Agencies. Put your deck away.

“Send us over your creds”.

“We’d like you to present your creds”.

“Our MD will need to see your creds before the meeting”.

Any of these sound familiar? How do you typically respond?

If you are anything like the many agency leaders and business developers I speak with, you eagerly oblige. After all, it’s a positive buying signal, right? Maybe. But often not.

When it comes to the agency / client ecosystem, there are certain processes and behaviours that are deeply engrained, even though they don’t really benefit either party. The ‘show and tell’ presentation is one of these.

From the client’s perspective, what they want and what they actually need can often be quite different.

They want you to talk through your clients, case studies, team, approach, processes, awards and all manner of other, largely irrelevant tosh because this is ‘just how things are done’ when it comes to this agency lark.

What they actually need is for the agency to ‘own’ the process and discover (fairly quickly) if there is an opportunity to work together (to the mutual benefit of both parties). This is rarely achieved when the agency talks at the prospect for half an hour.

In my view, agencies need to be the drivers of change when it comes to this sort of thing so let’s look at a few specific situations when your creds deck should stay well away:

When asked to send it via email.
Imagine the scenario. After gently nurturing your dream client for months you finally get through.

“Thanks for your call. I haven’t any time now but send me your creds. I’ll take a look and come back to you”.

With your thoughts already turning to celebratory champagne as the signed contract lands on your desk, you dutifully send them over. Game on.

What are the chances of the prospect looking through the deck and getting back in touch? Pretty much zero.

What are the chances you’ll spend the next year chasing them? Very high.

If a prospect asks you to send over your creds during the very early stages of engagement, it’s a fob off. It’s a polite way of telling you to bugger off.

You should therefore be polite in return and push back. If you genuinely believe you can help (beyond “we can definitely get better results than your current agency”), tell them you don’t have a standard creds deck. I never had one in my agency days.

Say you’d be happy to share some information but want to be sure it’s relevant. Ask what’s on their mind, what they’re working on right now or what they’d find of interest. Ask them anything that strikes up a conversation (or allows you to book a call / meeting for a later date).

You’ll either quickly discover that they’re not interested right now, which saves you wasting your time OR you’ll create an opportunity to send something that’s actually relevant, helping you move the discussion to the next stage.

When meeting a prospect for the first time.
You’ve gone one better than getting through to your key contact. You’ve secured an appointment.

Introductions quickly out the way, the laptop comes out and you talk through your creds, leaving no stone unturned as you elaborately describe the agency’s history, approach, processes, team, clients, case studies and, of course, awards.

The prospect barely says a word, clearly in awe.

“That all sounds very interesting, we’ll be in touch” they say.

You never hear from them again.

There is a time and place for talking about your agency. However, it comes a distant second to talking about the prospect; THEIR objectives, THEIR issues, THEIR metrics for success, THEIR, THEIR, THEIR!

As a rule of thumb, whatever you say about your agency, your approach, your clients and so on should be contextually relevant. Any solutions you introduce should be directly related to an issue the prospect is facing (and therefore the problem you are solving).

You cannot possibly do this without taking the time to get to the know the prospect; where they are trying to get to, the challenges they are facing, what success looks like and their concerns, anxieties and motivations, for example.

So, in landing an appointment, leave the creds deck alone. Instead, focus your efforts on posing interesting and challenging questions. This will lead to a much better outcome for you and the prospect.

When pitching.
After starting work with a new client last year, I reviewed one of their pitch decks. It contained 60 slides. Probably too many but not a crime in itself. What made me fall off my metaphorical chair was that the opening 40 slides were all about the agency. Slide after slide of mind numbing guff, entirely irrelevant to the prospect and readily available on the agency’s website should the prospect choose to bore themselves to death. Unfortunately for them, they were not given that choice.

Needless to say, the agency lost this particular pitch.

A good presentation tells a story. Not about the agency but about the prospect.

Having got to this stage, the prospect should have already done their fair share of due-diligence. It shouldn’t be necessary to tell them a load of stuff they already know.

I’m not saying there isn’t a time and place for an ‘about us’ section. There is — at the back of the deck in an Appendix. Come the end of the presentation, ask the prospect if there is anything they’d like to know about the agency that hasn’t already been covered and then jump to the relevant slide.

This means anything you say about the agency is there to fill the gaps in knowledge, not fill minds with irrelevant drivel.

Look, I have nothing against agency creds, per se. It’s the often lazy approach to how they are used that makes them a near pointless sales ‘tool’.

Think about how you react when you meet someone for the first time and all they do is talk about themselves. They don’t ask you a single question. It’s all about them.

I know what I do. I turn off. I think about other stuff. I find my excuses and I scarper.

Are your prospects doing the same?