Nothing lasts forever, or even five years. It’s not just a change of management but simple boredom (can’t they come up with something new?) that nudges a company to review its relationships with long-time suppliers. Also, there are always new players, friends of friends, and suggestions from high places (just hear them out) that puts a company in play for a new relationship.
What banks, management consultants, financial advisers, security contractors, or ad agencies bidding for an account call a “pitch”, their clients refer to internally as a “beauty contest,” or a swimsuit competition.
The hopeful bidder trots out its credentials and awards it has won, what it has done for other clients (with some semblance of confidentiality maintained) and what it intends to do for its prospect. There is an earnest attempt to show a deep understanding of the target’s industry and the problems facing it. The latter has to be carefully treaded, as it may sound too offensive — your competitor is having you for breakfast.
Beauty contestants would never set out to deflate the egos of the judges. But this is what pitchers for business do right away. In the guise of research from focus groups selected for their animosity to the target company, the bidder weaves findings that can be summarized in one sentence — “Your company needs help, and there’s no time to waste.”
Radical solutions are advanced to address the symptoms. Seeming to diagnose terminal illness, the bidder offers a cure if only the patient can accept the equivalent of chemotherapy… and pay for it? The panic scenario is invoked — your corporate life is ticking away.
But can the diagnosis turn off the patient? There is a possibility of that. Clue: The panel is already jotting down negative scores after such a situation analysis. (Who let these morons in?)
Presenters are able to read faces. Just because the “big idea” is flopping around, and overturning furniture like a wounded elephant doesn’t mean it is possible to change gears and be a little daintier. The different creative treatments are variations on the focus-group theme. The hole is dug deeper and deeper. The scenarios get darker. The panel members are texting away and looking at the distance. (This stand-up routine isn’t getting any applause.)
Beauty contestants move through their paces on stage with metronomic precision, not allowed dawdling and wasting time. Not so for bidders. While they are given a time limit of an hour for presentation, they go slide after slide presuming the same enthusiasm from their audience as they themselves try to project. After all, presenters worked on these slides for three days without sleeping. Let this smirking panel be inflicted a fraction of their ordeal.
Bidders do not trot out on stage simultaneously as regular beauty contestants do to facilitate comparison and rating. Corporate contestants go in one after the other as similarities of the slides (and even the jokes) are inflicted on an increasingly bored and testy panel. (Can we go straight to the swimsuit portion?)
Because of the serial presentation, comparisons and judging can only be made at the end when the early entries fade in a hazy soup. Rating is often done against some personal abstract standard — the first team’s blazers looked newly bought.
The evaluation panel is studied to find out which of the supposedly equal votes have more weight. The Fence Sitter’s Rule on evaluation committees state that, “number of questions asked and the loudness of their delivery are inversely proportional to the decision making weight of the panelist.” Thus, the quiet one asking not a single question needs to be watched — is he smiling or smirking?
Here are some distress signals to watch out for: Shifting in the seats, constant checking of the watch, texting of the man in the middle seat (the one facing the screen), and loud conversations at the fringes while the hot stuff is trotted out (Do you really think our women’s volleyball team is competitive?) and long toilet breaks.
It is a rule that the losers get the verdict first — I liked your effort but your ideas are too abstract. Your slides show the influence of Kandinsky’s early works. Anyway, the swimsuit was not designed for a beauty contest. It was intended for diving into the water to find out… if you sink or swim.
A. R. Samson is chair and CEO of Touch DDB.
