I still have something I call the Twister. It's a prototype that sits on a shelf in my workshop, a little silver funnel I built in my garage for a pitch. I've never been able to let go of it, even though we let go of the idea.

Years ago, the agency I worked for, a music and experiential agency, was working on a global spirits company's flagship whiskey. We'd built an amazing relationship with senior management and the brand team there. And like all agencies, we wanted to expand the business. The company had just bought a specialty Italian liqueur, and the GM of their specialty brands group invited us in to pitch it.

So we set out to show our range. We were known for music and experiences, but we wanted them to see we could do more than the thing they already valued us for.

And that's the crazy thing. When you're pitching, you're always looking to impress the client, even when the client is predisposed to like you. The way a pitch works, they give you a bit of a brief. You're allowed to ask a few questions, and the answers usually get shared with everyone pitching. Then you go away and try to be creative. And it's really hard to come up with the right strategy because, to be honest, you don't know enough about the audience, the product, the brand, or most importantly, what the client really wants. You're working off on your own.

That's certainly what I did.

My team was struggling to find an idea that was different from the places we'd already played. So I brainstormed and brainstormed. How do we make this liqueur the drink people ask for? Then, in a fit of inspiration, I wandered into a kitchen supply store and found the tip of an icing bag. Maybe I can do something with this. That sent me into my garage with some solder, glue and tape, and I turned it into a device I called the Twister.

It clipped onto the side of the glass. The bartender poured the liqueur into the funnel, and the customer lifted it out, twisting the liqueur into the drink. I thought it was brilliant, even though in practice it was kind of hard to work.

What's crazy is I didn't really understand what the client was looking for. We were allowed to send questions before the pitch, but we didn't interview a single bartender, and we hardly leaned on our own on-premise people. Instead, we used our questions to prove we were smart and position ourselves against the competition, instead of learning something.

On pitch day we had a deck, a presentation and a big reveal. The Twister. I showed the room how you could make a drink with it, although it was a little awkward. Then there was a big pause.

The GM looked more confused than disappointed. He was trying to figure out what he was looking at, because he'd never seen anything like it. It was definitely not what he was expecting, and really not what he wanted.

I finished presenting. He paused, then said something like: That's not really what we're trying to do. Bartenders would probably hate it, because it makes the drink harder to serve. At best they'd skip it, and at worst they'd pour something else. We just want to sell more of this liqueur, and I think the winning idea is mixing it with cola, so it's not just a shot.

That was the whole brief. And the Twister wasn't in it.

The old me would have tried to convince him he was missing a big idea. Thankfully, I said: Got it. We wanted to show our creative range, but really, we work well together on the business we already have. So let's sketch out what you think the priorities are and build some ideas together in real time.

Because I slowed down enough to ask, he laid out what was in his head. The liqueur was a bartender favorite, a shift shot in a few local markets. It was selling more in Colorado than in Italy. He wanted to grow it one market at a time, with really good, hardworking on-premise support.

Amazingly, we got the business. Well, I'm still not sure if we won that pitch or just didn't lose it. The agency and my boss had a great relationship with the company, and I think the GM appreciated the effort we put in, even if it went in the wrong direction. More importantly, I think he liked that we didn't try to oversell him in the end. We shifted gears based on his input.

So the Twister went on a shelf. To be honest, I was disappointed it didn't work, and maybe even a little embarrassed, because in hindsight it was a bit of a dumb idea. But I love ideas, and all great ideas start off as dumb ideas. I'd put real work into that little funnel, so I couldn't throw it out. Now it's a reminder about listening.

That pitch taught me to listen more. A pitch is built to produce answers. You get a short brief, a chance to ask a few questions, then time alone building whatever might impress the room. I've written about the day 14 of us walked into an airline pitch with an enormous deck, all telling different stories. The Twister was the same habit, only built by myself in a garage.

It's a challenge I see over and over between agencies and clients. The agency tries too hard to be creative and doesn't spend enough time asking questions and listening to the answers. That's where the creative opportunity is.

That habit has a name: self-orientation. It makes the pitch about how smart we look instead of what the client needs. And everything you bring into the room gets divided by how much the conversation is about you. That's the math of client trust, and it's why the first trust skill is Ask, Don't Answer.

You might think your agency does a good job of listening in pitches. This past fall I looked at the homepages of more than 50 of the top independent agencies, most of them amazing small-agency award winners. Two in three open with a sentence about the agency. For every "you" on those pages, there were two "we"s. Six in ten never ask a single question. And of the nine that opened on the client, five were back to "we" by the bottom of the page. One good question, then back to us.

That doesn't mean those agencies lose. Often they're pitching against agencies doing the same thing, and lots of them win plenty of work. And I would have written those same homepages back then. It's agency 101 to feature your work, your team, your philosophy, but it's also what every other agency says! Shoemaker's children and all that. It's not wrong. It's just not very client focused. It's the same habit of trying to win the business, and it puts distance between us and our clients. In my experience, it's a big part of why clients trust their agencies less and less with strategic thinking, as real business counselors.

We also did an informal review of what search consultants, the people who see a lot of pitch rooms, have said in public about the process: 32 of them at 25 different firms. The work and the credentials get you on the shortlist. That's table stakes. Among the finalists, two things come up most. The people, which they often call chemistry, including meeting the team that will actually do the work. And client orientation: understanding the business, listening, asking, and answering the question the client asked. Each came up with 26 of the 32. The idea and creative quality came up with six, because every finalist has those.

Clients say it in their own words. In an IPA study published this July, 77% of senior brand-side decision-makers said they value an agency that challenges their brief and assumptions. Only 43% say they get it. In the C-suite it's 85% and 37%.

So before your next pitch, think through how to win the question first.

Looking back, the strength in the Twister pitch wasn't that I was the most senior person in the room. It was that I was going to run the business, and I was the one going back and forth with the GM. Over that conversation I got better at asking questions and listening to his answers.

If I did that pitch again tomorrow, as head of the agency, I'd open with something like this: The team has worked hard on some ideas, and we'll show you our creativity. But that's not really how we work with clients. We like to build the ideas with you. So take two things away from today: the range of our thinking, and more importantly, how we'd work with you to land an idea that fits your business.

Then the team presents a few ideas, with no push to sell how smart we are or how good the ideas are. For each, we say what we were trying to do, then work hard to understand the client's reaction and where they'd want to take it.

Some people call that a tissue session. Agencies have resisted them for years. But really, it's giving the client the marker and letting them tell you what they're thinking.

One thing to try before your next pitch: put the questions on the run sheet with a name beside each one, the same way you assign the slides. Then, in the debrief, count how many got asked before anyone gave an answer.

The pitch is one of your first client conversations. The people who win that room are the people who will run the account, and they win it by asking. Agencies don't grow because their people got smarter. They grow because their people got trusted.

Take the trust skills quiz before you forward this one to your team.