Don’t NDA me. We are building a bond here, aren’t we?
Digital Marketer? I bet you have been faced with signing an NDA before, haven’t you? At least you’ve heard of it. It is quite common for companies that are seeking for services, such as Digital Marketing, to ask for an NDA in order to work with them. Yes, you’ve already struggled with an RFI, then an RFP and just when you thought everything was going well you are faced with the last acronym, the NDA.
I’ve been in both sides of the table by now. I’ve asked for digital marketing agencies to sign an NDA for me to disclose information that could help in the pitch process and signing NDAs to be able to understand the full depth of what it is being asked by the client. Disclosing market share, targets, business KPIs and sensitive information isn’t a thing to be taken lightly. It has to be done, period.
Let’s see it the other way around, the agency side. Disclosing nonpublic information to the company you are willing to work for has some disadvantages. It is a legal process and it may take some time to go through it with dilligence. In big companies and agencies, it may take more time to get documents signed that the pitch process itself. Only by using an NDA template, the process gets faster. But not everyone has an NDA template and sometimes you are asked to bring the NDA with you, rather than signing the one given by the company.
What about trust? What if I come with a great creative pitch deck and find the utmost solution for your needs? I firmly believe that somewhere over the rainbow someone has the same idea that we did. The hard part is to execute that idea the way it was thought. Perhaps you are pitching to a Forbes 100 company and you don’t win. While browsing, six months later, you find that the company you pitched for, is executing 95% of the idea you presented. What are you supposed to do? I think that you should embrace it and move on. You are definitely on the right track. Something happened and your agency wasn’t selected for whatever the reason. NDAs protect the information being shared to come up with an interesting proposal, it doesn’t care about your well being, most of the times.
We are in Lean-something times. Why don’t we just trust each other and work for the best outcome? We, as an agency, are trying to build a bond with you, the client. We want to work with you, not only for you. We want to be partners in this journey and for that we need your trust.
