The most persuasive thing you can say might be the thing you're afraid to admit
When you walk into a pitch meeting, you strive to demonstrate that your agency operates at the highest level of excellence.
You lead with the victories, smooth the rough edges, and gloss over gaps in experience or qualifications.
It's understandable. Why would you want to point out your flaws and risk losing the business? The instinct is to look as strong as possible, because strength is what wins.
Except the research doesn't back this up.
Why admitting a weakness makes people trust you
I've been rereading Robert Cialdini's book Influence and in his chapter on authority, he makes a point that runs counter to the way most agencies pitch. We tend to assume it's to our advantage to present a version of ourselves that has never had to learn anything the hard way.
But there's a body of research that says a communicator who references a weakness early on is seen as more honest. And, once that honesty is established, the audience is more likely to believe the strengths that follow.
The sequence is the trick. You name the flaw first, while it can still buy you credibility, and then you place your strongest argument in the moment right after, where it lands more deeply because it's now coming from someone the audience has decided to trust.
Cialdini cites Warren Buffett as a master of this. Each year, when Buffett wrote the letter to shareholders at the front of his annual reports, he would include a mistake the company made that year. In fact, if there wasn't a big enough mistake to highlight, he'd go back to another year.
This happened in 2016, a year so good there were no real missteps to point to. He went back and flagged what he termed "the egregious error" of buying Dexter Shoe for $434 million, a stake whose value went straight to zero, and the compounding mistake of having paid for it in Berkshire stock, something he promised never to do again.
He made this admission because he knew it would deepen the trust of Berkshire Hathaway shareholders and position the stellar year in a way that was even more impressive.
Most agencies do the opposite. And a prime illustration is the typical agency case study.
Where this goes wrong: the case study
I happen to think the case study is one of the most powerful tools an agency has to sell itself. It's the closest thing you have to proving that you can do the work being asked of you, and it's the one place where you get to show a prospect what it's actually like to be your client.
The problem is that most case studies are written as if nothing ever went wrong. The challenge sounds more like the solution than a problem to be solved. The solution describes a friction-free journey to a finished campaign. And of course the results are stellar (or they are a set of numbers so grandiose to appear to be stellar).
A good case study is a story, and a story only holds our attention because things don't go smoothly for the hero. There are setbacks and surprises and moments where it isn't clear how the hero gets out of a tight spot. That's what makes us lean in.
In an agency case study, the client is the hero and you're the guide, the one who knows the way through. But, you can't be an effective guide if you've written a version of events where there was never anything to get through in the first place.
The parts that demonstrate your character and build trust are the mistakes, the course corrections, the moment you realized the first approach wasn't working and changed it.
So your case studies are a great place to practice this. The more challenging, but also more valuable situation is the pitch itself.
Naming the elephant in the pitch
Being open about your flaws is especially powerful in a pitch situation where it's likely your audience is well aware of them.
Here's an example —
Say you're the smallest agency in the final round, up against shops three times your size, and you know you're a legitimate contender. You also know there are people on that committee who are nervous about your headcount. What I often see is a reflex to go in and try to look bigger than you are, to talk past the concern and hope nobody raises it.
Don't. Instead, name it before they do.
Naming it costs you almost nothing, because you're not handing them new information. The only new thing they learn is that you're honest enough to say something like this:
"You may be wondering whether an agency our size can handle a business this big. It's a fair question, and you should be asking it."
And then you bridge to the strength that makes their worry beside the point. Maybe it's that the senior people in the pitch are the same senior people who'll run the account, with none of the layers and hand-offs you'd get at a larger agency.
Two things happen when you do this. The first is that you take the air out of the objection by saying it out loud, which is far more disarming than pretending it doesn't exist. The second is that you crack open a conversation, and that's the part agencies underestimate.
Pitch meetings are notoriously one-sided. The agency presents for an hour and the client sits there stone-faced and offers nothing, no questions, no reactions, and you walk out with no idea where you stand. Sometimes that's a procurement tactic. Sometimes it's because the agency built a presentation that left no room for the client to say anything back.
When you say "here's where you might have a concern about us, is that a concern for you?" it's very hard for a client not to respond. Most of the time they'll tell you they're glad you brought it up, and now you're in a dialogue instead of a monologue. And it is so much easier to handle an objection in the room, while you can read the reaction and respond to it, than to lose the business three days later to a doubt you were never given the chance to address.
If you need more proof this isn't just a nice idea, Cialdini provides it in a place where the stakes are high: the courtroom. He points out that trial attorneys who admit a weakness in their case before an opposing attorney can point to it are seen as more credible, and win more often.
Clients don't buy into a story of invincibility. They want to get to know an agency that they can picture working with, flaws and all, because they know they can be trusted to have the client's best interest at heart.
So the next time you're building a pitch, don't shy away from the weakness you're hoping nobody asks about. Put it on the table yourself. You're more likely to build trust and assert more control over the conversation.