After a chat with someone the other day, I recalled that the most commonly given answer when we’d asked clients why we’d won a new business pitch was that we aced the question-and-answer session. On reflection, two key points emerged:
- Ask clients why you won or lost the pitch. I never had a (prospective) client who minded giving feedback (although on a few occasions I had the distinct impression it wasn’t particularly honest), and it gave my teams and me the opportunity to learn from the experience. Clients were usually particularly pleasantly surprised when we asked why we’d won, if there was anything that hadn’t really impressed, and how we could have done better.
- Practice your Q&A session. Prospective clients expect your main presentation to be well-presented, polished, logical and slick; but they view the Q&A as the opportunity to expose the personalities of your pitch team (who they will often request is the team who would work on the project), dig down into the details of the proposal, and really test your team’s expertise; so it’s as important to get this bit right. Towards the end of our pitch preparation process, we used to brief someone from the agency who hadn’t been involved in the pitch, give them the tender documents to read, then run at least one mock Q&A session. This gave us the chance to really tease out which questions would be the most challenging to us, and how best to handle them.
