« Opportunity knocks: Get a (second) life | Main | Arbitrage, or Sabotage? »
April 24, 2006
Five strikes, you're out
I’m on my way back from another new business pitch. Every time I do this I think to myself, “I can’t believe businesses make business decisions this way.”
Picture this. Someone from procurement (a contract wrangler), someone senior from HR (a budget holder) someone mid-level from brand (a gatekeeper) and a group of eight or ten other folks (the decision team) are called together by a recruiting manager or director—the only one with real skin in the game—to evaluate agencies.
With the exception of the brand person—who may or may not be there, may or may not interact with agencies and generally sees “HR” and “creative” as antithetical concepts—and the recruiter, of course, it’s likely that none of these people have any idea what an agency does, how it does it, why it does it, or how to evaluate the merit of the claims they’ll hear about the quality of the creative, service or talent the agency could deliver. But I also can’t believe agencies spend so much time, effort and money trying to win what often ends up being an empty bag.
Our pitch was number three of five. Let me repeat that slowly: number three of five. Today.
What does that mean? That the hiring organization doesn’t have a prayer of making a rational decision.
Why? If you’ve ever sat through a pitch you know the rules of the game. The agency tries to cover every single detail from the RFP—and smile doing it. That’s a lot of data coming at the client. Too much, in fact, to hold on to anything but the pet issues each person walks in to the room with. And this is a huge problem. The decision’s typically arrived at somewhat democratically—but because the number of people with the necessary insight is a numerical minority, it’s typically a parliamentary question of who’s the best consensus builder, not of which team’s offered the best match for the client’s needs, that wins the day.
That’s why, before and after the formal pitch, the agency’s working the room, trying to make contact, make connections, figure out who’s got decision-making authority, who the key influencers are. Bill Zabit’s fond of saying, “people make decisions emotionally, instantly, then look for rational reasons to support the decisions they made.” That’s certainly true in the pitch environment.
Agencies know this. Maybe that’s why these pitches so often feel like chemistry contests or dating games. But before you correct me that this is “just the nature of business,” consider this: it’s the hiring business, not the agency, that’s set this dynamic in place. And the hiring business can make better choices.
I can’t speak for every agency out there but I’m confident almost all of them would agree that this process doesn’t serve any of us well. (Given TMP’s strong track record of winning in head-to-head contests, I’m fairly sure our competition likes them even less.)
So what’s a better alternative? Well, here are two simple suggestions:
1. Abandon the “RFP+pitch” process. Organizations should make their decisions on the basis of one or the other—but not both. There’s no way to do a comprehensive RFP response justice in a pitch—and if the purpose of the pitch is to see who the pitch team is, how they think, you’d be better served by giving them a unique challenge and seeing how they solve it. You’d also be better served by having the evaluation team comprised of just folks from recruitment, brand and communications. Anyone else is just too far away from their knowledge base to provide the kind of insight you want to make decisions around.
2. Unless you’re all recruiting your replacements don’t ask for—or accept—spec creative. Remember, the target is the candidates you’re trying hard to attract, not recruiters. Agencies know that cute or aspirational concepts make recruiters smile and they don’t yet know your talent or your business. So why would you have them spend time creating creative you’re never going to run. (You’d never run spec creative, would you? Didn’t think so!)
Believe it or not, these two small changes would create a huge improvement in both the selection process and in the partnership that follows.
Posted by davidkippen at April 24, 2006 04:49 PM
Comments
I spent far too many years filling out RFI's to get on vendor lists and then laughing when the RFP list was the same every year.
Every once in a while, I'd get a little guerilla and go around our RFP -writing process, inviting decision makers to come tour my offices to find out what my recruiters could do.
Not one decision maker, ever, had been into the offices of the people they were trusting to deliver top quality candidates.
As I did the normal staffing thing of swithing agencies every few years, I was surprised to find out that the "national" firms often had the fewest number of people doing the work.
That certainly wasn't the impression back at client headquarters.
So another suggestion, is to focus on making your RFP list presentations only after extensive interviews at a vendor location.
After all, that's where the work is done.
And bravo to you for calling it out.
Posted by: James Durbin at April 25, 2006 08:26 PM