You Were Born to Pitch Badly

You were born to pitch badly.

Not because you lack intelligence, creativity or genuine expertise.

But because if you’re an agency leader, you’re stuck with pitching abstract services and this requires a kind of communication that runs completely counter to your instincts as a professional communicator.

In other words, what you sell is, at its core, an idea.

Yes, the output may be a finished campaign or a brand identity or a website, but what makes those outputs valuable is the specific way you and your team unpacked a problem and arrived at a solution. 

I think that’s what your prospects are actually buying when they’re thinking about hiring your agency.

And here's why that falls afoul of our instincts: when you try to describe something that’s intangible—like how you come up with a great idea—you naturally reach for language that operates at the same level of abstraction. 

You say you're innovative, insight-driven, relentlessly curious, or fiercely independent. 

The language feels true to you—and it probably is true—but it asks your prospect to do a lot of cognitive work, because abstract language is genuinely harder to process than concrete language. 

Because of that, it leaves less of an impression. And it's harder to hold onto.

That’s exactly what we don’t want when we invest time, money and emotional energy pouring our hearts out into a pitch.

I don’t say this to discourage you (most agency leaders I know could use more encouragement to get out there and drum up leads than less!) but I think we’re more likely to fix a problem if we can get to the underlying cause rather than try to paper over symptoms.

And in this case, here’s what’s happening:

Our brains process concrete language differently than abstract language—and concrete wins. 

Have you read Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow?

His central argument is that we operate with two cognitive systems. System 1 is fast, automatic, and unconscious. It runs constantly, assesses faces, recognizes patterns, and forms first impressions without effort or energy. System 2 is slow, deliberate, and analytical. It’s the thinking we deploy when weighing a complex decision—like whether one agency should be hired over another. It costs us energy and so we engage it as rarely as possible.

Concrete language is processed by System 1. It's fast, it triggers imagery, it requires no effort to decode. 

Abstract language, by contrast, requires System 2 to engage. The prospect has to slow down, work out what "fiercely independent" actually means for them, and construct an interpretation from scratch. And as Kahneman shows, System 2 is a lazy controller that doesn't like to expend effort. Given any option to avoid that work, it will. 

So when an agency fills a pitch with abstract claims, they're essentially asking a prospect's System 2 to do a lot of work on their behalf. And System 2 would rather not. The prospect doesn't consciously decide to disengage—they just do, because that's how the brain is built.

Okay, so now that you know why you communicate in ways that don’t benefit you, how will you start to change your behavior?

Here’s a quick exercise: 

Take an abstract claim you're making— we're innovative, we're insight-driven, whatever it is—and ask yourself what that actually looked like the last time it was true. 

What was the client's situation? What did you notice that someone else might have missed? What did you do about it? Don’t be afraid to get literal. In fact, embrace it

The answers to those questions, not an abstract claim, are your actual message.