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How to run better pitches

This article is part of our meetings series, looking at different types of design meetings, and how they could be improved. You can find all the articles here. 

Whether pitching for a would-be client or unveiling work to a current one, presentations matter. And as with any collaborative process, there is a lot to think about.

But while decks are designed with painstaking care and insights polished up in advance, much less thought is usually given to the dynamics in the room. How do you bring a group of people together into a cohesive unit to present as a team?

Start with your people and their people

A great team presentation starts with a clear decision on who is on the team. For Chris Lumsden, co-founder of Good Brand Consultants, an “Opportunity Owner” is responsible for pulling the right people into the meeting.

He describes their role as “coordinating the group and briefing them on the presentation. They seek the team’s input and this shapes the best presentation and creates ownership for their individual contribution.”

Becky King, executive creative director of Dragon Rouge London emphasises the importance for each participant to have a clearly-defined role. “Everyone has to be there because they’ve got something to add.”

Ian Thompson, former head of Thompson Brand Partners, agrees and says that a good presentation draws on different speakers. “Contributions need to be balanced across the group,” he says. “This says that our expertise is across the board, and not an overreliance on one or two people.”

He urges leaders to send, “the people who the client will be dealing with if they select you. Not the good speakers. Not the senior people never to be seen again. And remember to think about, and act on, the make-up of your team when it comes to diversity.”

For King, knowing your audience is equally important in shaping what you say, and how you say it. “Find out who will be in the meeting, and what’s important to them. Look at their job titles and social profiles. Ask what would resonate with them, what’s important to a head of digital versus an HR director, for example.”

Be proactive around space and time

When on home turf, think about where the meeting will happen, but also who will sit where (and the unconscious messages these seemingly innocuous decisions can sometimes send).

Even when you travel to the client, it’s worth doing your due diligence.

“It’s on you to find out about the room, the technology and to ask for some set-up time,” King says. “If the meeting starts at 3pm, ask to arrive at 2.45pm.”

For Lumsden, it is the Opportunity Owner’s role to ask the client to share this information. “They find out about how much time we’ve got, what they want us to do with that time, and what they want to leave with.”

In a pitch, there are various things that eat into the allotted time – getting set settled in, introductions, handing over to each presenter, the Q&A. With this in mind, King stresses the need to “actively decide how you’re going to use the time.”

She advises against “fighting your own content by trying to pack everything in. This creates the room to discuss, provoke and talk things through.”

And clients clearly agree – 71% think new business presentations don’t allow enough time for discussion, according to this year’s What Clients Think report.

Make time to rehearse

For Lumsden, rehearsal time is vital. “You can’t just rock up and present,” he says. “The Opportunity Owner pulls together the run throughs, and makes sure they happen. They keep an eye on how long is each person talking for, that everything hangs together, and listen out for any sharp edges to smooth off.”

King agrees. “Rehearsals are particularly useful for checking your approach to handovers. And going over personal introductions, making sure they’re relevant and they fit into the time allocated. We decide how we want to begin, how we want to end, and when we will take questions.”

Questions create alchemy

Good chemistry is vital for a successful client relationship. For Thompson, it is a key aspect of team presentations.

“Chemistry is what separates one agency from another, when more than one agency has ticked all the boxes. Chemistry is created, or not, through conversation. And conversation is the refreshing part for a client who might be seeing multiple agencies in a day.”

Clients are very attuned to understanding group dynamics – and what they might mean for any working relationship.

“The audience picks up on your chemistry as a group,” King says. “Negative influences include people on the team who are making up the numbers, people who do not speak or pay attention to the occasion, and people who dominate the presentation.”

Lumsden agrees. “A pitch is a reflection of our culture. A client is getting to know us, through our performance.”

“We start our chemistry on the way there and keep it going,” Thompson says. “We switch on before we walk on. Smile, make friends with the people who greet us. Go in in a chatty mood.”

Likewise, Lumsden recommends “finding your human.”

“We let that come across. We may swear at technology, make a reference to the biscuits, or the coffee. We look for conversational oases. These are mini pauses, buffers, moments that occur naturally and provide ways to lighten the occasion and inject something of our personality.”

Questions, questions

Lumsden’s approach to questions is “not to predetermine who will answer what.”

“Sometimes the Opportunity Owner will coordinate by articulating their understanding of the question and then pulling the right contributors into play,” he says. “Having questions to ask the client is also a useful way of getting things moving and avoiding a tumbleweed moment.”

Big moments for individuals

It’s important for team leaders to be aware of the different needs of the individuals within the team presenting. For junior members of the team, these occasions can be a daunting experience. They are not only facing the client, they are also performing in front of colleagues.

Consider how you can support them to develop their skills and confidence between performances – in fact a good debrief is helpful for everyone involved.

For senior members of the team, think about how you can support them to take on a role that stretches them in the presentation.

When done well, team presentations create opportunities for personal growth, as well as business growth. Get both of these working together and you’ll make many more successful and satisfying team presentations.

John Scarrott is a trainer and coach, who works with designers and other creative professionals on presenting, public speaking and other communication skills.

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“We need to talk about meetings…”

This article is part of our meetings series, looking at different types of design meetings, and how they could be improved. You can find all the articles here. 

When Shopify’s employees came back to work after the Christmas break in 2023, their calendars looked very different.

Bosses at the e-commerce company had decided to purge all meetings of more than two people. An estimated 12,000 meetings were removed at a stroke – all meetings were banned on Wednesdays too.

“Uninterrupted time is the most precious resource of a craftsperson, and we are giving our people a ‘no judgment zone’ to subtract, reject meetings, and focus on what is most valuable,” Shopify’s chief operating officer Kaz Nejatian said at the time.

Later that summer, they were at it again adding a “cost calculator” into employees’ calendar app, putting a dollar value on every meeting, based on who attends, and how long the meeting was.

Asana did a similar thing to Shopify in 2022, removing all recurring meetings and asking employees to think carefully about whether they should be added back in.

Through meetings becoming shorter, or removed entirely, they apparently saved the average employee 11.5 hours a month, or nearly four weeks across a working year.

In The Guardian, one expert asked about the Shopify purge put it succinctly – “Most organisations have too many meetings, and most meetings aren’t good.”

And there it is.

Design, like most industries, runs on meetings – one-to-ones, company updates, team huddles, client pitches, brainstorms, creative check-ins, and more.

In a hybrid or remote work culture, meetings have proliferated – one estimate says meetings jumped 70% during the pandemic.

Of all the issues facing the industry, meetings may not seem like the most pressing (and it’s certainly not the most glamorous).

But in thinking about day-to-day work, and the things that impact it, I’d suggest that meetings are right up there, both in terms of quantity and quality.

“There’s no Mr Meeting coming to fix it for you.”

The first thing, if you think your meetings culture could be better, is to take responsibility for it.

Gillian Davis, an executive coach and leadership expert who works with many creative businesses, says she hears a lot of complaints about meetings.

“People always tell me about these really bad meetings that everyone knows are bad,” she says. “Well, if a meeting isn’t working, put your hand up and say, ‘Hey, maybe we should redesign this meeting.’ There’s no Mr Meeting coming to fix it for you.”

The key, Davis says, to an efficient and productive meetings culture, is to be intentional.

What’s this meeting for? Who needs to be there? Who really needs to be there?

Then you need an agenda to clearly and concisely set out the meeting’s aim, and at the end, you should agree on specific action points that reflect the intention set out in that agenda.

“People might think this stuff sounds obvious,” says Stu Tallis, creative director at Taxi Studio who has helped rebuild the way his company runs meetings. “But agencies are fast and furious, and it’s easy for things like this to slip.”

And if you put some of this best practice in place, then the idea of a meeting starts to shift. Many design leaders told me that it’s come to be seen as a dirty word in their studio – Tallis even avoids using the m-word altogether.

Guanglun Wu, founding partner and chief digital officer at Made by On thinks this is an issue.

“Many people are very protective of their focus time,” he says. “But that can lead to this mentality that meeting time is bad, that it’s unproductive. People become afraid of putting them in the calendar, and avoid them at all costs.

“But it depends what the aim is. Making time to talk to people and collaborate is important – it’s not wasted.”

Badberries’ managing director Natasha Szczerb wrote recently about the tricky balancing act of making time to focus on the clients, and the work, and making time to focus on the business itself.

Recognising the tension between the two, Szczerb says, “was crucial to our survival.”

And of all the operational decisions to make, and discussions to have, few leaders will feel their hearts fluttering at the thought of going deep on meetings.

But take a moment to look at your calendar, and your team’s.

How much time are they spending in meetings of one sort or another? And are you confident that time is being spent as efficiently and as effectively as possible?

Meetings matter, and good leaders will make sure they are planned and used in the best possible way.

And even if you’ve looked at this issue before, what worked for your studio in the past may not work any more.

“Companies evolve,” Davis says. “Their rituals and systems evolve. So meetings should evolve too.”

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How to run better annual studio meetings

This article is part of our meetings series, looking at different types of design meetings, and how they could be improved. You can find all the articles here. 

Although they call it lots of different names, most design businesses run an annual meeting where they look back at the year that’s gone, and forward to the 12 months ahead.

When done well, these meetings can be extremely useful – to celebrate successes, re-establish focus, and course correct where necessary.

But when done badly they can confuse staff, paper over problems, and damage morale.

Gillian Davis, an executive coach and leadership expert who works with many creative businesses, points out there is often a huge gap between the way big client meetings are prepared, and the attention big internal meetings receive.

We spoke with Davis, and three design leaders, to gather practical advice for running more effective annual get-togethers.

Start with why

Davis says the first decision for leaders planning one of these meetings is to work out why they are doing it, and what they want to achieve.

“It’s too easy for these meetings to become a waste of everyone’s time,” she warns. “Ask yourself, what is the one message we need to get through going into next year? And then design the meeting around that.”

That takes clarity, an ability to prioritise what the business needs now, and sometimes self-awareness.

SUN’s Jamie Kelly says their most recent annual meeting was part of a “personal reinvigoration” to address a flatness he felt in the studio, despite a string of successful projects.

“I wanted to use it as a spur, to look at all this great work we’d done, but also to get down and dirty into the things that we hadn’t enjoyed, or that hadn’t gone so well,” he says. “It was about mixing that celebration with some really honest conversations.”

Context shapes content

Communication begins way before the first words have been uttered. Where do you hold the meeting? How do you frame it? What do you ask people to prepare?

All of these decisions shape how your message will land. For example, if a business is reflecting on a challenging financial year,  holding this meeting in a sun-soaked locale with a generous free bar will seem quite jarring. That may seem like an extreme example, but Davis says she has seen proposals that are totally at odds with the story the leaders want to tell.

Number crunching

Many leaders use these annual meetings to reflect on the company’s financial performance and its targets for the year ahead. Work out how much you want, and need to share, says John Wilson, CEO of Universal Design Studio and Map Project Office.

“We try to be open and transparent, so there’s an understanding of where we are as a studio and there are no sharp surprises,” he says. “But I don’t think everyone needs to know everything.”

For Guanglun Wu, founding partner and chief digital officer at Made by On, accessibility is key when it comes to this information.

“We need to explain it in a way that can be contextualised by everybody within the organisation,” he says. “Some people understand what numbers and acronyms mean, and others don’t. So we put a lot of effort into those presentations in terms of the information design, so we can make that accessible.”

SUN’s Jamie Kelly had a neat approach in his most recent annual meeting. He visualised the turnover as percentages related to specific client projects.

“People could see how the projects they worked on contributed to the overall picture, and how their work has impacted the business,” Kelly explains. “I think the team found it interesting and maybe a bit surprising.”

Who speaks – Leaders

Gillian Davis says that the amount of time taken up by leadership presentations should depend on where the company is and how it’s doing.

In tough times, she says, people want to see and hear from their leaders. In this context, she thinks 90% of the meeting should be direct communication from the most senior leadership. In better times, the teams themselves should be encouraged to present and lead discussions.

Who speaks – Teams

Most leaders like these meetings to include talks from specific teams but there are a couple of things to consider. Davis once saw an 150 slide deck for a company’s upcoming AGM, and every department had its own structure for their individual section.

Some consistency is important, she says, as is avoiding it feeling like a long list of things that team has done.

It’s great to celebrate successes, but it’s even more useful if that involves some reflection on how and why it worked well. Davis thinks “some element of interaction” helps elevate these sessions even further, so other employees can ask questions.

For Made by ON’s Guanglun Wu, it’s all about teasing out what different teams can learn from each other. “What was really interesting about yout project that you want everyone else to know?” he says. “Explain the journey, what you learned and what are the future opportunities where we can be better.”

This dynamic may be different in smaller teams. SUN’s Jamie Kelly runs these meetings as a two-way discussion for his seven-strong studio.

“I pause after each section to ask questions. I want to hear what they think success could look like, so they can push my thinking,” he says. “It’s much easier in a small studio, where there is less hierarchy, to have that open dialogue.”

Who speaks – Clients

At its most recent annual session, Made by On invited a panel of current clients to take part in a fireside chat in front of the whole company.

Guanglun Wu says it added a whole new dimension to the day.

“When you have people come in and talk about their perspective on working with us, and how we enable their success, or how we communicate, then it builds that empathy.”

Be practical and specific

Let’s say leaders want to encourage more accountability in their teams. Saying that is the easy part, but it isn’t enough on its own.

“Explain why you want to become more accountable as a business,” Gillian Davis says. “Say how you noticed it’s a problem. Describe the impact on the business. And then say how you are going to fix it, in a practical, day-to-day way.”

Similarly give people the tools they need to make the changes you want to see. “Don’t just tell people something like you want them to develop their LinkedIn network,” Davis says. “Give them a playbook, a step-by-step breakdown of what that means and how to do that.”

Beware of big surprises

If you want to use the meeting to announce big changes around culture, structure or process, it’s worth getting some people on board first, says Made by On’s Guanglun Wu.

“It’s important to give the people who need to instigate the change early visibility,” he says. “Explain the reasoning to the people it’s going to affect first, and give them a forum where they can give input.”

Then when changes are announced to the wider group, you have a cadre of people who can help explain it to their colleagues, and allay any concerns.

End on a high

Like any performance – and Gillian Davis thinks these meetings do require an element of performance from leaders – the ending really matters. Think about how you want to leave people feeling, and tie it back to that one key message you were looking to land.

Davis once saw a brilliant annual meeting at a big creative firm, which ended on a massive high. People were visibly enthused and excited. Until someone immediately grabbed the microphone to explain the travel arrangements for people who needed the shuttle bus.

See annual meetings as part of a bigger strategy

While these big set-piece meetings are important, they need to work as part of a consistent and coherent approach to leadership.

Gillian Davis says leaders should look at how annual, monthly, and weekly meetings work together, some of which may be for everyone, and others for specific teams.

“I think the monthly meeting should be a super-engaging company health check, and then the teams should have their own weekly rituals, where the real brass tacks of the work is discussed,” she says.

For John Wilson, leadership is ongoing work, that shows up in myriad ways, big and small.

“My gut feeling is that it’s not really about these big single meetings,” he says. “It’s about constantly iterating and refining and re-strategising and re-budgeting.

“The best leaders I’ve worked with are not necessarily always standing up at the front, they are also gently pushing and prodding from behind.”

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Pentagram’s galloping horse logo steers TwelveLabs rebrand

Pentagram partners Jody Hudson-Powell and Luke Powell have created a dynamic equine identity for AI video company TwelveLabs.

Based between San Francisco and Seoul, TwelveLabs describes itself as “the world’s most powerful video intelligence platform.”

Unlike generative video tools which help users create videos from scratch, TwelveLabs uses AI analysis to help people understand their existing videos at a very granular level, which makes them more searchable.

Co-founder and CEO Jae Lee explains that communicating this difference – between video generation and video understanding – was at the heart of their work with Pentagram.

“In the middle of last year our models were improving pretty rapidly, and we thought we needed to up our game in terms of our storytelling, why we matter, and to match the design, the tone, and the messaging to our ambition,” he says.

Lee described the previous branding as “straight out of Silicon Valley” and they chose Hudson–Powell and his team due to their tech-savvy design practice.

In creating a new identity, it was important not to be “lumped in” with other generative AI video companies, Lee says, but also to differentiate themselves from other video analysis tools.

“Our competitors essentially do frame-by-frame analysis, but we look at it temporally,” lead product designer Sean Barclay explains. “That’s what differentiates us, and we wanted to convey that secret sauce.”

“On the first call, they had me at temporal reasoning,” Hudson-Powell laughs.

His team had to avoid the visual cliches AI tools tend to embrace – “it’s a very noisy category with lots of sparkles.”  But they also had to capture and communicate TwelveLabs’ offering in a way that was accessible and exciting, but not dumbed down.

“We had a distinct stream of work that wasn’t strategic or creative – it was just understanding the technology,” Hudson-Powell says. “We kept asking them, could we imagine your technology to look something like this? Or this?

“We were trying to put some kind of conceptual apparatus around the technology, to see if we could find a visual communication language that we could start to build on.”

“Jody was very good at pulling out those threads about what video looks like in our brains,” Lee says.

Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new identity palette for TwelveLabs

The Pentagram team homed in on the core idea of “video as volume” rather than a timeline, and they built a series of thread-based diagrams to help explain how it works. This visual motif could be scaled across the touchpoints, from product pages to sales and branding.

“You get this graphic stretch, so you’re speaking to different audiences with the same concept,” Hudson-Powell explains.

The horse logo was grounded in what Hudson-Powell calls TwelveLabs’ existing “lore” – Lee says they were inspired by Eadweard Muybridge’s famous 1887 animation of a horse, and he likes the metaphor of a user as a jockey steering their technology.

The logo – which has 12 layers in a nod to the company’s name – is often used in motion, galloping across a screen.

“We worked a lot of animation into the identity,” Hudson-Powell says. “Animation can be quite frivolous, but we did it really intentionally. The logo gives you this feeling of perpetual motion, this rhythm at the heart of the brand, which is really important.”

The team chose Milling for the typeface for its combination of “technicality and soft edges” and the visual identity uses the LCH colour system, which, compared to RGB, represents colour in a more similar way to how our eyes perceive colour.

“You can match any two colours and they’ll be harmonious, which you don’t get with RGB,” Hudson-Powell says. “We can find infinite combinations.”

There were also three colour subsets for TwelveLabs’ three key features – pink-purple for search, orange-yellow for generate and green-blue for embed.

Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new colour palette for TwelveLabs

Lee says the new identity has resonated with investors, employees and most importantly, customers.

“It’s given them this confidence that they’re working with not only a super-technical team, but also a team that cares deeply about video,” he says. “So we can communicate with our science community, but also with the people who are building the content we love consuming. There’s a duality which feels really connected.”

Barclay agrees, and adds that it helps people grasp what TwelveLabs does – and what it might do for them – more quickly.

“It’s definitely improved our website tremendously in terms of telling a better story,” he says. “Before it took a lot of time to comprehend what TwelveLabs is, and what we’re offering. We have definitely shortened that.”

Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new identity palette for TwelveLabs
Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new logo for TwelveLabs
Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new identity palette for TwelveLabs
Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new icons for TwelveLabs
Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new identity palette for TwelveLabs
Pentagram’s Luke Powell and Jody Hudson Powell’s new identity palette for TwelveLabs

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