Jonathan Becker: belief

Transcript context

…Awesome. Last question. We started with the story of how you landed Uber, and I know you also have an interesting story which I haven't heard of how you landed Snap/Snapchat as a client, so maybe tell that story. It's a fun story and I think it's about ultimately confidence and knowing your craft. I believe it was like 2015 or 2016, we were essentially contacted to participate in an RFP down in Los Angeles. RFPs are difficult processes and essentially a department of a company is saying, "We want performance marketing and here are all the questions that we're going to ask you and exercises you need to complete in order to vet you as to whether you are the right partner or not." Sometimes RFPs are incredibly thoughtful and they're run by people who have either done a lot of RFPs in the context of what we do or they know specifically what the outcome is. Then in other cases, they're very experienced marketing departments with senior people and an approach that they may take is every stakeholder within that department gets to submit one or two questions to a long list of questions and the respondents have to respond to all of this. The RFP process for Snap was somewhat complex and they asked a range of different questions and we find ourselves in LA at a hotel the night before, it's 2:00 in the morning, my business partner and another team member that we had brought down are sweating and we're like, "How are we going to build a presentation out of this? They're asking so many well-meaning but difficult questions that are zigging and zagging." In a pitch situation you want to tell a story, it's important, and that story has to have a beginning, middle, and end. It was just difficult and yet here we were and we had worked with all these really cool organizations and I was very confident that we knew precisely what we were doing. I kind of had this eureka moment where I was like, "Here's what we're going to do." It was Brent MacArthur, my business partner and I kind of arrived at this together, but we're kind of like, "Here's what we're going to do. We're going to have a completely unique take on how to respond to this and we're going to build a deck that's bespoke around X, Y, and Z." We work till 6:00 in the morning, I think we get a couple hours of sleep and then by 10:00, we're sitting in their offices. Essentially the pitch is something like this. I stand there in front of about 20 different executives from their organization and I say, "You have thoughtfully curated an RFP for us to respond to today, and you have asked us to respond to about 20 to 30 different questions. With the utmost respect, I am not going to answer any of your questions today. I'm standing here because you are looking for a marketing partner and you need expertise in this area and instead of telling you the answers to the questions that you asked, I'm going to tell you what I think you need to do to get where you want to go and if you agree with me and my logic and what I talk to you about here today, then you should hire us. If you do not agree with my logic and you think that we're out to lunch, then you should not hire us." You could hear a pin drop in the room. t I talk to you about here today, then you should hire us. If you do not agree with my logic and you think that we're out to lunch, then you should not hire us." You could hear a pin drop in the room. My own team I think was a little bit surprised. We had a whole bunch of technical difficulties that day. Someone who was supposed to Zoom in couldn't make it and so I have to ad lib part of the pitch that I wasn't prepared for, lots of zig and zags. They thank us for RFP response, lots of handshakes and smiling faces, but we don't know whether we're going to land the client or not. Then about two hours later, I was driving to San Francisco with a friend, immediately leave LA for SF because I had a bunch of follow on meetings, and I get a phone call and they were like, "We loved your approach. Congratulations. You're hired." These days I think Snap is still a really interesting organization, but at the time they were kind of bringing the future of a social platform or what a social platform could be in the same way that we think about TikTok right now. TikTok wasn't on the scene yet and Facebook was very worried about Snap and there was tons of engagement on Snap, so this was the it client of the day and it felt amazing. Essentially the lesson was that you have to trust yourself and understand your strengths and weaknesses. In situations where someone is well-meaning but may not understand what they need, be brave and tell them what they need rather than just conforming to what they're asking for because sometimes inadvertently that leads you down the wrong path. We took a big risk and it had a wonderful payoff and we have, in addition to this story, we had a wonderful relationship with them for a couple years.…

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