Somewhere on the agenda, between the financial report and a discussion about office parking, you’ll get your ten minutes. What you do with them decides whether the firm gets a content programme this year or has the same conversation again in eighteen months. Partners’ meetings are unforgiving rooms for marketing proposals, and the workload behind your proposal, the reason the maths doesn’t work without structural help, is invisible to most of the people in it. Here’s how to give the pitch its best chance.
Do the real work before the meeting
No proposal should be heard for the first time in the meeting that decides it. Brief the managing partner beforehand, one on one, so the idea arrives with tacit support rather than surprise. Identify your likely pilot partner in advance too: the one who’s curious about LinkedIn, has a niche they love talking about, and would say yes if it cost them almost nothing. Walking in with a named willing partner changes the proposal from theory to plan.
Bring one page, not a deck
Partners scan; they don’t read marketing documents. The structure that works fits on a single page.
The problem, two sentences. Our partners have deep expertise, and almost none of it is visible online. That costs us at the referral validation stage, when prospects check a partner’s LinkedIn before deciding to call back.
The solution, two sentences. A consistent content programme built on short partner interviews, with the production handled outside the firm. Partners talk; they don’t write.
The pilot, one sentence. We start with the named partners for a fixed period, measure the agreed indicators, and present results before any wider commitment.
The investment, one line. The fixed pilot fee.
The ask, one sentence. Approval to run the pilot.
Use their language, not yours
The same idea lands or dies on framing. “We need to build our LinkedIn presence” invites a shrug. “We’re invisible at the referral validation stage, and prospects are checking us before they call back” names a business problem. Engagement rates mean little in that room; a specific moment, like a prospect who mentioned a partner’s post before a pitch, means a lot. And rather than “partners need to get behind content”, describe what the model actually asks of them: a 30-minute conversation every couple of months, with nobody writing anything.
Have answers ready for the questions you’ll get
The time question. Partners will want to know what this costs them personally. The answer: one short interview every two to three months, talking rather than writing. It works better again when they respond to the comments their posts attract, but that’s a bonus, not a requirement.
The voice question. Partners worry the content won’t sound like them, usually because of a past agency experience. The voice gets calibrated once, properly, at the start: you, or a key brand representative, work through the first batch of content with the production team until each partner reads like themselves, and after that the editors carry it. One calibration done well beats every partner marking up every post forever, which no partner wants to do and no programme survives.
The ROI question. Agree the 90-day measures in the room: impressions, posting consistency, and changed conversations, with leads expected on a longer clock because clients make engagement decisions slowly. Setting this expectation before launch is what stops the programme being judged unfairly at month three.
The “we’ve tried this before” question. Probably true, in a different form: sporadic posting, a training workshop, or a generalist agency. What failed was the execution model, not the idea, and this proposal fixes the part that broke, which was consistency.
Close on the small ask
Don’t ask the room to believe in content marketing. Ask for a bounded experiment: named partners, fixed period, fixed fee, agreed measures, results presented back. An experiment can be stopped, which makes it easy to approve, and a good pilot makes the bigger argument for you.
If you want the fuller version of all this, including a one-page proposal template you can adapt, we’ve put it in a free guide: Changing Partners’ Minds. It covers the framing, the pilot structure, and the language that tends to land with partners.