have an answer. They do not expect them to have all of the answers.

There are few keys to insuring that junior staff does a great job in a new business pitch. First, define their role. This means making sure that they use words like day to day when they describe their role on the account in order to set the bar that they need to clear. The client sets the bar lower for day-to-day staff than they do for the VP of account services.

Second, give them appropriate content to deliver. Clients expect to hear industry analysis and/or tactics from day-to-day account people. They do not want the 26-year old account executive to be developing and delivering the strategy for the product. The other half of appropriate content is giving the presenter enough content to deliver. If the account executive only has 90 seconds worth of content to deliver, he or she is not giving the audience enough time to get to know the presenter. But once an audience establishes an opinion on a presenter, there is no benefit in having the presenter continue. It takes about five minutes for an audience to get a good read on a presenter.

Finally, don’t change the content at the last minute. Junior staff members are probably petrified of the new business process. For many of them, they will be presenting with the president or managing director for the first time. Changing their content at the last minute could very well send them into a tailspin. Give them a day or two to really own their content.

Remember, the bar is lower for day-to-day staff. No one expects them to be as polished as the executives at the agency. Use that lower bar to your advantage and let the lower level staff show the client how smart everyone is at your agency.

The following article entitled Simple Rules for Q&A Mastery ran in Med Ad News’ November 2009 issue. Mark Schnurman writes a monthly column entitled Pitch Therapy for Med Ad News about pitching new business. You can follow Mark’s blog, Pitch Therapy, athttp://pitchtherapy.blogspot.com/

Simple Rules for Q&A Mastery

It is virtually impossible to win a pitch with the Q&A session, but it is fairly easy to lose the pitch.
Agencies seem to feel that the Q&A session that follows the new business pitch is there to promote the free exchange of ideas. After 90 minutes of a finely crafted presentation, where the agency has scripted every word, every interjection and slide, the question and answer session is more of a test than it is a conversation. The client is using their precious 30 minutes of Q&A to kick the proverbial tires of the agency. Is everyone on the same page? Do they get along? Will the agency be easy to work with? Will the client need to suffer through an agency’s internal squabbles? These are the questions that the client is trying to answer when they ask, “Which concept would you recommend?”
So the question becomes, what is the agency doing that is getting them closer to a win during the Q&A? And what is the agency doing that is potentially losing the business?

When you start to look at Q&A as a conversation versus a test, certain behaviors become either positive or negative. For example, when you look at it as a conversation, team members discussing an issue makes perfect sense. When you look at it as a test, when one team member adds to another team member’s answers, it gives one of two possible impressions. First, that the team members are not on the same page. While this is bad, it is not nearly as bad as the second impression, which is that the person that adds on to the answer does not trust their teammate. This can be deadly. The client wants to know that not only are you all on the same page, but that you all trust each other. Other poor impressions that can result from someone adding on to an answer – the client may feel like the person just has a need to talk. We all know people like this.

There are two things you can do to combat the add-on. Train your staff to answer the question and then ask, “Does that answer your question?” If it does answer the question, most people would consider the case closed and would move on. If it does not answer the question, the answerer is now free to look for some help from your team. Asking for help is much more charming and intelligent than having five team members jump in for the save.

A second thing to consider during Q&A is to keep the answers short. The more you talk, the more likely you are to say something that you don’t want to say. Also, longer answers tend to make the presenter sound defensive. Keep the answers to 60 seconds or less. Closer to 30 seconds would be better. Don’t tell the client how to build a watch when all they asked for was the time. Another reason to keep answers short is that the goal is to get through as many questions as possible. It would be a waste of time to spend five minutes or more answering a question that was asked by someone that does not get a vote.

A third rule of thumb for Q&A is to not let any one person dominate. When one person answers the bulk of the questions it can give a number of non-favorable impressions. The first is that the agency has one smart person and a bunch of less smart staff members. Another impression is that the person answering all of the questions does not trust their team members. Remember, these are the same team members that are about to be assigned 100% to this account. Clients do not necessarily expect that their day to day staff will know all of the answers, but they do expect that staff to have the trust of agency executives. The goal is to get the pitch team involved and not let any one person dominate.

Finally, leave time for Q&A. The fact of the matter is that sometimes presentations run long. The danger is that if the agency leaves no time for Q&A, the agency is not so subtly saying to the client, “Your thoughts and questions are not important to us. It is more important for us to talk than it is for us to listen.” This is not the message that an agency wants to send to a perspective client.
The rules are not complicated, but they do require discipline. As much as I preach the “no add-on” rule, agency staff can find it difficult to hold their tongues on pitch day. As difficult as it may be, stick to the rules, and the pitch will be better for it.

Filament Inc. conducts Presenting Creative Work seminar for AAAA in Kansas City.

Kansas City, MO – Mark Schnurman, founder and partner of Filament Inc, gave an well received seminar on Presenting Creative Work to over 70 advertising agency executives in Kansas City

One of the creative directors from Berstein-Rein summed up the workshop by suggesting a new title – How to get your clients to love your work as much as you do!

It was great to see creative (and some account) staff of all different levels embracing some new tools to help them sell their creative ideas.

The following is the second installment of Pitch Therapy, an ongoing series of articles addressing the challenges faces agencies during the new business process. This article was published in the October 2009 of MedAdNews (www.medadnews.com).

PowerPoint punch up By Mark Schnurman, Pitch Consultant and founder of Filament Inc.

Over the years, it has become fashionable to criticize PowerPoint for making agency presentations long and boring. But PowerPoint does not make for boring presentations. Bad presenters make presentations boring. Let’s think about the components of a boring presentation and address them individually.

Too much data, not enough story is one common flaw. The slide deck is not supposed to be a comprehensive explanation of your presentation. The slide deck is a visual aid. The slide show is supposed to aid the presenter in delivering her message to the audience. Never lose sight of the fact that the presenter is the compelling component of the presentation, not the deck. If the deck were the compelling component, we would simply e-mail the deck to the audience and not have to fly half way across the country to make a presentation.

But wait you say, “The deck is our leave behind. We need a comprehensive leave behind in case someone misses our presentation.” It is true that if you take information off of the deck, it will no longer be your comprehensive leave behind. If you have to choose between a comprehensive leave behind and a solid presentation that helps instead of hinders the presenter, always choose the latter. In the history of advertising, no one has ever won a pitch because they had the best leave behind, but plenty of people have lost pitches because their presentations were painfully boring.

But wait you say, “…I want all of the information on the screen in case our junior person forgets something.” When you have all of the information on the screen and the junior person is forced to just read the slide, that person is offering no value to the audience. The audience could just as easily read the slide themselves. It is as if a really smart person wrote the slide, and then gave it to this (not so smart person) to present. You would be better off if they missed a point or two but remembered a few points that are not on the slide. The solution is to write the slide with all of the content so that the junior person can get the content down. After they understand the content, remove some of the points (typically sub-bullets) so that they can look smart at the pitch. If they miss a point or two, don’t worry about it. The goal is for them to look smart in front of the client, not for them to remember every point.

But wait you say, “PowerPoint slides can be so boring with a sea of bullet points.” It is not a mandate that slide shows are dominated by bullets. Mix it up a bit. Some bullets, some pictures, some video. If you are no longer worried about getting every last bit of text on the slide, it frees you up to be much more creative with slide composition. The one thing to avoid is clip art. Most clients expect their advertising agency to be able to come up with something more creative than clip art.

So we have addressed some issues in PowerPoint that are more a function of the user than the software, but that doesn’t mean that PowerPoint is the ultimate in presentation tools. Keynote is rapidly gaining acceptance in the new business world, but it has at least one pretty big flaw. Since not everyone at the agency uses Keynote, agencies tend to rely on their Keynote specialist for making every little change to the deck. This creates a significant bottleneck in the development of the presentation. This can create a severe limitation, all for the promise of marginally prettier slide shows.

I have seen circumstances where the deck was written in PowerPoint and then given to the Keynote specialist to convert. This method avoided the bottleneck problem, but then the team practiced with PowerPoint and did not receive the Keynote deck until the eleventh hour. Presentation teams are probably better off presenting with PowerPoint if that is what they rehearsed with. When Keynote is widely used throughout the agency, it will be a great tool for presentations, but in the meantime, it creates as many problems as it solves.

Boards and flip charts are another presentation tool that are making a comeback after years of PowerPoint use. Boards and flip charts have some distinct advantages over presentation software. The biggest advantage is that because boards require production time, they require a “pencils down” time. Presentation software’s promise of a perfect presentation can lure staff into never ending tweaks to the deck, even in the cab ride to the pitch. This type of last minute thinking certainly makes the presentation different but rarely makes it better. The last minute tweaks always raise the level of tension on the team, which is a recipe for disaster.

Just like presentation software, boards have some legendary issues of their own. Production snafus and size are the two biggest issues. If you have done new business long enough, you know what I am talking about. Regardless of the presentation tool you decide to use, never lose sight of the fact that the presenter is the single most compelling part of the presentation. If the presenter is the key, then make sure everything in your new business presentation is designed to make the presenter more compelling.

Editor’s note: Pitch Therapy is part of a series of guest articles written Mark Schnurman, pitch consultant and founder of Filament Inc. (filamentinc.com), a new business consulting and communication skills training firm working exclusively with pharma and consumer advertising agencies. E-mail questions, comments, and article ideas to mark@filamentinc.com.

The following is the debut column of Pitch Therapy, an ongoing series of articles addressing the challenges faces agencies during the new business process. This article was published in the August 2009 of MedAdNews (www.medadnews.com).

You didn’t come in second place
By Mark Schnurman, Pitch Consultant and founder of Filament Inc.

Think back to your agency’s last, unsuccessful new business pitch. Think about the feedback you received from the client. I’ve got news for you. Your agency did not come in second place.

Think about it. With typically four agencies pitching, the law of averages says that 25% of the time you will win (hopefully more if your agency plans on growing), and 25% of the time you will come in forth. Yet agencies never hear back from the client that they were the forth horse in a four horse race. Why is that?

The client has just two goals for that dreaded “you lost” phone call: make you feel good about the agency’s effort so that if there is another pitch in the future, the agency will be a willing participant, and get you off the phone as quickly as possible. The client’s decision is made, and the client has no interest in discussing it with the agency. Agencies have a history of trying to resuscitate a dead sale during these phone calls, which is the very last thing that the client wants to do.

Notice that “giving the agency useful, constructive feedback so that they can do a better job next time” was not one of the two client goals. Instead, they’ll deflect blame and come up with an excuse that you cannot argue with, like the creative was too edgy, they wanted a smaller agency, or they wanted an agency with initials in its name.

The reason that it is so important for an agency to recognize when it is getting false feedback is that the agency does not want to be making changes to the way it conducts a pitch simply because it heard something from a client who was trying to get off the telephone. Think about the implications on the creative department if the agency starts to endlessly shift creative because of this feedback.

If the agency can’t rely on client feedback from a new business pitch, then how can the agency get better at pitching? There are two things that agencies can do. First, listen for trends in feedback. If you get the same feedback repeatedly, there may be an opportunity to improve. Changing an agency’s pitch process or direction based on feedback from one pitch (no matter how important a pitch) can be dangerous. When you start to hear the same feedback repeatedly, it is time to make a change.

The second way to improve the pitch process is to review your own pitches. Your agency has pitched enough to know the difference between your best work and something that falls short of your best work. Here are some hints on how to do an effective review of your agency’s new business pitches.

Gather the entire pitch team in one location for a 30-60 meeting. The meeting needs to be a few days after the pitch (to let the euphoria of the pitch subside) but before you hear from the client. It is important to hold the pitch review prior to getting any client feedback because once the agency hears from the client, agency staff feedback will simply parrot what the client had to say.

Have each team member give feedback starting with the most junior staff. The reason to start with the most junior staff is that once an executive speaks, most staff will simply give feedback that somehow supports the executive’s feedback. Starting at the most junior staff gives the best opportunity for honest, unbiased feedback. The questions to answer are “what worked” and “what could we do better.”

If possible, videotape your dress rehearsal so that you can witness what your client is sitting through. While this is a scary step — so scary that many agencies are unwilling to do it — but it may be the difference between winning and “coming in second.”

If you are genuinely interested in improving your agency’s pitch win rate, the single biggest tool for improvement is a scorecard. Create a very simple spreadsheet that records each pitch and whether you won or lost. No excuses (i.e., the decision was made before we pitched). You either win or lose. If you are winning at least 50%, the agency is growing. If you are winning 25% of the time, you are probably treading water. If you are winning less than 25% of the time, recognize that it is time to make some changes to the process.

Ultimately, it is the agency’s responsibility to improve its new business pitch process, not the client’s responsibility. When you look at it that way, it is easy to see where the client is coming from with the “you came in second place” phone call.

Editor’s note: Pitch Therapy is part of a series of guest articles written Mark Schnurman, Pitch Consultant and founder of Filament Inc., a new business consulting and communication skills training firm working exclusively with pharma and consumer advertising agencies.

Mark Schnurman, President and Pitch Consultant at Filament Inc., has started a blog dedicated to the trials and tribulations of the advertising pitch process. The blog is called Pitch Therapy and can be found at www.pitchtherapy.blogspot.com

The first entry is the debut article from his Med Ad News column called Pitch Therapy and discusses how to learn unsuccessful pitches.

Med Ad News ( www.medadnews.com ), the pharmaceutical advertising industry’s leading magazine, has asked Mark Schnurman to write an ongoing column on pitching new business. The column, titled Pitch Therapy, is scheduled to debut in the July 2009 issue of Med Ad News.