A friend, honestly, who shall remain nameless, told me recently that his web agency were onto the shortlist for a largish project… a shortlist of seven! Down from a staggering 14!
Now, of course it makes sense when buying in expensive services to show due diligence, cover your bases, research what’s on offer and see a number of companies, but 14 seems a bit steep to me, knowing the nameless company for which nameless person is pitching for.
In terms of time spent alone….
I imagine each of the agencies pitch documents would be read by at least one person.
14 x 30 minutes
The pitches themselves, I guess, might have 3 people present and take an hour each.
3 x 14 hours
The meeting afterwards to discuss which are the hot contenders would be at least an hour.
3 x 1 hour
Not taking into account the countless hours put in by the pitching companies time, in mythical man hours, that’s 52 hours, which is web agency terms is two weeks work (only kidding!) spent on the first round alone.
If you then imagine that the second round might be more detailed and involve more people, looking into figures and finances, asking for clarification etc. then it is reasonable to suggest that the time it takes for simply hiring the right agency for you could be well over a month.
A month’s work to hire an agency? I don’t think many people would put that much effort into buying other expensive items, like cars… not solid hard work. Even when buying a house, which can be a lot of work the idea of a month’s slog would put me off moving ever again. If you are commissioning an IT system in healthcare or planning a big corporate launch then of course, spending that amount of time makes relative sense.
What could be done to make the whole process of pitching more transparent, because, to be honest, if I was invited to pitch with 13 other people, I wouldn’t bother. A bit like a game of pitch poker, if the agencies involved knew who and how many they were up against, half would fold… which would be a huge cost saving for all concerned…
If the pitches themselves were open and transparent, perhaps a standard of sorts would emerge,, at least in terms of checkboxes that need ticking, to simplify the pitch into merely “What value add do you bring to project?”
It does make me think, as a company hiring a web agency for a large project, what would be a reasonable number of companies to see before you can make up your mind, knowing that you have made an informed decision?
p.s There is of course, especially in dot.com boom times, the deplorable practise of inviting huge numbers of agencies to pitch for a project in order to steal all the wisdom and good ideas presented. This is a scam I’ve heard about from lots of people in the industry and is typically used by the greedy and the clueless.
I once walked into a pitch with the same nameless person and he/she asked how many other companies were pitching. 12 they said, upon hearing he/she got up and walked out. I was kind of embarrassed and excited but it was an important lesson in knowing when you are wasting your time. Even if we had have been head and shoulders above our fellow pitchers the chances of getting the gig would have been statistically slim.
Anyway, good luck nameless pitcher! May their shortlists get shorter and still have you on it.
You forgot to add no mention of a budget and deliberately vague requirements put together by external consultants with a 30K feet view of the problem the project is supposed to solve. I recently asked a Business Analyst who was putting together a RFI why he wouldn’t put in what our preferred technology platform was, but then bother about requirements such as “System must be available 24/7″. Would you get the 9 to 5 on weekdays version (doubling as a victorian mill) for half price I wondered? He just gave me that “Job security” smile. I felt really sorry for the sales guys beauty parading their product as their assumptions and desperate guesses (what else could it be?) got shot to pieces in each presentation. In the end it was simply a matter of picking the one that failed the least. Two of the vendors actully replied and said they wouldn’t touch the project with a barge pole without more information, count us out. Seems to me that these guys would have been the right people to speak to, rather than go with a vendor desperate for the first paycheque and just watching the project turn into a deathmarch.
In the end it was simply a matter of picking the one that failed the least.
And for the most part, as you say, the points of failure are often spurious. I’ve worked with people that insist the project is open source, or written in a certain language but have no idea of the particular challenges that brings to their project… or really why they are asking for it other than it seems like a good idea.
And yeah… when a project is deliberately vague in terms of budget and requirements there’s usually a rat-like odour lurking somewhere.
… but on the otherhand it’s nice when you are only asked for a system to be running 24 days/7 months a year
… I always agree to that one.
“what would be a reasonable number of companies to see before you can make up your mind, knowing that you have made an informed decision?”
There are a crowd of women in the next room, one-by-one they come in and you can choose to marry or reject, but once gone, no change of mind. How many do you reject before choosing the best so far?
This is the marriage problem and the answer is 1 over e – about 37%. http://plus.maths.org/issue3/puzzle/stopping/solution.html
Have I proved to you that there are no uninteresting numbers?
Hmm – I wonder who the mystery agency was? :-p
I think Tom that you have underestimated the work involved in responding to the pitch. Suppose this was a major strategic piece of work with a potential budget in the hundreds of thousands. How much time should an agency take to prepare its response (even if it is 1 of 14)?
If we spend 3 hours we might as well not bother. Instead we typically spend ten times that and that includes a pre-meeting with the client, preparation of a 20-40 page pictch document (written from scratch) and 2-3 visual concepts.
I wonder what the average pitch investment is these days?
Jonathan