The Win Without Pitching Manifesto

by Blair Enns

“Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.” – Mark Twain

If we are not seen as more expert than our competition then we will be viewed as one in a sea of many, and we will have little power in our relationships with our clients and prospects.

Expertise is the only valid basis for differentiating ourselves from the competition. Not personality. Not process. Not price.

Positioning is the foundation of business development success, and of business success. If we fail on this front we face a long, costly uphill journey as owners of creative businesses.

We must choose a focus Then articulate that focus via a consistent claim of expertise And finally, we must work to add the missing skills, capabilities and processes necessary to support our new claim.

We can measure the success of our positioning by gauging our ability to command two things simultaneously: a sales advantage and a price premium.

Winning while charging more is the ultimate benefit and key indicator of effective positioning, for price elasticity is tied to the availability of substitutes.

We are hired for our expertise and not our service. It is a mistake to believe that the service sector mantra of “The customer is always right” applies to us. Like any engagement of expertise, we often enter into ours with the client not truly knowing what he needs, let alone recognizing the route to a solution. For us to do our best work we need to leverage our outside perspective. We need to be allowed to lead the engagement. We need to take control.

We are lucky to do what we love. And we deserve to be able to do it. But as business owners we need to accept that loving our craft is no substitute for making intelligent business decisions.

While some make business success look easy, we know that the best rewards are the ones for which we’ve worked hardest.

There are greater causes by which to frame an enterprise, and there are nobler metrics by which to measure the value of effort. But we cannot escape the fact that money is both a necessity in life and the most basic scorecard of success in business. Even if it is not the validation we seek, it is the most basic of tests that we must pass: Is there a need for our efforts great enough to sustain and nurture them?

We will never be free of the pitch if we do not overcome our addiction to the presentation. Henceforth, we must work to eliminate the big reveal.

It is this practitioner’s position from which we must strive to operate. Practitioners do not present. Stars do not audition.

Nature abhors a vacuum. If we do not drive the engagement, of course the client will.

Presenting is a tool of swaying, while conversing is a tool of weighing. Through the former we try to convince people to hire us. Through the latter we try to determine if both parties would be well served by working together.

The tone of a conversation, in which both parties endeavor to make an honest assessment of the fit between one’s need and the other’s expertise, is entirely different from the tone of a presentation, in which one party tries to convince the other to hire her. Presentations build buying resistance; conversations lower it.

Our mission is to position ourselves as the expert practitioner in the mind of the prospective client.

Objective: Determine Fit → While our mission is to position, our objective at each and every interaction in the buying cycle is simply to see if there is a fit between the client’s need and our expertise suitable enough to take a next step. That’s it. It is not our objective to sell, convince or persuade. It is simply to determine if there exists a fit suitable enough to merit a next step. Our mission is to position; our objective is to determine a fit.

We Will Diagnose Before We Prescribe

While it is common practice in the creative professions to prescribe solutions without fully and accurately diagnosing the problem, in almost every other profession such a sequence would render the professional liable for malpractice.

most successful clients, whether owners or executives, have achieved their success in part because of their ability to take control – their ability to rise above and orchestrate others. This is their strength; and even though it is not always in their best interest, it is in their nature.

we will view the act of prescription without diagnosis for what it is: malpractice.

We will assert the professional’s obligation to begin at the beginning and walk away from those that would have us proceed based on guesses or unvalidated self-diagnoses.

The good news is that selling, when done properly, has nothing to do with persuading. It is not our job to talk people into things. The first salesperson had it right: selling is about determining a fit between the buyer’s need and the seller’s supply (our very objective) and then facilitating a next step. Sometimes the proper next step is to part ways, sending the client on to another provider who is better able to serve him.

To sell is to: Help the unaware Inspire the interested Reassure those who have formed intent

The psychology of buying is the psychology of changing. Selling, therefore, is change management. The very best salespeople are respectful, selective facilitators of change. They help people move forward to solve their problems and capitalize on their opportunities. The rest talk people into things.

The role of our thought leadership is to educate, not to persuade. The future client should be smarter for reading it, we should be smarter for writing it, and, one day, when the client does experience a problem in an area on which we’ve written, our guidance may be helpful to him in seeing the opportunity within his problem. Until that day, we continue to cement our position as leaders in our field through our writing. Experts write.

Like anyone, we play to our strengths. And, like anyone, our strengths become our weaknesses when we go to them too often.

The key is to respond to the motivation and not necessarily the request.

The most common, and costly, business development mistake shared by creative firms around the world is that of mistaking interest for intent.

We must learn to measure the client’s intent; if his decision to act on his opportunity has not yet been anchored to a future date or event (a decent indicator of intent), then the written proposal is not the tool to help propel him forward. If the engagement has not yet moved from his wish list to his to-do list, then it is still inspiration he seeks.

No is the second best answer we can hear. If the answer is no, we want to hear it as soon as possible, before we and the client unnecessarily waste valuable resources. When an opportunity first arises, therefore, we try to see if we can kill it.

Selectivity is something he must learn. He must put his passion in its place and walk away from those opportunities where he is not viewed as the expert.

most people will change their desires, even their values, before they will change their behavior.

Writing gets us found. Writing helps to cement our position as experts. Most important of all, writing about what we do is the fastest way to deepen our knowledge.

If we have no meaningfully defined processes, then there is not much to train our people on. But once we commit to defining and improving how we work, then we must commit to training our people on such methods.

“We don’t do speculative (spec) creative.” But our designs are merely the application of our strategy; and our strategy, when arrived at responsibly, is rooted in a thorough diagnosis.

We Will Address Issues of Money Early We will resist putting ourselves in a position where we have overinvested in the buying cycle only to find the client cannot afford to pay us what we are worth. We will set a Minimum Level of Engagement and declare it early in conversations so that if the client cannot afford us, both parties will be able to walk away before wasting valuable resources.

Let us commit to memory the Win Without Pitching rule of money: Those who cannot talk about it, do not make it.

A Minimum Level of Engagement By following the sixth proclamation (We will be selective) we agree to be more purposeful about the new clients we take on. We agree to establish the criteria that define with whom we will and will not work. Included in such criteria is budget, and specifically the fees that such budget would represent. When we commit to deliberately managing a slow, steady churn of a small number of clients, we commit equally to the idea that each new client must be of a certain size, representing a certain amount of fee income. We owe it to our prospective clients to share such fee expectations with them as soon as appropriate.

Discussing money early is an easily formed habit that, once acquired, helps us better make the decisions that shape the future of our practice.

When we win by charging less, price becomes our positioning that we wear like an albatross with that client forever: we become the price shop.

By allowing an engagement with a new client to begin unprofitably, we set up what is almost certain to be a relationship of mutual discontent.

We Put it in Writing → Second, we must ensure that such discounts are clearly identified in all written documentation, including contracts, estimates and invoices, in order to remind the client of the true value of our services. Our failure to abide by this rule will almost certainly cost us in the future as the client “forgets” this proper value and references only what he previously paid. By recording our discount in all price documentation in this way, we ensure that such a discount does not set a precedent for new pricing moving forward.

Among those charities whose causes align with our values, we will work with the neediest, commit to them unselfishly and sacrifice any opportunity to benefit financially from this work. We will thus give ourselves the courage to ensure that every for-profit engagement is indeed profitable. This relieves the burden of the mushy middle of barely-profitable clients and quasi-charitable causes.

As we get better we will charge even more, until we find that equilibrium that captures the appropriate remuneration for the value of our services. Our premium pricing will cost us clients from time to time; but if we are not losing business on price occasionally, then we are not charging enough. Conversely, if we need to win on price, we are not setting ourselves apart as experts.

Superior service does not improve profit; profit improves service.

The test for this is the ringing phone. When we look down and see the profitable client’s name, we are happy to pick up. When the unprofitable client calls, we cringe.

We sell our thinking but we do ourselves a gross disservice in selling it by the hour. The surest way to commoditize our own thinking is to sell it in units of doing: time. Later in the engagement, when the strategy work has been done and we are deep into implementation work, the client buys our time. It is our thinking, however, that separates us from our competition and forms the basis of our ability to premium price.

Premium Pricing Improves Commitment We never want our clients to be in situations where it is easy for them to decide to not take our advice. Any time someone hires an outside expert, the ultimate outcome he seeks is to move forward with confidence. What is the value of good advice not acted upon? Yes, it is our job to tell him what to do, but that is often the easy part. We are equally obliged to give him the strength to do it. We are not meeting our full obligations to our clients when we make recommendations that they find easy to ignore. The price we charge for such guidance should be enough that our clients feel compelled to act, lest they experience a profound sense of wasted resources. There must be the appropriate amount of pain associated with our pricing. This implies the need for our pricing to change as the size of the client changes. Larger organizations need to pay more to ensure their commitment.