The Pitch & Pilot Playbook — Tactical Tips for SAAS Vendors

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Writer’s note: this article was originally published to Linkedin in April 2016. A lot has changed since then, but my 15+ years of tech experience maintains that most if not all of the below holds true.

Digital product pilots are very common in the tech world today. Piloting is a preliminary test of a how a technology will impact a brand or publisher site/app based on predetermined criteria. The process is remarkably similar to script to screen life stages of TV and movie pilots. SAAS (software as a service) vendors pitch to brands and publishers in hopes for a spot. Likewise, filmmakers pitch to networks in hopes to get a primetime or featured premier slot (say, after the Super Bowl). SAAS vendors may have an awesome product with a client list that increases by the day, but if they don’t have their pilot strategy together, they might not get picked up. Does this process sound familiar? If so, saddle up if you’re interested in tactical guidance and examples to guide you along the journey. Here, I present to you The Pitch & Pilot Playbook.

Pro Tip- word count exceeds 7,000. Feel free to CTRL/COMMAND+F now.

RESPECT THE STACK

The most overused and oversimplified tech vendor expression is “our code’s just a line of javascript.” While your product’s integration may be a breeze for some, legacy sites (stood up with old sometimes homemade infrastructure) require more dev time, and that means more money and bureaucracy. While simplification may be your sales instinct, figure out a few other routes that may get you on the air. What about a CMS plugin? For example, let’s say you’re a video product, and your code has to fire on the video page. But it’s not impacting the page, it’s impacting the player. If it’s a Brightcove player, they have a plugin field within VideoCloud where your code may work. More importantly, your prospect contact may have access to it. It’s a simple workaround that can translate into a litmus test with promising results. Make sure that your plugin code doesn’t leave a trail within the CMS if it has to be removed at any point. If you do create a plugin, see if that can get you listed on that vendor’s partner roster. These pages can act as a back door for leads too. Here’s Brightcove’s.

Know your contact’s PC/MAC settings as well as possible. If they share their screen (full section on this below), peep their Chrome extensions. Do they have adblockers? Ghostery? This can give you a loose idea of how techy they are. More directly, consider asking them to send you a supportdetails.com and speedtest.net report. When they pilot your code, confirm they’re using this same stack.

Buffer.com integrated this process into their customer service flow. Their tech automatically adds in your support details when you write them via their simple Contact Us form. In their email reply, they include your support details at the bottom as such:

• Browser: Chrome 48.0.2564.116
• Extension version: 2.13.18 Platform:
• Mac OS X
• Full browser agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_11_3) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/48.0.2564.116 Safari/537.36

TAGS

While this likely only pertains to analytics vendors (products where there’s no visible module on the site), your prospect may be able to push your code live with just Google Tag Manager or a DSP. He/she is likely in a business role, vs. a developer with a huge and higher priority queue. If you get this person’s attention, familiarize yourself with the rest of their tag stack. Know where yours should fire within the load flow. Know if it should be asynchronous. Sandbox your code firing on a test page that replicates the live site best as possible (see my Staging section below). This is a good place to store ammo on your competition if you’re running simultaneously (see Race Condition section below). In the film world, this is similar to knowing what shops and filmmakers a studio has worked with in the past. Bonus points if past relationships became a little contentious.

DIAGNOSTICS REPORT/FAQs

Maintain a living diagnostics document, a sequence of checks and balances to go through once your product is live (see Launch section below). Share this document with all of your colleagues so that they can update with any live bugs. In one case, I found that a product’s features were disabled when I clicked the browser back button. It took me at least three months to diagnose. When I told the vendor, they discovered this was a new issue that was affecting ALL of their publishers. I felt like I was paying more attention to their product than they were. Don’t depend on your client to spend time problem-solving why your product, live for the first time on their site, ‘doesn’t let me click.’ In filmmaking, this is similar to knowing your main character’s strengths and weaknesses, and how they eventually capitalize or overcome them.

METRICS

Know exactly what metrics you need to make an informed decision on any pilot details. Don’t use single words like ‘volume’ or ‘traffic’ in this context, it’s an insult to Adobe and Google Analytics’ intelligence. Your request may be forwarded to someone else to pull the report, which is another person you want to impress. Get it right the first time with something like this:

• CY 2015
• Visits
• Unique Visitors
• Pageviews
• United States Only
• Breakout by Mobile/Desktop/Tablet

If someone has to rerun a report, it can be frustrating and they may suddenly be on vacation. The same goes in reshooting for TV/film, where an actor is on another set already, or it’s raining and you can’t get another outdoor shot. It’s easy to just accept a publisher’s blanket statement i.e. “we get a hundred million pageviews a month” but you need to tactfully challenge that rhetoric for a smooth pilot.

If your product simply does not work with one specific browser version, kindly ask the client the attributable traffic and/or revenue. This is a rare report but can be a lifesaver if they only make 0.47% of their revenue from IE9.

SINGLE SIGN ON (SSO)

At the most human understandable level, SSO means that stakeholders can use your product without another username and password. Regardless of advancements in this space like LastPass, simply not having another account login to think about is soothing. I was in talks with a vendor trying to unseat a native product for at least a year. They finally created a simple SSO solution to integrate with our CMS, and the product was live soon after. Training editorial was a breeze. You may not get your whole product packed into the experience, but it should be enough to shoot the pilot. Similar to the video plugin, make sure there’s public record of your SSO functionality with any CMS, esp. if it’s an enterprise solution with Adobe AEM, SDL Tridion, Sitecore, etc.

If the above solutions simply won’t work, send your prospect their actual page source with your additional code highlighted. This is especially important if your code fires in the header and footer. Send this or any solutions above in a .txt file, and as a github link on your company’s github account page.

Application Programming Interface (API)

An API can be your best friend, but if not programmed correctly it’ll stab you in the back. Here’s an anecdote. I programmed a video API to dynamically include all relevant video fields for an iPad app: 1) the video file type optimized for tablet, 2) title, 3) description and 4) tags. This is the beauty of flexibility that an API provides. After the handoff to dev, they created the app experience. A year later I terminated the deal with the video vendor for several reasons. I told dev to remove the video plugin altogether from the app. Before they did, I had to delete the vendor-provided API token, which prevented the entire app from OPENING. It just buffered eternally. A few people got mad at me that day.

Point is, many vendors tout their API as a simple plug and play process. Simplification of your API can burn you. In the worst cases, your client may ingest and locally store the API output, making it a lot harder to update. Always know the end destination of your API data, and what is the process to push/pull an update. Learn the capabilities of your API and you will be able to present better business solutions for unique use cases.

KNOW YOUR ALGORITHM

At any point of a pitch or pilot, your prospect may ask questions like “if someone is logged into our site on desktop, and then mobile, do you track that behavior as the same user? What if they use a hybrid of Chrome and Safari?” I’ve heard responses from vendors saying that they don’t know but their competitor doesn’t do it either. This is frequently where they recycle the “we’re the number one vendor in the space” line. Sometimes the simplest question about your algorithm may throw you off, and that can derail everything.

If you don’t have the answer right away, take that note! In your follow up email (see below), include that as next steps. I.e. Joe → investigate user tracking consistency on multiple platforms/browsers. Worst case scenario is that you don’t look into this right away, and then a month later your contact’s boss asks the same question, and you still don’t have the answer.

Know your roadmap too. Saying “I don’t know” is fine, but saying “that’s an active feature request slated for fix in Q3” is much more reassuring. In screenwriting, knowing your character’s “hero journey” beats is critical. If you skip one in your pitch, a good producer will ask a question like ‘when does the false victory occur?’ If you don’t know, it’s back to the script.

STAGING

“QA” or staging sites are internal/not publicly available web environments. This is a good step, but most staging sites are skeletons of the live site. You may not have access because of a firewall, so be sure to ask that first. If you can’t access, a screen share can get around it. Maybe an Incognito tab will cure the issue. Know that staging sites are typically not true representations of live sites. Look for more design issues here, if your unit or code collides with others and presents a strange front end experience. If you’re comfortable, ask for a limited access or read only login.

A/B TESTING SOFTWARE

Adobe Target, Optimizely and the like are great testing tools, especially for older companies that have the benefit of YoY (year over year) data to compare to. This is especially important in any seasonality-based business, which largely impacts the travel and hospitality sectors. You may find that the owner of this business relationship is in another department, maybe even in IT. Knowing your prospect uses testing software is a fact that you have to unearth. Learn if it’s mainly used for native testing, and/or third parties.

H/T to vwo.com for the above image.

HARDWARE/WIFI (for presenting to clients)

If your team has a designated laptop as the sole hardware for a presentation, make sure you have all applicable cables, dongles and adapters. HDMI, VGA, ethernet to Thunderbolt, Lightning, etc. Bonus if the room has Apple TV and you have a Mac/Apple product and display via AirPlay. Spend the couple hundred bucks to get the quality ones (Amazon Basics work great), put them in a ziplock and store them in your bag. Don’t lend them out to anyone. Losing ten minutes out of sixty may cut out valuable Q&A.

The best presentation one-two punch I know of is Keynote and iPhone Keynote Remote. You can stand up, swipe from slide to slide AND view presenter notes on your iPhone only. In order to do this, your iPhone and laptop need to be connected to the same WIFI network.

If you don’t have your own Wifi device, ask your client in advance about WIFI access. In some instances they’re happy to share but ‘the IT guy’ has to set up specific WIFI credentials first. Ask if the same network can be connected to when you’re waiting in the lobby. Some companies are open and simple, others are still incredibly complicated. Read more about office visits below in Dog and Pony section.

SOCIAL SHARING

It’s crucial that your social share buttons work round trip. Ideally, your prospect’s site already contains Twitter Cards and OpenGraph (commonly used for Facebook, Instagram and Pinterest) and maybe a third party share tool (i.e. Gigya, Addthis, Sharethis). Wherever your product is, every single button should be tested in every browser and platform. Just because the little “F” Facebook button is there, doesn’t mean it works. The biggest errors I see are with the click thru URL that’s posted to the user’s social site. Sometimes it’s the homepage of a site, instead of a unique URL. Other times, an insignificant image, i.e. your logo, will be auto selected by the button because you didn’t specify the hero image within your code. When you test post, enter the time of day that you shared, and true up with the time of the actual post. It should take less than two minutes to be live.

For video and rich media sharing, every platform is different now that there’s Facebook Video, Twitter Embedded Video, Pinterest Cinematic Pins, etc. Know how you want your product to appear in each scenario, and more importantly, where users should go after they click.

One particular environment to pay attention to is a long page of individual pieces of content. Typically this is UGC (user generated content) like a page of product reviews. If a user is half way down the page (aka at 50% scroll) and shares a particular review, the click thru URL should be unique and anchored. This logic will send social click thru users first to the page, and then ‘drop anchor’ down to the specific content that was shared. This can typically be done with a hashtag appended to the URL, followed by a unique alphanumeric identifier. This HubSpot blog post is a good resource (tho dated Oct. 2014).

Pro Tip- I have extra social media accounts for each platform, all linked to an email address I only use for QA (thanks, iCloud). All accounts are private so no one can friend me or view my Tweets. Since Chrome is my default browser (where I am logged in with my personal accounts), my ‘tester’ browser is Firefox. I keep a Firefox browser tab open and logged in to each platform, so that whenever I’m QAing a product, I can quickly test a round trip share. If you’re a mobile app publisher, best to test Safari for iPhone and Chrome for Droid (definitely read up on Chrome custom tabs). You should test in order of most important platform first. Find this via your analytics provider, below is Google Analytics’ social referrer report I grabbed from this Buffer article.

LOGLINE

Every pitch starts with the answer to the most key question- “what’s it about?” HBO’s Silicon Valley’s logline: “In the high-tech gold rush of modern Silicon Valley, the people most qualified to succeed are the least capable of handling success.”

There’s a lot packed in there, but keep in mind this is a comedy. In any genre of television, there is conflict. The logline suggests the conflict is that the characters can’t handle success. In the digital pilot real world, that’s not funny. You must nail your logline, and the one place you have the most air time is your pitch email. It should contain three things:

1. What does the product actually look like and/or do on a webpage/in an app?
2. Do users interact with your product? If so, how?
3. Does it generate traffic, revenue or analytics? If analytics, can that translate or be unpacked into traffic or revenue?

Your pitch email has to be specific. Don’t mention anything in your pitch about how your product is the ‘world’s first’ or ‘global leader’ or ‘#1’ unless you can actually quantify that merit. In SV, they use the Weissman Score which measures a file’s compression ratio. Most boasting language is frequently hyperbole. You’re not looking for investors in this context (although that can be a happy accident). Publishers, especially those without a paywall, have enough native tools (in content marketing, ‘Editor’s Picks’ is an example) that the editorial staff and algorithms manage and TRUST over your product.

GET RICH MEDIA

After your logline, bake some rich media into your pitch. After a brief explanation, Google’s Chrome Custom Tabs developer page has a great GIF:

It illustrates how the product looks, replicates a user click, shows competitor/similar products, and provides a timer (quantify!) below each experience. Just below it, a Github code.

PRIVATE SCREENING

Once you’ve completed the email draft, send it to your work and personal email addresses. Check out the preview text on mobile, desktop and tablet. If you’re not intrigued by the preview text snippet, your prospect won’t be either. Click on any links you’ve included, make sure they open as intended. The most common mistake here is preview text reading “click here to view on the web.” Bad preview text will lower your open rate. Send the final draft to your spouse or a coworker who will give you constructivefeedback. If they just say ‘it’s good’ ask someone else.

FILL THE VOID

What is the company doing wrong, that they may not know of already? Can your product solve that specific problem? I’ve received many pitches from social content aggregators that simply say “we’d be a great match for your site.” My site? The whole thing?? It’s kind of ballsy that you think your product would be best ROS (run of site), yet I don’t know you nor your product. I’ve heard vendors say “the algorithm works best when we’re on every page.” That may be the case but that is simply too big of an ask up front.

Filling the void is also an interview tactic, where interviewees should seek out the problems the interviewer is dealing with and present fully baked solutions. A guy from a site optimization vendor used to email me once a month and say something like “half way down on your homepage, in the country drop down menu, you should have United States in the first spot given the criteria,” and include a screen shot. Tactical advice is great in a pitch and can act as a deal sweetener down the road.

Minor plug, I’ve written a short film script, which essentially is a pilot for the feature length movie. My WIP logline: “When a tech startup’s personal shopping app mistakenly places cancelled orders, the team scrambles to prevent hundreds of gifts being sent to ex girlfriends.” I’ve watched every episode of Silicon Valley so that one day (though hopefully there will be multiple) when I’m pitching a studio exec, I have some relevant ammunition. As should you, keeping your bullets specific and fired only when prompted. For example, if I am asked “what other shows is it like?” I’m going to respond with a specific scene in Silicon Valley. I’ll have that scene cued up on my phone to show him/her, and elaborate on the character dynamic and conflict in the scene. A SAAS vendor should have a wealth of specific bullets on their competitors.

PUBLISHING CALENDAR

During an election year, most news sites’ politics sections will see an increase in pageviews and impressions- that’s not where you start your pilot. Tell them to initially test your code on the baseball page before pitchers and catchers report (#LGM). Put it on the health section before flu season. If it’s an eCommerce site, beware not just of Cyber Monday- do some research and find the top ten busiest days of your prospect’s industry and see if you can squeeze in your pilot in the #5 spot. If they have a Chinese user base, Singles’ Day may be bigger than Cyber Monday. Have a rollout schedule for additional sections too, make sure you generate enough data to scale up accordingly. If wind of your incredible attention to editorial integrity makes its way to the (sometimes literal) other side of the business, that’s good. Though before you lock your show’s shooting days, make sure you request relevant metrics (see my Metrics section).

Race conditions are a pitfall to watch out for, in fact I could include them in many paragraphs of this playbook. This is when two or more products try to access shared data at the same time, forcing both algorithms to race against each other. Real time ‘Bake Offs’ done wrong can result in race conditions.

CALENDAR/MEETING ETIQUETTE

Once someone emails you their availability and there is a time slot that works with your schedule, instantly reply with the Meeting button in Outlook or the Create Event function in gmail. Modify the prepopulated info and create a clearly worded (in the subject and body) calendar invite detailing who is calling who, i.e. Bighead to call Richard. If multiple people will be on a conference call, ensure the body of the invite has a mobile-friendly one-click dial in number. For most devices, the format is 8005555555,123456789#. Sometimes a double comma (,,) is necessary. Below that, include a human-friendly number format, (800) 555–5555, 123–456–789. (H/T to Daniel Miessler for this).

MOBILE FRIENDLY: 8005555555,123456789#

HUMAN FRIENDLY: (800) 555–5555, 123–456–789.

There may be an international number as well, which you can include lower down. If it’s an in person meeting, enter the entire physical address in Google Search, copy Google’s formatted result and paste in the invite so your invitee can one click open in Google Maps. They should thank you if they have an iPhone and you’ve just outwitted Apple Maps. Test this all out by inviting yourself to a fake meeting, and clicking on the link with your mobile device. One app that I must absolutely give a shout out to in this category is Mobile Day. An emerging product in this space is Amy, the Artificial Intelligence powered personal assistant. Go to x.ai (that’s the URL) to get beta access waitlisted.

SCREEN SHARE GAME

Keep it tight. Countless vendors have pitched me on the phone, and then half way through one of us suggests a screen share. While it always sounds easy, errors frequently occur when you try to set up a GoTo, join.me, logmein123 etc. on the fly. Typically it’s because there’s a brief software download required. Your calendar invite should include the screen share URL (bonus points if it’s human readable or a vanity URL) and mention if there’s a download required. Hopefully your contact’s user permissions/firewalls allow this. Be sure you know how to configure your comp’s microphone and speaker settings.

Pro Tip — I have a dedicated email signature named ‘conference call info’ and it is the mobile + human friendly dial-ins and the screen share link. Speaking of Signatures…

EMAIL SIGNATURE

I’ve seen a number of creative signatures. Sometimes this is a good space to promote your brand’s social channels. Or a recent press release or success story. Maybe even a case study? Yesware or Toutapp (email software that tracks clicks) can be helpful here. Do not include any images or GIFs. Same goes for your out of office. You know what else doesn’t work in your OOO? Kitschy language about how you’re ‘marrying your best friend.’

DON’T PITCH THE PARENT

Every organization I’ve worked for has owned several intercompanies or brands, each with different demographics, different voices, different tech stacks (the worst)… different stuff. This is especially common after brand acquisitions/mergers, where the new brand is referred to as an orphan. If your prospect company owns Brands A, B and C, don’t pitch saying that your product would increase the whole company’s traffic/revenue. Learn about each brand, figure out your sweet spot. Liken this to a director pitching Time Warner when in reality you want to air on TBS.

Are you St. Regis or more Residence Inn?

Don’t assume that your product is agnostic of an intercompany culture or political baggage either. In HBO’s Silicon Valley, this would be the equivalent of pitching Jared who then has to bring in Erlich. Two completely different characters with different levels of cynicism. Now you’re pitching someone else who’s not heard your logline and is only available Monday at 10am EST. And of course you’re based in the Bay Area and totally want to have a call at 7am PST.

MATRIX

Where does your contact fit in the company’s matrix? Are they a Neo? Morpheus? The Oracle? If you you’re getting wind that they’re not the decision maker, tactical get-me-your-manager nudges are a good ‘next steps’ topic. My title while working for NY Daily News was Sr. Digital Product Manager, but I was on the ‘business side’ (NOTE to recruiters) whereas most product managers sit on the IT side. I had the leeway to pilot products because I had access to the CMS and a good relationship with the Director of Ad Ops, who had access to the Google DFP server. Vis a Vis knowing him, I was able to pilot vendors running their code in the CMS and sometimes via an insertion order (IO). See my Contracts section below for more on IOs.

Image from Blu-Ray.com. Neo’s waiting for someone to start on the fancy salad.

ACRONYMS

Be 100% sure that the your contact knows what all of your acronyms signify. You may think ‘CMS’ is an industry standard, until someone asks ‘what’s CMS?’ after you’ve just said it five times. This goes both ways. Don’t act like you know their acronyms. Interrupt if you have to. One example from my Wenner Media days- US. That stands for Us Weekly. “Us” as in “Us and them,” not like U.S. In USA. If interrupting isn’t an option, have a browser tab open to acronymfinder.com, sort results by the Information Technology tab.

NOTES & NEXT STEPS

Stack your notes arsenal in preparation for next steps aka action items. Though don’t assume that at the end of every call you’ll have five minutes to recap everything. People have hard stops, fire drills, any number of things that can cut the call short. Your follow up should encompass the entire call in a bullet formatted fresh email with a descriptive subject. The amount of detail should be relevant to how well your client contact understands your tech. The fresh email will ensure it doesn’t get subject grouped. Include at least one good link to your site i.e. a press page where, even if months later, the prospect can click on it for updated content. Follow steps from my Logline section above. I fully endorse Evernote in the note taking arena. As a screenwriter, the ability to have one document across all devices filled with random character and plot notes is invaluable.

ATTACHMENTS

Forgetting attachments is one thing, but attaching too many documents, or files that are too big, can be really frustrating. Before you attach a static document, consider hosting it live on your private file server, which you can update as needed. Got a 20 slide case study in PPT or Keynote? Consider linking to a Slideshare hosted on your company’s Linkedin page. Some companies still have strict size restrictions and quarantines set up with Outlook. Other times, your 18MB attachment will archive everything before it, frustrating your partner contact. Google Drive and Dropbox are available as well. Know that if you attach huge documents, it may be construed as lack of consideration for your contact’s inbox, or worse, that you’re not tech savvy. Burn.

KEEP A PILOT LIGHT LIT

Keep the heat on your partner contact without being annoying. One guy pinged me on a weekly basis with essentially the same email, filled with Yesware tracking. It felt so systematic, so repetitive; and worse, assumptive. He mapped out a timeline of when we would partner and how much I would pay. After one call. He was no longer with the company a few months later, and his successor emailed me to apologize. And to pitch me.

AGENCIES

In no world is the ‘we’re the #1/world’s largest…’ rhetoric recycled more than in the agency world. The importance of an agency-focused biz dev role grows proportionately to your company size. Hire someone who has agency experience and connections. Learn about the agency’s contracted fields of business with your prospect. I.e. if they just run SEM, they’ll be less qualified to vouch for your content marketing product. Know that either way, you may still be pointed in an agency’s direction. In all cases, know the agency’s client roster in the chance that you can pitch a bundled package.

READ ALL ABOUT IT

Whenever I’m considering working with/for an organization, I Google News them. If they’re public, check their stock price. If there’s been a lot of movement recently, just know why that may be. If it’s bad press, the whole company will know about it and you should too. If you have someone reporting to you, this could be a good recon assignment for your prospect list. If you think any of these news stories are worthy, let this be your small talk to start the call. NOT the weather or how they get to/from work.

I will mention Lumascapes here, though use at your own risk:

Use alexa.com to your advantage, I recommend the Chrome extension at a minimum. While Alexa’s free version used to reveal more insight, it’s still great. Here are a few stats available as of publish time of this guide: domestic and global traffic rank (“How is this site ranked relative to other sites?”), audience geography (“Where are this site’s visitors located?”), bounce rate, daily pageviews per visitor and daily time on site. The Wayback Machine is cool too, just don’t get caught in a black hole of nostalgia.

NEWSLETTER

Don’t sign someone up for your newsletter without asking. Forward a previous one that mentions a specific feature you discussed, with a voluntary one-click subscribe link. Make sure the one-click subscribe works if they forward it to a colleague. Follow my “private screening” instructions for forwarding newsletters.

DOG AND PONY SHOW

Cater to the important and new people in the room. An agency pitching my team handed out nice index cards with head shots, names, titles and a few keywords about each person in the room and on the conference line. I am terrible with names, especially when I meet five people in a row at 9am. The “D&P Show” is again where the intro has started off “we’re the partner of the year” etc. and then another agency came in and said the same exact thing. Keep the general intro short and direct. Bring mints and put them in the center of the table. Mints are also great conference booth schwag.

LEGAL

NDA — The non-disclosure agreement can come straight outta nowhere. This is a tricky one. You want your prospect to sign yours, but you don’t know when to ask. And if you ask, they have to ping their legal/counsel, and will likely reply requesting you sign their NDA instead. Both of you think yours is a ‘Mutual NDA’ but in reality it’s not. On occasion, there’s a signed NDA from 2009 with your prospect’s parent company. This could be signs of life or just an oasis of hope. Nullification of an existing NDA can be as petty as one or two words, typically related to indemnification. Just be sure to consider an NDA and know that your legal person/team (if you have one) takes this document very seriously. If you dohave a person in legal, befriend them. Take em out to lunch, get a drink… the NDA volley is an annoying task that can kill weeks, even months, because there’s a legal dispute over something ridiculous, ahem, not company policy.

Getting legal people on the phone typically has the best results. Invite both counsels to a meeting two weeks out, marked as tentative. It’s far enough away where they won’t feel like they’re under the gun, and the tentative status means that if things settle before then, you could easily cancel it.

Vendor beware. If you don’t get an NDA signed, that means the publisher or brand has more freeway to DIY your product into their site on their own terms. I’ve seen it happen. In Hollywood, screenwriters can write scripts, pitch it to a studio, get rejected, and then the studio can make nearly that same movie or TV show without compensating you. Good luck winning the lawsuit.

CONTRACTS

Though typically out of scope during piloting, contract talks may begin here. They can be the devil of all queues. Very rarely does a legal team have nothing to do. Most work in chronological fashion, unless you have a strong case to bump up a specific product. This is another area, like the NDA, where indemnification will be a sticking point. Liability is big. Make sure downtime fees are there too, i.e. if your code breaks or your servers are down for more than 24 hours, the fee structure will adapt. Or, don’t include it but beware that the prospect’s legal team might. Liability should only extend to your owned servers, not third party (i.e. AWS) servers.

Publisher Insertion Orders (IOs) can be a handy workaround. Even though they’re designed for running advertising, they contain legal language which may suffice for a pilot as well.

TAXES

I am no tax expert, but there are things you can tax, typically goods, and things you cannot, typically services. State taxes may be tied to the state that your servers are located in, and/or the partner’s. I know, that doesn’t make sense, but it is something to think about. Taxes are related to money of course, which is my next section. If this topic interests you, read up on Delaware General Corporation Law.

FEES

I have had startup CEOs literally tell me “I don’t know what to charge” and not even have a ballpark. Another good remedial project is to run a competitive analysis on all available rate cards in your space. Typically, publishers prefer a revenue-sharing split with whatever they earn/the lift that is attributable to your product. Brands may request the same, but having a fixed cost, one-time fee can be preferable in that the prospect needs a hard figure in the books of the current quarter.

If your model is a revenue split, the partner then has a lot more opportunities to match up with their metrics. Analytical discrepancies happen A LOT and that is a conversation you cannot avoid. I’ve seen gaps as large as 40% on an ongoing basis- always in the vendor’s favor.

One vendor’s pilot structure was as such:

• Term: 30 Days
• Cost: $5K
• Commitment: Auto Renew into partnership with $5K credit.
• Report: 6 page audit

Essentially if the pilot ‘won’ within the first 30 days, I had a $5K credit to put towards the first month of the partnership, which started right after 30 days. If the pilot ‘lost’ then I lost the $5K but nonetheless had a solid data report to analyze. Likewise, I convinced them to a 90 day test for $10K. The non-autonew model was simply the $5K fee with no credit if you partner at a later date.

Sometimes when it comes to fees, honesty from the vendor has helped. For example, “We just need to recoup the Akamai server costs, and my fee structure is based on that model.”

REVENUE

Assimilate yourself as natively as possible with how much you could earn for publisher or brand, usually this requires quoting a CPM or CPC range. If your product delivers traffic or analytics, what are the incremental pageviews/time spent etc. the publisher can potentially gain? In some cases, you can use the publisher’s eCPM formulawhich calculates the overall value of a thousand pageviews, say $5. If your product can be attributed to 2 incremental pageviews per visit, a publisher that averages 1 million pageviews will earn an additional 2 million pageviews. That translates into a $10,000 eCPM lift. Consider ad operations i.e. the waterfall, programmatic, etc. but this formula typically spurs a conversation that may get your product shortlisted.

BONUS SECTION — PARTNERSHIPS

This was originally called The Pitch, Pilot & Partner playbook… but that doesn’t sound as good, right? It’s the comma. Below is a synopsis:

LAUNCH

You got picked up- woohoo! All hands on deck for this. Get everyone on your team, your squad, whoever, clicking the s**t out of your product. In Chrome, FF, and yes, in IE. How does your partner’s site now appear in the Google Search app? Send a live link out to your whole company, even the mailroom, from an internal customer service email, and request confirmation and comments by EOD. Get the word out! Remember Steve Madden day in Wolf Of Wall Street? Something like that. But legal.

Pro Tip — Involve champagne. If you can bring it to the partner’s office, or host them at your office, great. Get several bottles of decent stuff and buy at least twelve disposable champagne flutes. Prosecco is a good alternative, especially if there will be Italians involved. A champagne bottle pop in an office is a wonderful thing. If there’s some left over, offer to coworkers of your partner contact, he/she will get an instant status level-up. Pretty much everyone drinks champagne. Write a short speech to say at the toast. A haiku, a quick poem. If you’ve had some speed bumps throughout the process, include them. Just make it meaningful, stress that ultimately, mutual growth is the goal. Ask everyone to stand and raise their glasses, keeping the ceremonial stuff serious and quick. Get someone to take a group photo at some point.

ONGOING MAINTENANCE

If your job is to close the deal and hand the partnership/ongoing support to an account manager, try to at least have one face to face with everyone. Even if it’s months out. Don’t ever let the partner go on autopilot. Sometimes, a biweekly tentative check in call on the calendar is best. A shared agenda document helps, in that both of you can update in the interim and have some real items to discuss.

PUBLIC RELATIONS

I am a fan of press releases, but some people are not. It’s a worthy topic to discuss once the contract has been signed, but know that this is also a touchy subject. Confirm all links in the write up will travel and post as hyperlinked text in the press release. When files transfer in XML or API feeds, they sometimes flatten into plain text and strip out hyperlinks, which can cause a broken link. Sneaky publishers ‘accidentally’ do this but will manually hyperlink it if you catch them. Sometimes the stripping can be related to use of HTTP instead of HTTPS. Before you share the good news to your followers, run a round trip test. Also, while sharing the PR Newswire version may make sense, if the story gets picked up by a large news organization, you may want to share that instead. Set up a Google News Alert to wrangle all the crazy press you’re getting.

BELLS AND WHISTLES

If your company launches a new product and you expect to be in the press, ensure the partners know as soon as it’s public. Especially if the product compliments what you are already running on the partner site. It’s annoying to read a press release about my vendor’s shiny new product that my account manager never told me about.

MY PET PEEVES

Quit using these words as vocal fillers: Like, ya know, umm, uhhh. For people who strive to not use those words, it’s painful to hear other people say them. I actually count how many times certain people say them. Plenty of online self help for this topic. Also, don’t congratulate someone for something that’s not congratulatory-worthy. Likewise don’t apologize for things you’re not really sorry about. For example: “Sorry I didn’t get back to you last week, I was at SXSW.”

FUN STUFF

If your company has a bar, ping pong or some cool office space, don’t just brag about it. Actually invite your contact there for a drink at a certain day and time. I recommend 4pm, knowing that they may have to push to 5 or 6pm. If your contact comes, keep it personal until they bring up business. Have a few beer and wine options, not just your microbrew IPA on tap that’s 9.2% ABV, bro. Champagne can make an apperance here too, of course.

CONCLUSION

I hope this guide helps those at any stage of their career. It is solely my attempt to recount tactical examples that I’ve dealt with, and save you time and money by thinking about them in advance.

Did i forget anything? Get something wrong? Do you want a PDF version of my playbook? Leave it in the comments or message me. If you enjoyed this, stay tuned for The Digital Strategy Playbook. Until then…

Stay connected:

@JWEsposito

www.linkedin.com/in/JWEsposito

I’m a screenwriter with absolutely no representation:

www.stage32.com/JWEsposito

PS- If you’re reading this and wish you had it before you blew your last pitch- fear not. Here’s the link to an early draft of SV’s pilot. Nothing like what evangelized onto the screen, but it got their foot in the door. Bravo Mike Judge and Alec Berg!