A bullet dodged

Recently I endured one of the strangest meetings of my consultancy career.

It began with an email from an ex-client who was now an account manager with one of the most successful pharmaceutical advertising agencies in Europe.  She had a client whose product was facing some specific strategic challenges that she felt I could help resolve.  Given our history I was confident she had a realistic idea of what my company does and specific thoughts as to how I might be able to help her help her client.  Could I come in for a pitch meeting?

When an agency this big calls you take the meeting.

It was scheduled for 930am a few Friday's ago at the agency’s lovely Home Counties offices and to run for ‘ninety minutes, two hours at the outside’.  As requested I customised my basic credentials presentation to hone in on the product’s current needs by highlighting some successful work with other products facing similar challenges.

In a pre-meeting she’d stressed that Charlie, the client in question, was sometimes a bit unpredictable and hard to handle.  That she’d insisted on a formal pre-meeting should have been red flag enough.

I arrived my usual fifteen minutes early to be told that Charlie, also travelling out from London, would be about thirty minutes late.  I chatted with my ex-client and her colleague when a few minutes after 10am a secretary announced that Charlie had arrived but was outside having a smoke.  The other account manager was describing a long overdue beach holiday she is taking next month when he appeared,

Holiday?  Who said that you could take a holiday?  I never signed off on that.

 Charlie wore a golf shirt, jeans and ancient trainers.  Without shaking hands or acknowledging me he threw himself in a chair and announced that he was late because he’d been up all night watching the General Election.  We got a short yet impassioned lecture about the inequities of the first-past-the-post electoral system and then turned on me, 

What’s he doing in a suit?

Before I could respond he waved his own comment away.  I handed over a business card which he tossed unread on the table next to his BlackBerry and cigarettes.  My contact said a few words and handed the meeting over to me.  I began to begin when he interrupted, 

Is he going to stand the whole time?

I was. 

I’d really prefer it if you’d sit down.

I declined.

I’d be using flipcharts and so on and he’d get a far better idea about what my company offered far more easily if he just let me do what I normally do.  He snorted but let me get on with the presentation.

I made it as far as Slide 2 before he interrupted again.  This time he wasn’t objecting per se but rather commenting on the way I was constructing my argument, 

I can see what you’re trying to do here.  It’s not going to work.

He lasted two more slides before declaring that he ‘got’ what I was trying to do but what was I going to do for him?  I negotiated my way through another six or so slides to the point where I move from what my company offers to hone in specifically on the client’s challenges.  And I really do mean ‘negotiate’; after each slide Charlie had to be told to hold his question as the issue raised was addressed always on the next slide.  Finally I picked up a marker pen, turned to the flipchart and asked my usual question, 

So, who is the correct patient for your product?

Charlie immediately left the room for a cigarette.  When he returned ten minutes later I repeated my question,

So, who is the correct patient for your product?

There isn't one.

All I'm trying to understand is where the product should be positioned and define that in terms of the patient that the product will help.”

My next slide outlined a few parameters to help the discussion. 

You don’t understand.  No one knows where to position the product.  I've been in pharma for twenty-five years and I’ve never see anything like this.  It’s impossible.

I’d read the research and it didn’t seem impossible to me.  The product was currently getting low-level usage in one major European market but not in the right type of patient to sustain long-term growth.  I told Charlie I wasn’t talking about how to position the product; we’d get to that later, but simply where it should be positioned.  That is, for which sort of patient.

 That’s the problem.  It’s a extremely complicated area of medicine and no one can say where it should be positioned.

What does the clinical data say?

It says we can be used anywhere in the disease area.”

Okay let’s start with this; how many prescriptions do you need a year to make budget?

He named a figure (which I knew already). 

Then as I understand the disease area, that means we have to avoid pigeonholing the product for last line use because the epidemiology shows us that there aren’t enough eligible patients in that ‘last line cohort’?  Coincidentally this is the only place you’re currently getting sales.

I see what you’re trying to do.  You’re trying to say where we should tell the market where the product should be used.

That’s what positioning is, Charlie, that’s exactly what I was trying to do. 

There’s no point.  The sales team isn't smart enough to follow a strategy as complicated as that.

Let’s leave the sales team out of the mix for the moment and start with the customer; where do the doctors want the product used?

I obviously didn’t understand enough about the product.  That was certainly true; at the start of the meeting I’d given myself permission to ask naïve questions.

Charlie responded by likening the challenges he faced in his market to the launch of the blockbuster antidepressant Prozac.  I told him I found analogies to be of limited benefit.  Why didn’t he instead walk me through the actual issues facing his own product in a way that I could understand and we’d take it from there? 

I find it easier to use this analogy when explaining to people about my product as it keeps things simple.  It’s not just you.  I do this all the time with our sales team.

The point of his Prozac analogy was that the drug represented a game-changing technological advance that created a multibillion-dollar market overnight.  He felt strongly that his product should do the same.  Prozac hadn’t been niched, which was why it was so successful.  And wasn’t that what positioning was?  Niching by another name?  He suggested that we dwell on this wisdom whilst he stepped out for another cigarette.

Need I say that his product was no Prozac?

Around we went.  Every time I proposed a positioning Charlie rebutted it with either another ridiculous analogy, by ‘reminding’ me of a piece of data that he’d hitherto neglected to mention or just by leaving to smoke.

At 1230pm I said I was mindful that it was now Friday afternoon and that I had enough information to put together a costed proposal which he’d get by the middle of next week.  I started to pack up my things, as did the account managers. 

Wait a minute.  What's going on here? I didn’t say that anyone could leave.

I said that had a teleconference scheduled with another client. He demanded that I postpone it, which I duly managed to do (thank god for sane clients).

I don’t have anything else on this afternoon so I want us all to stay here and keep going until we work this thing out.

After we went around the analogy/previously unmentioned data/cigarette loop another time I’d had enough, 

Charlie, I think that three hours is more than long enough for a pitch meeting.

Pitch meeting?  Who said anything about this being a pitch meeting?

It said so on my first slide.

(One of only seven you saw you boor.) 

No, you should know that I don’t waste my time with pitch meetings.  If the girls here say that you’re the right guy for the job then that’s good enough to work for me.

Well, we haven't agreed terms yet and I'm not prepared to share any more of my IP until we get that sorted.  Anyway I still have to make that other call.

I said my goodbyes and left.  My ex-client walked me out, apologising the entire way to the car, 

He knew damn well it was only a pitch.  I told him a dozen times.

The following week I fired off a brief proposal that included a ballpark budget that ignored his request for a discount ‘because we’d never worked together before’.

And that, of course, was the end of the matter.

***

Charlie was a walking Petri dish of insecurity.  Everything he said or did amounted to an ironclad guarantee that he would be a nightmare to work with.  Except that in Charlieworld I wouldn’t be working with him, I’d be working for him.

The ways in which Charlie would be a poor client fall into three broad categories: (a) his inability to engage in Marketing 101; (b) his total lack of respect for anyone inside his business, but most of all (c) the aggressive status games presumably played to mask the first two shortcomings.  The specific behaviours that bother me fell under one of those three headings: - 

Deficit in Marketing

• Hypnotised by the complexity of the product and unwilling (unable?) to see that the marketing still needs to be simple


• Overuse of banal analogies to avoid engagement in the actualities of his own market


• Opting to make a show of positioning the product ambitiously if unrealistically but without any real plans to assist the sales team in establishing this in the field 

Lack of Respect

• Seeing the sales team as stupid


• Antagonistic towards the rest of his organisation.  I got a sense that Charlie’s vociferous support for a project would immediately damn it in the eyes of everyone else.  What good would that do my long-term prospects within his organisation?


• Wanting the whole project to be prohibitively difficult as that might excuse the ambiguous positioning and correspondingly poor sales results to follow 

Status Games

• The relationship with the two (female) agency account managers totally ignored their expertise


• Withholding information from a potential supplier (me).  Of course I didn’t know the data as well as he did, but I resented the implication that I was incompetent rather than newer to the project


• Leaving the room to smoke every time the discussion put him under any sort of pressure


• Dressed so casually as to be dismissive of everyone else in the room


• Actually lying about his understanding of the nature of the meeting

***

So like the title says, a bullet dodged.  If there was an upside it was that I got to bond with the account managers over the experience and that just might be the beginning of a beautiful friendship.