Winning More by Pitching Less in Agency Sales with Nikki Gatenby

Mike (00:38.163)
Nicky, thanks ever so much for joining me on Higgle, the B2B Sales Club podcast.

Nikki (00:50.073)
Thanks for inviting me. Very happy to be here, Mike.

Mike (00:52.147)
I'm really looking forward to this. We had a great pre -record session and we've kind of talked to each other in the past about various kinds of clients and opportunities. So before the audience gets lost on who you are, who are you? So who are you? What's your background and something unusual about yourself?

Nikki (00:55.769)
Mm -hmm.

Nikki (01:05.913)
Hahaha.

Nikki (01:09.657)
OK, so I'm an agency specialist, non -exec director, and cognitive behavioral coach with a laser focus on helping founders build their agencies. It's a highly valuable asset by creating value for both the agency and the client over time. So I've led, owned, managed, grown pioneering agencies in London, Paris, and Brighton. And I can understand what makes business success and also what can go wrong. And that's where most of our learning comes from. My last agency went from Brighton to Global, from marketing services to two SaaS technology products.

Mike (01:31.027)
Absolutely, definitely.

Nikki (01:38.233)
answer the public encourage book, both now independently bigger than the agency itself. And that was hand in hand with being one of the best places to work in the UK for eight years running. So we traveled margin, generated four times more revenue and 10 times more profit, but kept people at the heart as well as the money. And having captured all of that in a book called Super Engaged, that was my reason for an exit. Lots of founders got in touch and said, could you help us do what you've done? And I have a lot of joy now helping other people go on that really fun journey of creating their own agency to a really highly valuable asset.

Mike (02:07.379)
Very good. Excellent. Very succinct. And something unusual about yourself.

Nikki (02:11.545)
So I like slightly unpredictable and slightly dangerous things. By that I mean a bit of an adrenaline junkie. So racing cars, I ran racetracks when I was early on in my career, used to work in the automotive industry. I spun a Toyota Celica off the track at Ranshouse and got into quite a lot of trouble about that. I wasn't supposed to go off the track clearly, but yes, slightly out of... getting my knee down on a motorbike in Donington Park, that was quite incredible.

Mike (02:16.787)
Oh my word, okay.

Mike (02:34.003)
No, I can imagine not. No, no.

Nikki (02:40.761)
parasailing over the French Alps, wild animal experiences have been charged out by a bull elephant in Etosha and Namibia. And the most amazing one was getting stuck in what I now know as a squadron of manta rays while they were cyclone feeding in the Maldives and we were scuba diving and they don't want to hurt you but they're the size of a cow these things and if they cyclone around you and they smack you, you're going to be in trouble. So that was a lot of fun.

Mike (02:45.587)
Wow.

Mike (02:55.859)
Wow.

Mike (02:59.539)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mike (03:06.323)
Wow. Okay. So you're you are definitely an adrenaline junkie. Do you own a motorbike?

Nikki (03:11.737)
I don't anymore, but I realised that I was a little bit more fragile than anything else on the road, having had one too many accidents, so no.

Mike (03:17.267)
Correct. Absolutely. I had one and then when we had our son, I was like, no, no more. It's not a good idea. Yeah. Yeah. Always. Exactly. So let's start talking about the kind of the two or three topics that we prepared kind of in advance. So the first one was around, so given your agency experience across all the agencies you've owned and worked with, what have you learned about qualifying sales opportunities?

Nikki (03:22.905)
No, no, no. You realize you're gonna come off worse, particularly if you're quite a speed freak, yes?

Mike (03:47.251)
What tips would you give to agency leaders, commercial teams?

Nikki (03:51.321)
Well, there's a real biggies here. I think the biggest for me is volume is vanity and conversion is sanity. Because if you go for too much, you're going to end up breaking yourselves. And I'll go into that in more detail. The second one is feedback loops are essential. Third, how to spot red lights early. And fourth, knowing your ICP and what you do to deliver value to them specifically. So if I jump back to the first, volume is vanity, conversion is sanity.

Mike (03:56.851)
Mm -hmm.

Nikki (04:18.137)
time wasted on pitches that you're not going to win can make or break an agency or a client. And it's extremely, you know, extremely conscious about where you're spending your time pitching because being busy on pitching is actually a false economy for your agency and the client, particularly your current clients. I think current clients get, you know, misserviced sometimes where there's so much pitch activity going on, which is deemed to be the shiny stuff. And it's, hang on a minute, what are we actually doing? And I know it feels counterintuitive, but turning down pitches, I believe, is a winning mentality.

Mike (04:21.555)
Exactly.

Couldn't agree more.

Mike (04:29.875)
Correct. Yep.

Mike (04:44.851)
Absolutely. Definitely. And in fact, the data that I've got across various surveys is if you looked at successful high growth agencies and non -agencies alike in the services industry, they turned down about 40%, 50 % of what they receive. And that's from stuff that is not just marketing input off the web, but stuff that's genuine. They turned down 48%.

Nikki (05:09.849)
Yeah. And that's that. I wonder, you know, people listening, it's like, oh, could we turn down 40 % of the leads we're getting in? Because when leads are scarce, that's quite a scary thing to do, isn't it?

Mike (05:18.643)
Exactly right. Correct. And it's frightening as a commercial leader in the business, as you've been, as I've been, you're sat there going, pipeline's a bit thin, and I'm going to turn down 40 % of what I've got already. But explain why, Nicky, it's so important.

Nikki (05:23.545)
Mmm.

Nikki (05:34.105)
Well, it comes purely from experience, seeing it firsthand or feeling it firsthand. Working in London agency, we did 52 pitches in one year, so one a week. And it was exhausting. And we won 10.

Mike (05:47.315)
Wow. So your win rate, just so we're clear, your win rate was 20%. Yeah, 19 % because you were pitching once a week for 52 opportunities.

Nikki (05:51.769)
19 % yeah yeah

Nikki (05:58.873)
absolutely insane because it was a deem to volume game. Then when I had my agency, my focus was much more about quality and by comparison, we did 12 pitches and we won 10. So that's an 83%. Yeah.

Mike (06:04.723)
Exactly.

Mike (06:08.787)
So your win rate was 83%. So I spoke to another agency of the week. His win rate, they were, they're about 100 people. Their win rate's about 80%. So you're the second person I've spoken to that's in that kind of 80 % category. You are 1 % of agencies I've talked to. Most agency win rates are like 30%, typically.

Nikki (06:20.825)
Amazing.

Nikki (06:29.561)
But you have.

Yeah. Yeah. But you have to be brave and you have to know what you're good at. And you have to be really clear where you are the best in the world or as close to the best in the world as this is all about value. It's not about volume. And that's the whole mantra I've got with every founder I work with. Let's not chase the value, the volume. Let's look at where the value is and you can change those metrics.

Mike (06:49.989)
So how do you qualify things out, Nicky? How do you work out what to go for and what not to go for?

Nikki (06:57.753)
Brilliant. This goes on exactly to the feedback loops. So every business I work with, I'm asking what are their new business criteria? If they don't have any, well, let's get some to start with. Really simple. Is there a decent brief? If there's not a decent brief, the work is not going to be valued. Is there a clear budget? If there isn't, let's work out what value they're after. Are we excited by the opportunity? And there's some really simple ones you can start with, but then you get the feedback loop going through the process and refining your own new business criteria to get to ones that work for you, because everyone's will be slightly different.

Mike (07:26.707)
They will.

Nikki (07:27.385)
You know, we had one where, excuse my language, no bastards, and that's not anyone, that's just the people you're working with, they're too chaotic and they don't respect your time. They're going to take your time and attention away from other clients and that doesn't make life better for anyone. So let's not go there. And it's about the ways of working as well as what's written down on the piece of paper. You know, anyone can answer a brief, it's how people work together that makes the difference. And having that constant feedback loop and a pitch doctor that goes with you throughout your process to keep that feedback coming in.

Mike (07:44.723)
Exactly.

Nikki (07:56.153)
And what we mean by that is not just getting the creative work presented or the data work presented or whatever type of agency you are. It's also going and we've talked about this into the deal. How do you negotiate? How do you go to the deal part of it? It should be half your time as the leader looking not only answering the brief, but what is the conversation about the deal look like? And at what point does that happen? So.

Mike (08:18.195)
So something else really, so going into this, because I've got this big thing about qualification as all people that talk to me will find out is one of the things that I always say, having been an ex buyer, so I was an ex buyer as you know, and one of the big things for me, one of the big warning signals is, so I'd love to hear your views on this, if in, you get this brief coming in, it could be a client brief or it could be an RFP, doesn't matter which it is. If you don't have any opportunity to talk to the budget holder,

Nikki (08:23.321)
Mm -hmm.

Mike (08:48.371)
before you put virtual pen to paper. In my view, that's a massive red flag.

Nikki (08:54.649)
Absolutely, that's your red light. If there's, if it's, roles always expectation, expectations on a full budget issue. If there's no budget, you're asking me to work for free, which says to me, you don't value the work. That's a major showstopper for me. And have that conversation because it may not be understood that that's how it's coming across. But no, I'm not going to work for free. We've got really valuable, talented people in the business because we treat them well. We want to do really good work. We're not going to treat them like a commodity because there's a brief with no budget. No.

Mike (09:12.595)
Exactly.

Mike (09:23.859)
Exactly. And so the budget's a big red flag. And another one is this kind of the idea that they've sent you a brief and they say to you in the email, you can't talk to a human being unless you get shortlisted. So I'm like, right, so you're expecting an agency to take what you've written down as a brief, write a highly creative proposal, be it a creative ad or a creative strategy program.

or data or whatever it might be, SEO, you want me to, you think I'm going to get inside your head as a client just through a bit of paper that you've sent me. It's ludicrous. So if you can't have a conversation with the stakeholders before you start writing, to me, it's like that's an enormous red flag.

Nikki (10:01.753)
Mm -hmm.

Nikki (10:11.481)
Yes, it's not robot to robot. You know, we're not robots yet. There's a human interaction. And it also says, yeah, indeed. It also says, maybe they are not really clear on what they're buying. If they believe a value conversation can happen off the back of a piece of paper with no human interaction, do you want your agency to be bought by these people?

Mike (10:15.443)
Thank God.

Mike (10:29.299)
Yeah, exactly. Because what you don't want is, oh, you've been shortlisted. Okay, great. Why? Well, you met the criteria, but you didn't write the criteria down in the brief. No, I know, but we've got our own criteria. It's just all a basket case. The whole thing when you look at it a bit more objectively like we're doing is, no, there's lots of bad signs here. No criteria, can't talk to a human being, no budget declared, no indication of value or targets.

Nikki (10:45.369)
It is.

Mike (10:58.899)
best foot forward. And who are we competing with? Oh, we can't tell you. Oh, great. It's just madness.

Nikki (11:07.033)
And if we apply that to what we're being asked to do in terms of marketing and creativity and influencing and encouraging changing behaviour in whichever way, shape or form it may be, where is that in the buying process?

Mike (11:17.684)
Exactly. Correct.

Nikki (11:21.401)
It seems the wrong way around completely or the presses aren't matched. You're not buying in the same way that you want to achieve with your own customers. So how is it really going to work? Yeah.

Mike (11:29.267)
Exactly. And if I go back to my days in consulting, when we were taught consultative selling, this is going back, wow, 25, 30 years. I don't remember ever writing a proposal to an RFP, but I remember doing lots of work, working with clients, building propositions, defining what the value statement looks like, defining what the ROI is.

working out what the fee structure looks like in collaboration with a client. I remember doing lots of that, but I don't remember just sitting in a dark room trying to write great things on a bit of virtual paper.

Nikki (12:10.809)
It's almost as if we aim to be so effective we're no longer developing. Which is a crying shame because we are still human and we still need to be developing and if we can't have conversations we can't do proper work.

Mike (12:19.123)
Exactly.

Mike (12:25.459)
So on the qualification thing is a kind of summary. What's your kind of thinking about if an agency leader sat there and they're thinking, okay, I'm getting in three or four opportunities a month. We seem to be pitching for all of them. What should I do? What should they do?

Nikki (12:43.993)
Look at their value proposition where they are best in the market to deliver. Look at how well the briefs are aligned to that and go for the ones they're best set up to deliver to and put all effort into that. It may feel more risky, but I would offer that the risk is actually diluting your time and attention and your energy across three things, which you won't do your best job at. You're not going to put your best foot forward. Focus. Laser focus makes a massive difference. It changed the pitch win rates I was experiencing from 19 % to 83%.

Mike (13:12.211)
Exactly. And that's ultimately what counts. And also, did you find your average order value went up as well? The stuff that you were winning was much bigger.

Nikki (13:21.657)
Absolutely, and team retention was higher because people weren't so exhausted and so upset with losing all the time. No one wants to be a loser. People want to win!

Mike (13:28.083)
Exactly. Exactly right. Correct. And also I was talking to the agency the other week about how we decline. There's a way of declining an RFP or a client brief, which still keeps you in their mind without you wasting 30 hours on average for a bid that you're never likely to win.

Nikki (13:50.073)
Yes, yeah. And if you can really get identified, we're not going to win that, we're not good for that, rather we'll just go for it because we have to. The we'll just go for it if we have to can absolutely destroy an agency.

Mike (14:00.754)
Yeah, definitely.

Nikki (14:02.649)
Whereas the confidence we're going to win this one makes it so different in terms of every step you then take.

Mike (14:07.827)
and it gets you to 80 % plus conversion rate. So next topic, if you look across all of your experience across agencies that you've worked in and with, common themes in the sales process when you win new client logos, what are the kind of themes that you've picked up?

Nikki (14:10.937)
Yeah. Yeah.

Nikki (14:27.833)
So having a winning mindset and making sure that you embrace procurement early on, know what procurement value and learn what they're learning and educate yourself. This was game changing for me and negotiating at the right time and knowing when the right time is to do it well. Because if we as agency owners, leaders, founders don't speak the same language or learn what procurement are learning.

How on earth can we negotiate the same way? We talked about the crowdjit matrix last time you spoke, you know, the profit impact versus supply risk. Game changing for an agent to understand where they sit there and whether they're in a good or trickier negotiating position. You know, do you know your crowdjit matrix from your back? I've met a lot of people like, oh, not sure.

Mike (14:54.451)
Absolutely. We did. Yep.

Mike (15:04.435)
Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, when you map, I did it with an agency a month ago. We sat in a room and we mapped all their opportunities onto the Cryologic matrix about, you know, are you in the top right hand corner, the bottom left hand corner? And they were like, oh, we've never done this before. It's quite frightening. Because they ended up with an awful lot of opportunities that were in the, it's really a commodity purchase. And as a buyer,

when I'm buying a commodity, it's three bits and a buy. It's like, you know, you're all very similar. I can't tell you apart. I'm going to go for the lowest risk, best price that I can get on the best commercial terms. And that's why you end up in this horrific race to the bottom.

Nikki (15:35.545)
Mm -hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

Nikki (15:51.833)
And if founders could put this kind of analysis into their qualifying criteria, where do we sit? This is why knowing your ICP, what you're best to deliver at is so good because you created that natural scarcity, this top right box that is where the profit impact and the supply risk is to the buyer. And you're in a very different negotiating position. And that just gives you a hell of a lot of confidence to go, no, we can have a very strong, very creative conversation here, actually.

Mike (15:55.667)
Yeah, exactly.

Mike (16:04.339)
Correct.

Mike (16:14.675)
Correct, exactly, because it really matters to the buyer. So the next buyer, if something strategically important has a big impact on my profit and it's a really scarce supply that I'm going to buy, there aren't many agencies that can do this, I'll treat you very differently in the negotiation. I'll collaborate with you because it's really hard to find someone that can do what we're trying to do that has the impact that we're aiming for. It's so logical, but agencies don't see it that way.

Nikki (16:31.257)
Hmm. Hmm.

Nikki (16:41.465)
it is... and it's interesting because you know what the key things in terms of actually winning new logos is having that winning mindset and knowing this is a conversation that you can change and influence not that you just have to work with procurement at the end and get beaten up. No, no, no, we're miles away from that these days, absolutely miles. I was working with a really, really amazing client, they do incredibly high impact work and the procurement conversation was coming up at the end of the year and the idea at the time was it'll be alright, I'm hoping it'll be alright and my whole mindset is...

Mike (16:52.883)
Exactly.

Nikki (17:11.449)
Hope is not a winning strategy. Good God, can we please, can we please talk about this? We've got to be well prepared, we've got to plan in advance, we've got to know what may come up and we already agree what we are and aren't going to trade. Just doing that puts you in a better position.

Mike (17:12.851)
Hope's not a winning strategy, not really, no.

Mike (17:23.827)
Correct.

I mean, just trading, Nicky, the word trade, again, with agencies, I'm trying to ban the word discount. So I'm trying to go through the agency world and go, don't use discounting. It's a bad idea. It's just a really bad idea. Use trading, trade with people. And you can trade what seems like relatively small things in exchange for something else, but it sets a principle. I'm not just going to reduce the price because as a buyer I'll go, wonder how far you'll go. Let's see how far this will go.

Nikki (17:40.505)
Yeah? Yeah?

Nikki (17:54.105)
Mmm. Mmm.

Mike (17:57.139)
because you seem to keep on dropping the price. An agency said to me the other day they put 30 % discount on their proposals almost like at the get go. Now they don't do it all the time, but they did it on a few proposals. And I'm like, that's a really bad idea for a whole bunch of reasons. And they're like.

Nikki (18:07.865)
Wow.

Nikki (18:15.193)
What does it say about the confidence in your own product?

Mike (18:19.187)
Exactly. And the buyer knows it's already been price inflated. Because there's a whole game that goes on that buyers know that you've put extra in. So we take that out and then we get to where you thought you'd be in the first place. And that's a bad game. It's a really bad game.

Nikki (18:22.937)
Yeah. Yeah.

Nikki (18:35.129)
And I think this is where, if as agencies, we can educate ourselves much better as to what procurement and learning and understanding and how they want to talk, we'll just have much better conversations, rather than expecting procurement to understand everything about the creative process and how marketing works. Because lots of procurement people are buying many different things. I've sat in automotive manufacturers, often buy a wing mirror next, or a million wing mirrors, and it's not the same conversation, but it is because of their experience. So you have to know how to navigate that.

Mike (18:50.771)
Yeah, correct. Yep.

Mike (19:00.083)
Yeah. I mean, I, I talked to people about direct versus indirect procurement in automotive is a good example. If you, if you're a direct procurement person, you buy wing mirrors. But if you're indirect, you're buying marketing. But of course you move from direct to indirect as part of your career. And if you meet a, an ex direct procurement person in an indirect role, you're in for a rough ride.

Nikki (19:16.473)
Mm -hmm.

Nikki (19:25.689)
I think I said to this to you before, we were sitting in a windowless room and there was a light on the wall and he shunned it in my eyes and he said, take a million off your price. I was like, I don't really have the authority to do that. That's not going to happen. And this 16 car launch is a three years worth of work at stake here. So no, that's not going to happen. I'm going to have to refer to someone else. But I mean, to be able to even say that to someone is a very different buying process to, as we say, marketing services. So it's knowing who you're meeting. So the winning mindset is knowing who you're going to meet, what kind of conversation you need to have.

Mike (19:41.139)
Correct.

Mike (19:45.203)
Yeah. Correct.

Nikki (19:54.617)
of where you sit in the value process.

Mike (19:56.915)
That whole value thing is critical. Just as a quick kind of pause before the third question, the book you've written, just talk to me about the book. Where did the book inspiration come from? And what's the kind of essence of the book?

Nikki (20:09.113)
So it's called Super Engaged, and it's about how to transform business performance by putting people in purpose first. And it was very much off the back of the explosive growth that we had in the agency that enabled us to throw off enough cash, because we're creating value for clients, to create our own two SaaS technology products. We didn't want any investment for anybody external. We didn't want anyone else telling us what to do. But we created a lot of value to clients with those products, particularly in the PR and comms industry, all the while being one of the best places to work in the UK. So it was really balancing profit and people.

and I was standing on stages talking about it and people often asked, have you written a book? Would you write a book? And eventually, I don't know about you, I'm a natural talker rather than natural writer, but I bit the bullet and wrote the book. And it went out in 2018 and like it just was an absolute springboard for the agency, for the rest of the people, just as this is how we did it. All of the stuff that went wrong, you know, it was kind of warts and all, which is what a lot of people appreciate. And five, six years later, they're still getting in touch with me saying, can you help us do what you did because you could balance those difficulties. And there's a lot in there about...

Mike (20:46.227)
Yeah.

Mike (20:58.931)
Yep, definitely.

Nikki (21:07.961)
how to create value for the agency, how to have those value conversations, how to speak with procurement in a way that's gonna work for you. I don't know all the answers, but I've had a lot of experience by creating that, going back to that value and not getting into a race to the bottom, because that's so painful for everyone involved. And then when you've hit the bottom, you've got to deliver on it. You can't get your team awful.

Mike (21:15.411)
No, no.

Mike (21:27.091)
Yeah, exactly. When's the next book due out?

Nikki (21:30.489)
Well, I did a second one in November last year called Better Business on Purpose. And that's about looking at the value drivers in the business beyond agencies for any business. I wrote it with two co -authors, one who's an ex DJ and a DJ marketing director, one is a tech guy, and how you can look at every single value driver in your business and create more value, more future value for you and anybody who potentially may want to buy you.

Mike (21:32.947)
Ah, okay.

Mike (21:53.235)
Right, very good. Excellent. So definitely two books to go out and buy as agencies listening to this. So third question. When you're negotiating between kind of agencies and clients, how do you prepare? And specifically, let's get into that agency value piece. Because I think that's really, really often a missing piece about how you define that. How do you prepare when you're looking at negotiations in a spirit of collaboration rather than competition?

Nikki (21:57.817)
Hehehe

Mike (22:22.163)
Let's focus around that. How do you describe the value the agency is going to create and link it back to the fee?

Nikki (22:28.889)
Yes. So I think it's different depending on whether you are incumbent and it's come around for the three year cycle and you need to revisit procurement or it's a completely fresh. Let's look at if you're incumbent. So the situation with the client earlier this year, there was so much value that had been created, but it's never been captured anywhere. And what I really encourage my clients to do is have a value bank and capture every piece of positive feedback from procurement, from the rest of the marketing team, from customers, from clients to put into a document. So you've got somewhere to go back to when you're starting to prepare for this conversation to say, this is the value we have created.

Mike (22:56.435)
Exactly.

Nikki (22:58.777)
This is hard evidence. Things like if you are the incumbent, we've got a deep understanding of your business. We may have been in place longer than many of the team and that often happens. We have proven impact. If you've got the numbers to show it, brilliant. You should have if you're reporting the right way. We can join up areas and maximize the value of your budget, back to that value conversation. We can amplify the assets because we've created a lot of them. You're not going to lose loads of assets and things be obsolete in other people's data. No, no, we can help bring that to the fore.

Mike (23:13.491)
Exactly.

Nikki (23:26.777)
There's layers and layers and layers of value that you can actually bring forward. So long as you've been capturing it along the way and you regularly talk about this with your marketing or comms contact and ideally have them in the conversation with procurement. So it's a real value conversation. It doesn't get switched into something else. You stay in that value place.

Mike (23:33.203)
Yes.

Mike (23:41.299)
Correct.

Exactly. Very good. What about QBRs? I always think QBRs are a massive lost opportunity because procurement is normally in the room at the QBR because you're looking at SLAs. If agencies would just to every quarter take your advice, you capture what the value is that you've created each quarter, tangible and the intangibles, and that gets presented at the QBR so that procurement know about it. You've kept a record of it. Everyone's aware of it.

Nikki (24:13.305)
Yeah.

Mike (24:14.099)
And also, all the stuff you've done for free that was a favor, make sure there's a variation, but it's free of charge. And let's say we raised six variations this quarter, didn't charge you for any of them, and here's the value it created.

Nikki (24:20.025)
Yep.

Nikki (24:30.137)
Oh, I like the variations. I've called it value add, but variations is really good because it says there's a distinctive difference between what was briefed and what we did. Yeah. Okay. That's nice. Yeah. And I like to just add on that. So I've always liked to change QBR because it's quarterly business review, looking back to QBP, quarterly business planning. So we then go into the future. So it's the same data, but if we think about it with a future focus, we can then take the value into the future. And that's a really lovely conversation to have the clients, then they can translate it back into the business quite easily.

Mike (24:33.363)
Oh yeah? Yeah. Yeah.

Mike (24:46.675)
Yeah, exactly.

Mike (24:51.571)
Correct.

Mike (24:57.587)
Exactly. So you have a game of two halves, as I call it in the QBRs. So we do, we say, right, half of it is looking back. Did we do what we said we'd do? And half of it is looking forward. What are we going to do next quarter? What are your priorities? How do we need to change the budget allocations? Where's the value going to get created? It sounds so simple, but I don't think it's always practiced.

Nikki (25:16.025)
Yes.

Nikki (25:20.985)
No, because we live in the future in agencies and we forget to do those reviews that can form, you know, impact the future. We forget to do retrospectives on pitches, the amount of founders that have said to me, oh, we lose for different reasons all the time and we often come second. Oh, do you know how many people say that? You're losing for, there will be reasons that we're not winning. It could be back to qualifying, it could be back to how we're presenting, it could be back to not preparing the deal, but there will be reasons and let's find them. So let's review what's working and put it into the future to make it work better.

Mike (25:33.619)
Right?

Mike (25:46.643)
Exactly. Correct. Absolutely. So something I didn't ask you about. So this is something completely unprepared. But there's data that's out recently from, I've got at least two independent sources that we've done on a research based set of interviews and quant as well. So quant and qual. For the incumbent agency, so where you're the incumbent and it's a repitch the third year, on average,

66 % of the incumbents win. So that's come from two different quite big sources of data. So imagine if you're pitching for a piece of business as a new agency and you've been asked to go along in the RFP to pitch some business, you haven't bothered to find out who the incumbent is or how long they've been there, but there is an incumbent. Your probability of winning,

Nikki (26:21.113)
Mmm.

Mike (26:43.507)
where the incumbents in place and they've done a decent job, it works out at about 5 % or less, roughly, because the odds are stacked against you. Because you're not one of five or one of seven, you're really one of four or one of six, because the incumbents got this enormous advantage. Where do you, do you have any examples of where you've kind of seen an incumbent get knocked out, where they've been doing an okay job, but a new agency has actually come in and won?

Nikki (26:53.785)
Hmm.

Mike (27:14.227)
Just interested.

Nikki (27:14.905)
I think, yes, absolutely. I didn't know the stats were quite that damning. That's quite terrifying, isn't it? But you've got to change the odds. I mean, one of the reasons for doing the SAS technology products was so that we would have some proprietary technology to say, actually, we are the agency that created this. So Coverage Book enables you to carry out a review of all your coverage and present it to a client in a way that's got all the stats related to it. It's done in seconds as opposed to taking hours of sniffing things out of web pages and putting them in PowerPoint. So Coverage Book was created by the public.

Mike (27:19.123)
Yeah, they are pretty damning. Yeah.

Correct. You've got to change the odds.

Mike (27:40.883)
Yep. Brilliant.

Nikki (27:44.729)
And in pitches, other agencies were using our tech and saying that they're that. So if you actually then get the agency whose tech it is, who created it, who understand the value behind it and why they did it, and that kind of innovation and thinking, you get back into that top right hand corner in terms of scarcity and innovation, and you change the odds on whether you're going to win or not. And I think that's a massive sweeping statement because investing in tech is really hard and it doesn't always work.

Mike (27:49.139)
Aha!

Mike (27:53.395)
Correct.

Mike (28:00.211)
You do.

Mike (28:04.115)
You do.

Nikki (28:10.745)
But when it does and you've given yourself a way of changing the odds, you've got a different angle to go in on. If you're just answering the same RFP that the incumbent is and they've got all this weight behind them, you have to find a way to change the odds.

Mike (28:20.691)
Yeah, because they've got all this history. They've got the relationships, they've got all the data. They probably wrote, not directly, but they influenced the RFP or the client brief. So it's like, it's madness to think that they've not got a really strong hand. So you have to change the game. You've got to change the basis of competition. It's the only way you're going to break through by doing something very different.

Nikki (28:28.985)
Yeah.

Nikki (28:41.209)
Yes. Yes. And if you have people in your team that are industry experts on certain areas, personal branding is not something that I'm a massive fan of because it's not about the person, it's about the idea. But if they're an expert on that idea and the pitch is about that idea, you could change the game. If the incumbent doesn't have that person who's all about the idea, it's a very different conversation. That's one, tech is another. There's lots of things we can do differently. We can't just answer the briefing hope. Five percent. Oh my God, that's terrifying.

Mike (29:03.603)
It is.

Mike (29:08.691)
I mean, things like, yeah, so, and it is, it's, if the incumbent wins 66 % of the time and you're one of seven, you're now one of six. So the 33 % split between six of you, you know, it's basically 5%. So, and it was Blair Enns that pointed that out to me a while ago. And I ran the numbers and went, oh yeah, it's quite terrifying.

Nikki (29:16.569)
Mm.

Nikki (29:24.665)
Mm -hmm.

Nikki (29:32.409)
He's always so pointed and he's always 99 % of the time right. Yeah, yeah.

Mike (29:34.163)
Oh, he's great. He is indeed, correct. Exactly. I'll speak to him next week, so I'll remind him of that. But one thing also, Nicky, that you just mentioned there is the differentiator, is people like you. You speak on stage, you're an authority in your domain, you've written books. Clients go, okay, Nicky is super credible in this area, and she's either the overall lead or she's the...

Nikki (29:40.761)
Ha ha.

Mike (30:02.867)
CEO with the top level cover. We're talking to real thought leaders here who really understand their domain in a lot of detail, in huge amounts of detail and can back it up. Yeah, a client to buy into that.

Nikki (30:15.513)
And this is why it's so important that we are there talking about our ideas and sharing what matters and what's different and we don't outsource it all to a bot.

Mike (30:24.307)
Yeah, correct. Exactly. And the other thing that I'd say is, is the opposite flip of the coin is risk. A lot of, uh, well, procurement people, basically one of our key things is managing risk. So the switching risk is quite high with the new agency. So how do you reduce my risk? Well, you convinced me you've done this before. You've done it time and time again. You're an expert in your field. You've got proof of methodology. No one wins on methodology. No one ever wins because of methodology. It's nonsense.

Nikki (30:53.273)
No, there's always a seven stage diagram. Yeah, okay, move on. Yeah. Yeah.

Mike (30:55.603)
There is! Exactly! Or it's 5, or it's 9, or whatever it might be. Yes, they're all very nice, but they're not differentiators. Nicky, what else? Sorry, go on. No, carry on.

Nikki (31:04.025)
And I think, I think that what's fascinating there is if you are the incumbent, you've got to come with all that value, that weight, see the 66 % app, see it does go in your favor. And if you're not, show a comparison. So with clients like you, with a brief like this, we've got results like that for a client, hopefully the competitor, just to really hit it to them. And this is the kind of thing we will do on a range price of this, you know, but have the conversation with a lot of weight behind it, not just answer the RFP with hope. As we said, hope is not a strategy.

Mike (31:20.019)
Exactly.

Mike (31:29.587)
Exactly. Correct. Hope is not a strategy. Nicky, this has been amazing because you've got such a weight of experience in agency world. If you had like two or three things that you'd say to people practically after this, the agency leader should go away and think about that whole qualification and winning more briefs and RFPs. What would you say?

Nikki (31:56.249)
Embrace procurement and educate yourself. It's fascinating what procurement know. It's not that thing at the end of the process. It's the stuff all the way through. Fascinating. Educate yourself. Have a pitch doctor and get those feedback loops going. Make sure you get feedback at every stage of the process. And even if you are the second, ask for specific feedback. What was it that inspired you? What was it that turned you off? What was it you didn't hit on? What needs more time and attention? At the end of the day, bring the people part of it into the process, not just answering the brief. Just answering the brief and not someone bothering in the first place.

Mike (32:25.779)
Exactly. Nikki, it's been amazing. Where can people find out more about you?

Nikki (32:30.521)
So I'm on LinkedIn, Nikki Gattonby and superengaged .co .uk is my site. All there with the books and my consultancy and yes, I'm very happy to chat.

Mike (32:39.827)
Nikki, it's been amazing. Thanks ever so much. Right, if you stay there a minute, Nikki, I'm going to stop recording. What should happen is it should then say that it has uploaded it your side and my side.

Nikki (32:41.849)
Thanks so much, Mike.