On pitching

A pitch is a brochure. Captivating, motivating, compelling and memorable. Everyone understands the value of a winning brochure, and because we uniquely possess exquisite brochure-making talent in house (art directors and writers work here) we especially understand this.

A pitch is a deliverable. The first deliverable we deliver, and it must contain the exemplary quality, skill, detail and design our prospects can expect from us when they become clients. This first deliverable is free—a gateway drug.

A pitch is for them, not us: The prospects should immediately see themselves in our work—their images, their style, their brand. It’s their baby, and we need them to recognize it as their own as soon as possible.  

A pitch is a standalone narrative and prospects must be able to read from hello to thank you, on their own, without VO, because we often email the deck, and we aren’t there to push and prod it to be great. 

A pitch has spec: There are simple, scalable ways to provide spec, without over-investing. 

A pitch contains perspectives: To illustrate that we understand, in detail, how to orchestrate and balance strategy, experience and technology on the road to POC, MVP and beyond. 

A pitch knows delivery: We must be detailed with activities and deliverables, team and plan—this is what they’re paying for and from a procurement perspective, how they’ll measure us against the competition. Detail, (even if it is wrong) is better than no detail.

A pitch is as short or long as it needs to be. Pages, as long as they’ve purpose, will never stand in the way of a compelling offering. If it’s long, it’s probably for good reason, and we’ll never create a presentation that can’t be presented in the time we’re given to present. 

Just like that, another year.

At the end of the year I was trying to recall what the fuck I had done with it. I suppose this happens every year, but seeing as I was in my garage for the majority of it, this year felt different. And, in my last role at Sapient, I was probably split 70/30 Creative Delivery and BD respectively, and this year, it was the opposite, with 70% of my efforts focused on business development and just 30% in Creative Delivery.

In addition to BD, I played a role in Delivery too, for a few key accounts, serving as an exec sponsor for two larger accounts, helping drive discover/define phases and ensuring that our engagements lead to longer-term (beyond the scope) engagements like detailed design and product engineering.

So I made a list on paper.
Then in Google Docs.
I sent it to my boss to make sure he knew I wasn’t just cleaning motorcycles and old cars in the garage all year.

sometimes i ride these; sometimes i clean these


I think he signs off on my bonus.
Should have sent him booze.

My spreadsheet says I had around 50 opportunities last year.
To be on that list means that I had at least one new business call with you.
I crafted a deck for these types of calls and it’s pretty good—it can quickly be customized, and it teaches a total stranger who we are, how we think and what it might feel like to work together.

Usually we’ll meet again, to better understand a client’s needs and expectations for partnership.
Why are we on Zoom? Do you have a product, a need, an idea? Do you have money?
If all systems are go, we move forward.

I’d guess that between prospecting calls and follow ups, plus all the pursuits that went to formal proposal, plus orals and follow up calls for revisions prior to SOW, I crushed over 200 BD meetings in my garage (and still had time to scoot the bike or the car down to the beach for a quick IPA and a few casts at lunch, when the fish were in).


With a year’s hindsight, I’d say half of the pursuits were windmills and some were us just chasing dough instead of strategic long-term partnership fit, but there were some gems too—here’s a few:

  • EY

  • Morningstar

  • Wawa

  • Mohawk

  • Six Flags

  • Northern Trust

  • Lifetime Fitness

Not every gem is a win, and that’s OK—they’re gems because I learned a lot or I improved, and there’s always a there, there, for that.

2022 Goal: Spot gems (and windmills) sooner.

From the garage, Happy New Year.
J.

From Physical to Virtual Co-Creation

EY has an elite and effective program called wavespace.
Clients and consultants meet in cities around the world to workshop business challenges and co-create solutions together—usually in specific real estate in dozens of cities globally.

Post-Covid though, the logistics of getting the world’s leading business leaders and consultants together to solve problems got a little harder.

We’re partnering with EY to define and design a suite of digital tools to help workshop design leaders create the ultimate experiences for their clients.

8-week Define Phase covered things like:

  • Stakeholder and user interviews

  • Sitemaps

  • Key wires and flows

  • Journeys/personas

  • Service blueprint

  • Design POC across two, key personas

  • Detailed design estimates (the templates and components we need to design to feed the engineering team)

  • And a proven plan forward into unified detailed design and engineering

12-week Detailed Design includes four, 3-week batches of design of approximately 200 mobile and desktop artifacts, delivered as dev-ready to the engineering team.

Product Engineering commences in Q1, 2022.

Here’s a snapshot of this ongoing engagement.




Strategy & Product Design

We met with Morningstar in April 2021, to shape an engagement to define and design (redesign) a responsive Index experience. We ran a 5-week Define phase resulting in an Experience Strategy & Design Brief—a 100 page document covering findings, POVs, sitemaps, flows, wires and an actionable roadmap forward, into Design & Engineering.

Here’s a snapshot of this ongoing engagement.

to the good ones

Over the last several years, I’ve been lucky enough to partner with a few really good ones. I knew they were good when I met them, and they were even better, over time.

I’ve got a Shout Outs area here on the site, but in particular, over the last couple years, I’ve been able to understand, achieve, overcome, grow, win, laugh and not cry, with the special help of a few good ones:

Kit Casey, Steph Curran, Flo Balsiero (the namesake of our pack, Hustle & Flo) and Laura Skaggs. There were others too for sure—this partnership just held up longest.

As Hal Riney put it:

“ This business is not a work of committees. It’s not a work of formulas. It’s not a business about any of that. It’s not big agencies or anything else. It is simply a few really good people. And if you’re lucky enough, as I have been, to have a few of those people around you, you can probably succeed—cuz there aren’t a whole bunch of them—I’ll tell you that. There are a lot of people in this business, but damn few really good ones.

On packs

Over the years, my team adopted a team or pack mentality.
A small group of us—three always—sometimes 5, remained together, ongoing.
There’s nothing I pitched without them and nothing we didn’t shape and then deliver, together.
The power of the pack is extraordinary, and if I had to place a bet, I’d place it on a true, connected and committed team, over a random selection of ‘resources with avails’, every time.

Resources with avails may be great too, but once you get a small team of alphas thinking and moving, practicing, winning (and losing) together every day, nothing can stop them.

The Estée Lauder Companies Pitch

This was a great team effort across experience and DBT consulting. We pitched three times from October to January, and eventually…we won.

I think the secret was good insights to show we understood the audiences/users and some UX and Design spec to illustrate how we think, and a good team of leads that really connected with their leads. I prefer to pitch the real team, as opposed to some bigs the clients will never see again, and I think that helps show some truth and transparency, which helps build trust early.

Following are some pitch deck shots of insights, POVs, journey and spec.

Thanks to the usual suspects—Kit, Steph and Laura.

Plynk: Investing for Beginners

In January 2020, I met with a few folks from Fidelity’s innovation group; a conversation about Sapient and my team with some capes and creds mixed in. I met them again a week or so later, and they shared they needed an ultra-beginners investing app, but as their vision and GTM plans were not set, details were light.

We were invited to pitch against a handful of other shops in February.

And we won.

The early plan was to create a rapid Define Phase followed by a unified Detailed Design Phase alongside their development team. But as they say, the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.

The product had a strong client team, but no name, logo, palette or ID and we had under three weeks to create that.

“And this little shit showed up too, and well, that changed everything”.

Little shit #19

In late February, our client said, “I’ve spoken to Abby Johnson, and it’s business as usual—nothing’s changed.”

”That’s unusual,” I thought. “I haven’t been to work in three weeks and I’m in my garage on Zoom. Something had changed”.

We had adopted wolf-packs long ago at Sapient (teams of creative leads who work together again and again) and that chemistry and closeness and safety helped us immensely as we set on the journey to create an app from scratch, with around 20 people, all working from their bedrooms, kitchen tables, basements and garages.

We shaped a rapid, 3-week ‘brand-lite’ experience to analyze the competitive landscape and create a palette, fonts, illustration styles and the beginnings of a system by way of a pattern library. This evolved over time, but notional and directional alignment was important, prior to moving at velocity, in Detailed Design.

First, we looked at the landscape.

A competitive look around for inspiration and opportunities.

Then analyzed our findings:

Brand-Lite Findings

And quickly developed two concepts for consideration:

Early design concepts

And from there, moved into Detailed Design.

Not too shabby…thanks to an extraordinary experience and design team and smart and driven client partners!

A sample of key screens

We broke Detailed Design into around five, three-week batches of design (one batch per epic). The goal of a detailed design phase is to create all the design artifacts an engineering team will need; e.g., mobile and desktop if responsive, OS-nuance if app, and all the design permutations such as alt states, error states, micro-interactions and so on.

Once we’d created around 250+ artifacts for MVP development, we added a couple batches around engagement—a little bigger lift than we thought!

Process for alignment around engagement ideas for the new investing app.

Little workshopping with our client partners

Concept and resonance testing with users.

A prioritized list based on user needs.


Then the team set to work to design artifacts for the new, larger epic, Engagement.

I named this!

These came out sweet!

These too—quizzes, points and bonuses.

We finished up in around July or August 2020, and the Plynk app launched Q2 2021.

The experience and design A-team (pretty good team if you can find ‘em):

  • ACD Experience: Steph Curran

  • ACD Experience: Liz Goodwin

  • ACD Visual: Kit Casey

  • BA/Product Manager/UX: Kim Looney

  • Design Manager: Laura Skaggs

  • Sr. Art Director: Florencia Balseiro

  • Designer: Quan Nguyen

  • Copywriter: Lynne Viera

  • Client Partner: Shiva Nadarajah

  • Creative Director: Jared Kelleher

Outcomes

  • Foundational elements of a brand, definition and place to build upon

  • Ownable illustration system with 30 animations

  • An organized design system with robust documentation

  • Hundreds of mobile app designs

  • 9 happy stakeholders

  • 6 prioritized opportunities to keep the novice investor engaged

  • Successfully transferred the project to Fidelity’s internal product team

You can find the app in the app store or learn more here, online.

I liked this project a lot, and I liked learning how to work with remote partners—my own and the clients.

J.

What he said...

Dan Wiedon

I don’t think any organization or any career succeeds if there isn’t a goodly amount of old-fashioned love involved. And a deep sense of affection for each other—the people you work with. If you can hold onto that and make your decisions with those things in mind—even when they’re hard decisions you have to make—I think it’s a big difference.