I Took A Team To Paris And Discovered The Brief Was In Spam
5/28/20266 min
A missed brief. A room full of decision-makers. A team fresh off the Eurostar waiting to present a tailored proposal that never existed—because the client’s detailed instructions were quietly filed in spam. We tell the whole story with candour, including the costs, the embarrassment, and the uncomfortable gap between personal brand and reality when a simple system failure derails a big moment.
We dig into what professionalism really looks like in sales and agency life: not bravado at the pitch, but the boring brilliance of process. You’ll hear why “creds plus” only works at the right funnel stage, how attendee lists hint at evaluation versus discovery, and where most teams stumble when meetings evolve without explicit re-qualification. We break down practical safeguards—48-hour objective confirmations, shared inbox rules, whitelisting, pre-flight checklists, and backup comms channels—that make important emails unmissable and keep live meetings aligned with buyer expectations.
There’s also the human layer. Pride takes a knock when your edge is process mastery and the basics fail; we talk openly about that ego hit and how to respond without excuse-making. From rapid acknowledgement to a 48-hour turnaround on a tailored proposal, we share recovery moves that rebuild trust and sometimes strengthen relationships. If you sell, pitch, or lead client work, this story will arm you with simple, repeatable habits that prevent single points of failure and turn confidence into evidence.
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsChris Norton· Host0:00
What's, what's one mistake you've made in your career that you've learnt quite a lot from? I'm looking for a nice anecdote here.
Will Ockenden· Host0:07
Chris, I think I love this, uh, question, and I love the, the sort of basic premise of the, um, of the podcast, right? Because I say all the time, I learn far more from my failures than I do from my success. Success is ultimately a function of how you deal with failure. Uh, I'm going to tell you something that I've ne- of, of where I failed, where I've never shared this with anybody, and I actually made a point of saying to the team at Hotwire, "Please," who were with me on this, "Please, can you not tell anyone?" [laughs] Right?
Chris Norton· Host0:43
Okay.
Will Ockenden· Host0:44
That this happened.
Chris Norton· Host0:45
They're the best ones.
Will Ockenden· Host0:47
Yeah. So, uh, we had the opportunity to pitch a f- large French-based technology com- France-based technology company while I was at Hotwire, and we did a, like, creds plus and sent it to them, and, uh, we then got a meeting in the diary for a pitch. Um, but, um, in that time, I hadn't seen any correspondence from the folks that we were going to pitch.
Chris Norton· Host1:20
Mm-hmm.
Will Ockenden· Host1:20
And I, um... Or, or, or we'd... Uh, we- but we had, like, agreed who else was gonna be in the meeting, and my understanding was there were just, like,