Why The Pitch MD?
My name is Tom (Hi, Tom!) and I help sellers with their pitches to ad agencies and brand marketers.
Why did I decide to launch a business like this? That’s easy.
In my role as a founder of Underscore - an ad agency I founded in 2002 - I found my planning team giving sellers advice to the media and technology companies that would pitch us on a daily basis. You could say we developed a reputation for giving frank and helpful advice, to the point that sellers would often come deliver a pitch at Underscore before going to the big holding company agencies, knowing that we would help them refine their pitch.
Later, Underscore put together day-long Innovation Workshops and Media Days on behalf of clients. I was surprised by the amount of work the planning and account teams would put into these showcase events. What surprised me was how much time went into aligning presentations to the audience that would receive them, in comparison to the scheduling and logistics work. We put a lot more time into the former than we did into the latter. That wowed me.
When I looked at how much work we put into tailoring presentations for brand marketers, and the amount of advice we were dispensing to sellers on how to pitch companies like ours, I had an “a-ha!” moment.
What if I could help media and technology sellers pitch to brand marketers and agencies? What if that pitch advice were delivered by experienced brand marketers and agency pros? What if I could deliver strategic advice and re-craft pitches with a simple fixed-price product that’s easy for CROs to buy?
To be clear, I’m not talking about the “don’t slouch, and project from the diaphragm”-type presentation coaching that everyone has been through.
I’m talking about aligning presentations to your brand marketing or ad agency audience, whether you’re selling media, ad tech or marketing tech.
Most of the presentations we worked on with sellers ended up being heavily revised for a lot of the same reasons. Those include:
Delivering unclear value propositions
Getting hung up on tangential details
Relating concepts poorly
Failing to differentiate
There are many more, but these were the most common. Our perspective, however, was able to get presentations back on track and heads nodding in meetings again. We’ve seen thousands of pitches, we know what works, and we can deliver not only the strategic advice, but the in-the-trenches revisions to materials you need in order to succeed.
I look forward to taking you through some of our presentation “war stories” over the coming weeks. I hope we can work together.
