Peernovation

As the story goes, GTECH (the dominant player in the lottery business globally – now IGT) was putting its advertising and PR account up for review. GTECH was based in Rhode Island and had planned to have "get acquainted meetings" with six local agencies. A few of us approached our agency principals to suggest we put our hat in the ring and participate in the review. We received an unequivocal no, stating that we didn't know anyone at GTECH, knew nothing about its business, and shouldn't engage in an expensive agency review we had little chance of winning. Not to mention, our client roster consisted mainly of industrial companies.

Hard to argue with that rationale, so we took our disappointment to a local pub. The "we" I'm talking about included Jim McGinn, Account Supervisor; Brian Murphy, Art Director; Todd Diamond, Copywriter, and me, the PR guy. About three beers in and still unable to let go of our desire to pitch the GTECH business, we committed to approaching the principals on the following morning. As a united front, we asked: If we could squeeze our way into the review, could we pitch the business for the agency on our own time? The principals responded with a smirk, saying, “Sure, knock yourselves out.”

I don't recall which one of us secured our spot to participate in the review, but once we were in, we were committed to win. While we really wanted to capture the business, we were especially driven to doing everything possible to avoid having to endure the inevitable, "I told you so" if we didn't prevail. The thing is, the agency principals were right. We were a huge underdog here for the reasons they mentioned and many more. With that in mind, we got to work.

First, we agreed that there is no such thing as a "get acquainted meeting." Second, we didn't know anyone at the company, so we knew our first impression needed to be an impactful one. Third, realizing we knew nothing about their business, every person on our four-member, ad hoc pitch team committed to digging up anything we could find about the company, and we had less than two weeks to do it. This is where the timing of this story becomes even more relevant. It's not like we could go online and uncover a mountain of company, competitor, and industry data in a matter of hours. We had to identify relevant associations, obtain industry trade pubs, find media clips, etc., all of which had to be mailed to us. As I remember it, at the end of the week, we had this pile of info spread out on a conference room table – about 500 pages or so. Each of us committed to reading every word of it by Monday morning. Our meeting with the GTECH team was scheduled for just three days later.

By Monday morning, everyone did their homework, as promised. We believed that having one person look like the lead when it came to knowing what he was talking about wouldn't cut it. Everyone on the team had to demonstrate their understanding of the landscape. But how? At first, we planned to show the client everything we read in preparation for our meeting. We thought that if they could SEE how much work we did, it would separate us from the rest. Eventually, we agreed that it was more important to show them what we didn't know than what we did. Counterintuitive, perhaps, but here's how we decided to approach the meeting.

The 90-minute meeting (the last of the get-acquainted meetings), which we hosted, was held on a Thursday at 10:30 AM. After a brief agency tour, the four of us gathered the GTECH team in our conference room. The walls were lined with our creative work, the outside tables were topped with awards, and the main conference room table had a large pitcher of water, water glasses, coasters, yellow pads, and pencils at every chair. That's it. We stuffed all of the research materials we had amassed into deck drawers in an adjacent office and didn't refer to a single note during the meeting.

After everyone briefly introduced themselves, and the prospect shared what he believed to be the company's biggest challenge going forward, we started to ask questions. Not the kinds of questions one could find in the research material, but an entirely different level of questions – well-informed questions. While they were questions in search of answers, they were questions designed to demonstrate a pretty sophisticated understanding of GTECH's business, competitors, new products, etc. After an hour, with every member of our team engaged in this exchange, I remember it like it was yesterday. The marketing director reached over his head and slammed his pencil on the conference room table, exclaiming, "How in the world do you know so much about our business?"

If you’re familiar with the term, hanging curveball, the head of marketing just threw us one. While I don’t remember which member of our team proceeded to hit that pitch out of the stadium, it was quite the moment. For me, it ranks right up there with the scene from A Few Good Men when Colonel Jessup (Jack Nicholson) responded to Lieutenant Caffey’s (Tom Cruise) question about whether he ordered the code red by blurting out, “You’re Goddamn right I did!” We led the prospect right where we wanted him to go. Shortly after the meeting concluded, they asked if we could continue our conversation over lunch. We took them to Capriccio, a northern Italian restaurant just a short walk away - a restaurant that's as good as it gets if you want to close a deal. Shortly after lunch, we received a call. We thought we were going to learn whether we advanced to the next round of the review. Instead, they told us that their search was over. We won the GTECH business.