I look at a lot of design agencies’ websites and see variations on the same positioning statements repeated business-after-business:

• We are an agency with creativity at our heart
• We work for purpose led brands
• We work for large multinationals and small starts-ups alike
• We work with brave clients
• Our culture sets us apart

Up to the Light’s latest ‘What Clients Think’ report, published in association with the DBA this Spring found that 61% of clients admit to finding it difficult to establish what an agency is best at when looking at their website. When tens of thousands of design businesses take a broad-stroke approach, the problem is that too many agencies look and sound alike.

While these statements might be attempts to keep the new business funnel as wide as possible, in essence what you are saying is that every company is a potential client – and the flip side is that homogeneity works the other way too, creating a sea of sameness in which you are just another design business. When all agencies look and sound alike it creates a problem for some clients: in their eyes there are then only two differentiating factors to choose on:

• price – who is the cheapest?
• and a response to a brief – which creative do we like the best?

Clients will often ask for a free pitch because they cannot tell agencies apart. So how can you avoid being asked in the first place, or effectively rebut the request if you are?

A good place to start with developing your positioning statement is to look at your parameters:

Who won’t you work with? Cut out all the sectors that are not relevant to you.

What size budgets will you /won’t you work for? Is the cut off £10,000 or £50,000? The structure of your business will dictate what your minimum engagement should be. Simply saying “we usually work on projects with design fees between x and y” will save you a lot of time and wasted effort with businesses who should be fishing in other pools.

Design agencies have a hard time tightening up their own positioning. “You can’t read the label from the inside of the jar,” as David C. Baker says, so having an external perspective is crucial, but essentially you need to do to your business what you do for your clients. Be creative and use your expertise to differentiate your business. Don’t become the cobbler with the barefoot children, as the saying goes. Visit the DBA Experts Register for support from experts who can help you “read the label.”

When clients find it difficult to differentiate agencies, this can be particularly frustrating when they look at a website and cannot easily understand what it is the agency does. 70% of clients prefer a statement on the home page that sums up what the agency is all about, while 56% of clients believe that agency websites lack clarity around the agency’s positioning and offer.

• Getting your business to the stage of maturity when you can confidently decline requests for free creative work isn’t a quick fix – but there were plenty of valuable tips shared.
• These included developing your own client engagement policies, having a clear perspective on the issue to help to educate clients, collating evidence to prove your worth (the DBA Design Effectiveness Awards can help you to build solid case studies) and establishing core values that act as guiding principles. 
• Having a policy in place that pushes back on free pitches shows the creative team internally how valued they are – it reinforces the culture you’re trying to foster and underlines that you’re operating as a professional consultancy.
• Asking yourselves internally ‘When are we at our best’ can support you as a team to build your own relationship agreement from the outset. Include this in your credentials/capabilities deck. 
• Building strong, authentic relationships can help you bypass the pitch all together – the latest ‘What Clients Think’ Report can support with this. 
• There are trade offs: RFP’s still take time to compile. But if you’re not giving away creative work or ideas, you’re more likely to attract better-aligned clients.
• Clients might request free work if they aren’t seeing much differentiation between agencies – specialist firms tend not to have the free pitching problem. 
• Blair Enns’ Win Without Pitching is a great source of advice on this topic, and the 2 Bobs podcast comes highly recommended. 
• One member talked us through how they turned around a request for free creative with a meeting to understand the clients exact deliverables, which they answered with a proposal of the amount of time that would take to deliver and the associated costs. 
• Our very own Adam Fennelow, Membership Director at the DBA shared a clear illustration of why giving away free creative doesn’t make financial sense. Download the slides for the hard data behind the case.
• One important note is the amount of fee revenue vs your total income – large clients won’t want to make up more than 15-20% of your income, any more makes it risky for all involved – perhaps a question for the very beginning of the process.
• The DBA’s guides on this topic are all easy to find in the resources section of our website. From specific advice for agencies, information you can share with your clients and an example response to requests – we’re here to support you get paid for all the work you do.