With the shrinking of resources everywhere, the marketers inside organizations have found themselves having to do much more with much less …. and being under pressure to deliver on results without there being a very clear definition of what that means sometimes.
That’s a lot of pressure. Plus, there is often the need to educate colleagues from other areas of the organization about what marketing delivers and why it is an important function vis-à-vis sales, engineering or finance, which by and large continue to drive most B2B organizations — technically, culturally and politically.

Your starting point in pitching marketers inside organizations is the awareness that they need more than just a brochure or a new logo. When approached the right way, the conversation may lead to being selected as more than a vendor and becoming a partner. This of course assumes that you’ve done your part –
Essential Dos:
- Do your homework — learn more about the organization. Google it, data monitor it. Talk to people who can give you a first person account, not just a name. You are going to want to be considered after all.
- Think in terms of benefits …. if you were to buy your own services from the point of view of the marketer you are pitching, what is the key strength?
- Be persistent *and* patient …. it takes a lot of time to break through the noise today. It may also take time to find the right fit between what you offer and what is needed. Find ways to be helpful without becoming a nuisance.
– which leads to the Main Don’ts:
- Don’t be a nuisance …. – if you send a brochure about your company, that’s essentially a cold call. You compound it by calling a couple of days later to follow up on what amounts essentially to unsolicited mail.
- Invoking the power of higher authorities is the shortest path to the exit door …. – how does this grab you? “I was talking with your CFO the other day–” This is the equivalent to saying to someone you want to date that you were talking to their Dad, and therefore they should go out with you.
- Pressing people at networking events …. – people who represent service providers are often in the majority at professional associations’ events. Some of them may insist on pitching you every single time. If you haven’t read the very entertaining book He’s Not That Into You, you might take a look at the concept. Yes, I’ve seen you, I know what your company does, and I’ll call you when and if I need those services from you.
These are my main dos and don’ts.
I can tell you that the most successful at pitching me have been those companies and agencies that (1) had a core skill I needed at the moment; (2) where flexible and willing to work as part of the team, which means with other agencies and firms for me; (3) found ways to be useful above and beyond the call of duty (this is valid in any relationship).
I’m sure by now you are hitching to tell me your stories …. both from the agency/consultant side and from the corporate side.
What are your top dos and don’ts? Any story that could be the poster child for a do/don’t?

It’s also our fault. Before you move onto the next post, let’s agree on the qualities that make a good marketer today. We need to be good at (the highlights):


How many of you have put these skills to use in the course of your daily work? There is a reason why the list is ordered that way. Many of us climb the first couple of rungs of that ladder really well, yet we rarely get to the others. Why?
The problem, as I see it, is that we don’t do a good job at selling ourselves. Ladies and gentlemen, what people often see is the end result, the campaign, the ads, the program. So they come to the obvious conclusion that that’s where marketing resides. Marketing = tactics.
You’re not convinced yet. You’re thinking that rookies make that mistake; they are too inexperienced to articulate the value of what they do to senior management. Consultants do a better job at this. Their clients hire them on the strength of their being able to articulate what they bring to the table.
What if I told you a brief story that illustrates how a top-notch marketer made the classic advertising rookie mistake? The following story is extracted with slight edits for length from the book Rebuilding Brand America by Dick Martin, former VP Public Affairs at AT&T.

After 9/11, the President decided that we needed to do a better job telling the Brand America story. So who did he turn to? Charlotte Beers, the first woman to rise to the top of two agencies, Ogilvy & Mather and J. Walter Thompson …. – making her the most prominent woman in advertising.
Secretary Colin Powell turned to “the Queen of branding,” “the Queen of advertising,” or “the Queen of schmoozing,” as people called her. His idea was that we needed to sell democracy, the product of a free enterprise system …. – the American value system.

Beers went at it in earnest, doing her research, meeting with people, and working around the clock to come up with the “Shared Values” campaign, a $15MM effort. The response was good, but the campaign didn’t work. Why?
Ms. Beers gave her client what he wanted rather than what he needed. Two major forces where against her:
1. She was not familiar with the intricacies and bureaucracies of reconciling the mandate from Secretary Powell and the complex web of communication offices at the State Department and across the administration. Her sense of urgency blinded her to the fact that she needed to research and understand the dynamics of this organization.
The lesson: know the environment in which you move really well, do your due diligence, speak with key stakeholders, and find the gatekeepers and the internal network’s nodes.
2. She jumped on a running train. She sat in on conference calls where the president’s communications director, Karen Hughes, was already leading State and Defense Departments staffers in writing the message of the day and plotting political strategy.
What happens when you’re put in charge of getting a message out and someone else is already doing it? The due diligence would have uncovered that many of these decisions had already been made. How about going back to the people who put you in charge and request that the business support you as the new lead?
The lesson: your first priority should be to set strategic direction. Find those people within your organization who set the tone from the operational side and partner with them.
You may also find, as Ms. Beers did, that there aren’t enough staff and resources allocated to your department. That will need to wait for another conversation.
Repeat after me, next time someone comes to you requesting a brochure, or a web site, or an ad, what do you say?
Let’s climb that ladder, shall we?