We’ve just got back from a fantastic presentation from planning legend and new business guru Jon Steel. The UK’s APG were good enough to ask Jon to talk us through his philosophy when it came to presenting and new business and he didn’t disappoint.
Jon talked about the dangers of professionalism when working in a creative agency. By which he meant doing what is expected and what appears professional isn’t necessarily the most creative thing to do – after all when was the last time you had a great idea in the office? The example he gave was when working on the Porsche pitch he and the media director took the afternoon off to watch baseball and drink beer. On the way back from the game and in no fit shape to ‘work’ the media director had the breakthrough idea that won the pitch.
Jon’s suggestions for coming up with new and good ideas were to take more holiday, read fewer business books and more general topics, and do things away from work. He always encouraged staff to put in a fictitious meeting in their diary once a week so they could have some thinking time.
Jon provided plenty of tips on presenting including never rely on your slides – always use them to accompany you, not vice versa. In a very amusing example, Jon presented Churchill’s 1940 post Dunkirk speech as if it were a corporate presentation.
A key theme of Jon’s presentation was rehearsal. He suggested that you rehearse exhaustively prior to presentation, something he’d done prior to this one!
Jon’s top new business tips were:
1. Don’t have a new biz director
2. Learn to say no to business that you won’t win or doesn’t feel right
3. Use the first week of your pitch to crack the idea, for the next two execute it as much as possible so that you have thought it through and everyone knows it backwards
4. To do this, a small high level pitch team of people should thrash out the agency’s answer to the client’s problem and then everyone work from there on
5. Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse
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