new business pitch | Air Canada

Changing perceptions means

winning a new account

One of the most important tasks for a Business Narrative Strategist to take on is to change the perception of an organization by changing its narrative. Here’s an example.

I was working for one of Canada’s largest agencies (located in Montreal) as a freelancer, and we were pitching Air Canada. Not the travel side of things, but the maintenance and repair side of things, which is an incredibly important and lucrative business.

I was asked to write the pitch document. Sure, I said, but I want to be part of the pitch. Agencies hate to do this, because they like to pretend that they have all the expertise in house. But they said yes.

To understand how I proceeded, you have to first understand how agencies are rated in pitches. There are usually 4 or 5 categories that are graded 1 to 5, and made public beforehand. Things like:

• Experience
• Understanding the Mandate
• Capacity (can the agency handle the mandate)
• Strategy
• And finally, Creative.

Creative is the Pandora’s box of most pitches. Because ad agencies are notorious for wanting to portray themselves as creative first, everything else, second. But judging creative is subjective. A client may just fall in love with a given tag line, a visual, a whatever.

On the other hand, judging things like Capacity, Understanding the Mandate and Experience is much more rational, and this agency had those categories covered in spades.

10 questions a day puts the client in play

One feature of Requests for Proposals is that the potential client always says: If you have any questions to ask, we’d be pleased to answer. Most agencies don’t bother: they believe they know it all already.

I put on my Business Narrative Strategist hat and told the Account Supervisor that I would be preparing 10 questions a day for the next week for her to send to the client. I began to delve into the arcana of aircraft maintenance and repair. What Swiss Air and Lufthansa were doing in Europe. What the different stages of aircraft maintenance were. The lore of metal fatigue. The formulations of deicing fluid.

Hitting the pitch out of the park

The day of the pitch came, and we pitched. And pitched well.

As we were leaving the room I leaned over to the Account Supervisor and said:
“We just won the pitch.”

“What? What are you talking about?”

“I just heard the female client whisper to the guy at her side: ‘They know more about aircraft maintenance and repair than we do’.”

The marks came out the next week. Indeed, another agency had scored 5 out of 5 on Creativity, while we only received 4 out of 5. But in every other category, we had fives across the board. And we had won the pitch by three points.

Three points that meant $200K per annum to the agency. Investing in a Business Narrative Strategist was a wise decision – even though I had yet to be paid.

How had the narrative changed?  By refusing to fall into the “Creative first” trap, the agency had proved itself to be incredibly thorough and utterly reliable, values that far outweighed mere creativity.