The Client Who Fired the Whole Deck

Idris Calloway: Welcome to Last Call. I'm Idris Calloway. Daniel Mercer runs a branding studio in Manchester that has not shown a client a slide in six years, and it started with a pitch that ended in four minutes. Daniel, welcome.

Daniel Mercer: Thanks, Idris. Four minutes and ten seconds. I checked the timestamp on the calendar invite.

Idris Calloway: Who was the client?

Daniel Mercer: A family-owned outdoor clothing company, about two hundred staff, third generation running it. Big rebrand, the first since the eighties. We had forty-two slides.

Idris Calloway: Take me through it, minute by minute.

Daniel Mercer: Minute one, introductions, coffee, all fine. Minute two, our first content slide, a market overview with competitor logos in a grid. Minute three, the chief executive closes her laptop and puts her hands flat on the table.

Idris Calloway: That is not a good sign.

Daniel Mercer: It is a very clear sign. Minute four, she asks the question. She says, you have told me about my competitors for two minutes. Have any of you been to one of our shops? And none of us had. We had read the annual report, the customer research, the reviews. Nobody had walked into a shop.

Idris Calloway: And that was it?

Daniel Mercer: She thanked us and said she did not think it was a fit. Very polite. Our account director held the door open for us, which I always remember.

Idris Calloway: What did you change?

Daniel Mercer: The first thing was a rule that nobody pitches a retail client without having bought something from them in person. Receipts go in the proposal. Then over about a year we dropped slides entirely. We bring printed sheets, maybe twelve, laid out on the table in the order we want to talk about them. The client can pick them up, turn them over, push one aside.

Idris Calloway: Why does paper work better than a screen?

Daniel Mercer: A screen gives you one thing to look at, in the order I decided. Paper lets the client interrupt. The question that ended that meeting was a client interrupting a deck that had no room for her. Now the interruption is the format.

Idris Calloway: Has it cost you work?

Daniel Mercer: Two procurement processes that required a PDF submission. We sent scans of the sheets and lost both. But our win rate on direct pitches went from about one in five to one in three.

Idris Calloway: Did you ever go back to that company?

Daniel Mercer: We did, four years later, for a smaller job on their repair service. I mentioned the meeting. She said she remembered the market overview slide, and nothing else.

Idris Calloway: Daniel Mercer, thank you. That is Last Call.