While working at a very busy, creative shop, we found ourselves pitching up to eight separate projects a week. Multiply that by three fully fleshed-out comprehensive layouts for each.
We began to notice that our pitches, made to lower-level agents were losing their initial power in the translation as the underlings made their pitches to the upper-levels.
We couldn’t always be there when they met with the busy vice-presidents to whom they reported. A good account exec always prefers to pitch to the C-level officers, but in a large corporation, it is not always possible.
So what can you do about this?—A Creative Rationale Document
My solution was to develop a creative rationale document to follow the comprehensives to the top. With this one sheet we could make sure that the finer points of the creative rationale were spelled out— the unique market positioning, the buyer’s proposition, the psychographic landscape, the calls to action.
Once we began to arm our “underling” contacts with this document, we found that they felt more confident presenting our ideas, our work was sailing through the approval process quickly, and we were getting fewer instructions to morph the three separate solutions into one.
There was one other up-side for us, some of the underlings were coming across as polished and poised now, they were getting promoted. They were meeting with us as vice-presidents and felt we were a part of their team!
That is no secret, your clients are part of your creative team!
No comments:
Post a Comment