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The final choice
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Don’t be one of those potential clients that takes forever to make a decision or disappears into the black hole of not returning emails.
Immediately after your visit, if the agency you visited is worth anything, you will have an email thanking you and your team for your visit (along with their enthusiasm for your company and how they can help you grow.
By this time, you have probably got an excellent feel for who is going to get into the final final short list. To make the best use of your time, my suggestion:
- Respond to the ones that you are pretty sure WON’T make the cut with a nice thank you but a clear indication that you will be looking elsewhere.
- Respond to the ones that you are pretty sure WILL be in the short list saying that you need a couple of weeks to put the next step together, but that they will be in the short list.
The Short List – The Final Presentation
When I was in architectural school, and in my “artistic” drawing class, I was a real disaster. I can draw, but somehow or other, I never finished on time, or, if I did, my quality would be at best a shade under mediocre. In contrast, one of the guys in the class would take the statue we were rendering, do the silhouette perfectly, then take a broad swipe across the middle and render that area to perfection.
The first time he did this, the professor came to him and scolded him for not finishing. The guy responded that the class was to gauge his drawing skills, not his drawing speed. He had shown two things: first, he could get the form perfectly well and second, he could render to perfection. The professor was kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place. My classmate got one of the few passing grades. Lesson learned
The best way to proceed at this point is not to sit through another meaningless deck and video pony show. The best way is to give the few agencies chosen for the final cut a project and a score-card.
Next and final installment we’ll examine the Project questionnaire for candidate finalists.
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