How Fitch Makes Its (Fast) Pitch

Clients expect you to know their business. But now they also want your best judgment about how to make it faster, smarter, and better. Instead of showing off how much you know about them, use your background data to support the ideas that you'll feature in the pitch. "The new pitch is about intellectual capital," says Tim Straker, who is managing partner for Fitch Columbus. "In the past, the pitch was 70% legwork or research and 30% instinct. Now it's 60% instinct and 40% legwork."

Your instincts will guide you to the big "aha" -- the clincher of an idea that will either win you the business or will, as Eric Ashworth, chief marketing officer of Fitch Americas, describes it, "get you pushed out of the room." Consider Fitch's pitch to a well-known global cosmetics giant. Fitch had been asked to present its credentials for possible work. Because the pitch wasn't for a specific purpose, it could have ended up being yet another boring recital of Fitch's past work or an attempt to show off how much the designers knew about the cosmetics industry.

Instead, Fitch shot a documentary-style video titled "What Would You Attempt to Do If You Knew You Could Not Fail?" The video chronicled the dreams, fantasies, and hopes of all kinds of women. For both the client and for Fitch, "it was about challenge and risk," Ashworth says. The pitch also went beyond the original creative brief. The powerful idea of challenge was the big "aha" that Fitch wanted to present to the cosmetics company.

Fitch's pitch was fast -- but also subtle. It showed the cosmetics company's executives that the firm understood their female market in a way that was smarter and more profound than traditional analyses or data-driven assessments. The women in the video never talked about the way that they looked or what kind of makeup they used. Instead, the women fantasized about hiking to the top of a mountain or learning to speak Italian.

Even deeper was the message for the corporation. "We were not just saying that they should challenge their customers," Ashworth says. "We were saying that they should also challenge the company and the brand. We wanted to inspire the corporation to think about what it would do if it knew it couldn't fail."

The umpire's call on Fitch's risky pitch? The design firm won the chance to work with one of the biggest cosmetics companies in the world.

3. Make your presents make a point.

A lot of salespeople send thank-you notes or gifts to clients after making their pitch. And most of the time, that gift is a cheesy tchotchke or a mindless memento. That's not how Fitch closes its pitches. Once, the design firm sent paper clips, sporks (the plastic spoon-and-fork utensil), and Swiss Army knives to a potential client. The point: Get the client to think about the "being practical" image that it wanted to project. "We wanted them to think beyond the words," Faust says.

For cosmetics retailer Skinmarket, a gift in the form of a custom-made 72-page oversized magazine helped clinch the deal. Hunter and Tierney worked for days on the Skinmarket magazine. It was a visual representation of their ideas for the redesign of the Skinmarket stores -- which the company calls "beauty and style lounges." They envisioned the stores as a magazine, with new, hot products located up front and a casual area in the back where young women could hang out, listen to music, and try on lipstick and nail polish. Constrained by time, Fitch's Skinmarket team invited fellow San Francisco employees to bring their teenage daughters into the office for informal chats about makeup. It was enough to give life to what would otherwise be just dry facts about what Tierney dubbed the "participation generation." It also gave rise to a risky idea.

Inside the magazine, Hunter and Tierney proposed a different branding approach for Skinmarket to consider. They suggested that the company make "Skin" the main brand, with the words "market," "online," and "catalog" in smaller type to create a cohesive brand across different mediums. (Hunter's concern: Skinmarket could be mistaken for a brand that was more about S&M than teenage girls.)

In the end, Skinmarket executives weren't convinced. They liked their brand name just the way it was. But the idea did get their attention. "I applaud their bravery," says Tony Hirsch, Skinmarket's president and CEO. "With competition as fierce as it is today, doing what's acceptable probably isn't enough."

4. The pitch is really about the batter.

At first glance, Fitch's approach may seem like an ego trip -- a chance to showboat for potential clients. But Fitch is winning not because of what it says about itself but because of what it says about its clients. "A pitch should be the catalyst for a relationship instead of a run-through of case studies," Ashworth says.