From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor - Jerry Della Femina [99]
Sure enough, general headquarters. Last-minute nerves. ‘Don’t forget we’re billing fifteen million.’ ‘Fifteen? I thought it was eighteen.’ ‘How many people we got working for us now?’ ‘I don’t know, I haven’t counted lately.’ You’re trying to get all your facts straight.
A guy from the company comes out and he’s very friendly and personable: ‘Hi, I’m Eddie Jones, come on in.’ Immediately four guys try to go through the door at the same time. It always happens, and the door is only built to hold maybe half of a guy. There is always a bumping of bodies on the way in to a presentation. I am very nervous, picking up and putting down the portfolio. It is like playing shortstop at Yankee Stadium when you know that it’s going to be O. K. if you ever get a ball hit in your direction. If somebody would ask you, ‘What are you guys billing?’ things would be all right. Nobody’s doing that. All they’re trying to be is friendly. They get you into a real Texas-sized conference room and you pray that there will be at least one guy there you will be able to understand. You start listening to the introductions and the hellos, and on a hello from one guy Ron leaned into my ear and said, ‘New York!’ Fantastic. One cat we could understand. He was from New York and it was a great feeling that we weren’t alone in this foreign country.
We still have to pick the man who has got the clout in the room. There is always one guy in a room who is going to say yes or no. Finding this guy is a job all by itself. There can be real problems in searching out this guy. A guy I know once came into a meeting late. He sat down, looked at his papers, and when it was his time to go on he’s looking right down the line at each guy to find the one he’s going to zero in on. He spots one guy who looks like he’s important and very inquisitive and says to himself, ‘This is it.’ He stared him straight in the eye all the way through the pitch, never taking his eye off him. He threw out the rest of the people, so help me, and sold and sold and sold. He forgot the whole room. When it was over he was convinced that he had done a terrific job. Then they told him he had been pitching to a new guy who had just come to work at his agency – an assistant media director. Obviously the new guy was too terrified to say, ‘Hey, I’m on your team.’
There may be six people in the room and there’s going to be discussion, but when it’s all over one guy’s going to say, ‘I think we should go this way.’ He might not even say that. He might say, ‘The president, I think, will agree that we should go this way.’ This is the guy you want to find.
You start off ad libbing and you have no idea whom you’re talking to. They want to know where we ate the night before and when we tell them they say, ‘Great place, great steak.’ I keep thinking of the enchiladas. They’re uncomfortable because they know you’re nervous as hell. You start off by saying, ‘I want to thank you all for allowing us to come out here and make this presentation.’
The top gunner, the big guy, is at this meeting. Which is not good. My feeling about top gunners is when they’re at a meeting their troops feel they’ve got to perform for the top gunner. I like to go with plateaus.
The group we’re pitching to, they’re all big gunners. You could see it when the introductions started: ‘Vice-President in charge of international operations’; ‘Vice-President in charge of marketing’; ‘Director of marketing and advertising.’
I start up again by thanking everyone. I give a little of my background and then we go around the table, and each of us gives background on himself. One of our account executives,