In our new business conversations, one activity has always had more airtime than any other. Pitching.

Back in 2020, when we started to experience a real change in the status quo, we declined to pitch for new business. Not because we didn’t want new clients but because we’d started to feel that the pitch process wasn’t a great way to begin a working relationship. For either us or for the client.

The all-too familiar scenario…a pitch is called, the best people come together and everyone works incredibly hard for weeks. Lots of exciting, speculative thinking without real experience of the client, their people or how they tick as a team or an organisation. There’s always a beautifully produced presentation.

And then you either win or, two out of three times on average, you don’t.

For some, the successful teams who worked together often move back to their normal accounts or start on the next opportunity and a new team picks up the account. The client’s now working with people they haven’t met and wondering what happened.

We tried something different. Now, when a potential client approaches us to pitch, we suggest starting with a small project instead. Something with a real brief, a real deadline and actual work to do. That way they get to see how we think, communicate and how we handle feedback. And we get to understand them properly too. Testing the chemistry on a real scenario outside the theatre of the pitch room.

It’s a low-risk way for both sides to find out if we’re a good fit before there’s a commitment to something bigger. We sometimes suggest a session where we’ll work through a live problem and they can see how we tackle a challenge in real time. We love to build relationships in person and it always felt like the pitch didn’t represent the reality of doing business together.

For us, the new approach has worked well. Several of those small first projects have grown into long-term partnerships with clients where we’ve become a trusted strategic partner and their marketing team’s twelfth player.

It’s always been about client collaboration. And with the new, project-based approach, we’ve focused more on growing our network of partners. Being able to spot added-value opportunities early in the process, even at initial problem stage, has allowed us to provide more complete solutions. This has been of real value in the PR space for the clients who operate in niche markets.

We understand that some clients need to run a formal process, for procurement reasons, internal politics or because it’s what they’re used to. It’s not always been the best approach for us, and for those clients who are willing to try a different way, we think we’ve found something better than a pitch.

A real start.