Before a potential client meets your team in person, your proposal and your interactions may have already introduced your agency. The key question is whether your team was introduced as collection of names and resumes or a group of people the client can imagine working with?
An account leader’s awards, previous employers, and years of experience can all contribute to credibility. That’s an important start. But those details leave important questions unanswered: what will each person actually do for this client, and what will it be like to work with them?
A written proposal cannot guarantee chemistry. It can, however, give the prospect a clearer picture of the people, responsibilities, and experience of working with the agency.
That is a much better starting point for the first meeting. How can you do that?
Write bios that explain the assignment
A proposal bio should not simply be a compressed career history. Its job is to establish why the prospect should want this person on their business.
Two questions should guide the writing. What will the person do? What relevant experience, capabilities, or expertise will they bring that make their presence on the team meaningful?
Consider this hypothetical bio:
“Alex is an accomplished agency leader with eighteen years of experience building brands. A strategic thinker and passionate collaborator, Alex has worked with leading companies across multiple industries and helped develop award-winning campaigns.”
It might be accurate. Yet it is ambiguous fluff. It tells the prospect very little about Alex’s actual background or his intended contribution to the proposed engagement.
Now consider a more specific version:
“Alex will lead your account team and coordinate the national campaign with your regional marketing leads. Alex has related experience managing programs for complex clients like AT&T, Microsoft, Bank of America and Liberty Mutual Insurance that required both brand consistency and local adaptation. Alex will help establish the briefing, approval, and reporting practices needed to keep the client and agency teams aligned. Alex’s experiences at agencies like TBWA and VML, and his client-side experience including a decade at Procter & Gamble have prepared him well to provide the long and short term thinking needed to grow your business.”
The second version does not need more adjectives. It gives the experience a purpose, explains how the client would encounter it, and how the exec’s background has prepared him for this role. Relevant specificity sells when it comes to bios.
Make your “interaction philosophy” come to life in the proposal
At Mercer Island Group we define an Interaction Philosophy as the messaging about what it it like to work with the agency.
“Collaborative,” “responsive,” and “an extension of your team” are generic terms that many agencies use. Generic descriptions don’t cut it. They don’t distinguish an agency and lack charm and appeal.
Curiosity, the frequently award, fine creative agency in Cincinnati, talks about “questioning the unquestionable”, facilitates “curious question sessions” with clients and when describing the team notes Remember the kids who always asked, “Why?” We hired them.
Nothing generic. Everything interesting.
A Curiosity prospect knows what they are getting, and it sounds awesome.
Apply the Monday-morning test
Ask someone who was not involved in writing the proposal to imagine the first working Monday after appointment. Can they explain who the client calls, what the agency leads, and describe the experience of working with the agency?
Use these questions to identify gaps:
- Roles: Is each person’s contribution clear, including day-to-day responsibility?
- Relevance: Do the bios connect experience to this assignment?
- Availability: Are staffing commitments accurate and realistic?
- Decisions: Can the reader see how feedback, approvals, and disagreements would be handled?
- Collaboration: Have you explained how you would work with the client and their other partners?
- Expectations: Is it clear what each side needs from the other?
The proposal does not need to resolve every operational detail. It should provide enough substance for a productive conversation instead of leaving the relationship hidden behind adjectives.
People still need to meet. They need to ask questions, test assumptions, and experience one another’s working style. Your written response should positively prepare the ground for that conversation.
Do not wait for the chemistry meeting to make your team real. Introduce people with a purpose, describe a relationship you can deliver, and help the client picture the working relationship.
Steve Boehler, founder, and partner at Mercer Island Group has led consulting teams on behalf of clients as diverse as Ulta Beauty, Microsoft, UScellular, Nintendo, Kaiser Permanente, Holland America Line, Stop & Shop, Qualcomm, Brooks Running, and numerous others. He founded MIG after serving as a division president in a Fortune 100 when he was only 32. Earlier in his career, Steve Boehler cut his teeth with a decade in Brand Management at Procter & Gamble, leading brands like Tide, Pringles, and Jif.
Mercer Island Group helps marketers and agencies succeed. Company leadership is as much at home with marketers and their C-Suites as in an agency’s boardroom. With marketers, Mercer Island Group is a top 5 agency search consultancy covering all types of agency relationships (creative, media, web, PR, experiential) and assists marketers with marketing organization structure, workflow and critical skill development (briefing, creative evaluation & feedback, etc.). The company also supports leading and aspiring agencies with positioning, pitch and strategy training and pitch support.