The Win Without Pitching Manifesto

by Blair Enns

We Will Specialize We will acknowledge that it is the availability of substitutes – the legitimate alternatives to the offerings of our firm – that allows the client to ask, and compels us to give, our thinking away for free. 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.

The Three Steps of Positioning Positioning is strategy articulated and then proven. These components of strategy, language and proof are laid out here as the three steps we must take to build deep expertise and meaningfully differentiate ourselves from others: 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.

Winning while charging more is the ultimate benefit and key indicator of effective positioning, for price elasticity is tied to the availability of substitutes. The more alternatives to our firm, the less power we have to command a premium over our competition.

What we choose to do with our strength is our decision, but as business owners we have an obligation to choose and then to pursue the path we have chosen. No one consciously chooses to be weak. In business, weakness is often a symptom of not making The Difficult Business Decision.

We can choose to let our fascinations and passions go unbridled. We can choose to remain a “full service” firm doing all things for all people. This lack of strategy will make us relevant to everyone with marketing or communication needs. It will indulge our desires to do something different every day, and to make every engagement different from the previous ones. When we make this choice, however, we invite all kinds of undifferentiated competition as well as some highly differentiated, specialized competition. We invite numerous alternatives to hiring our firm and we place the power squarely with the client. In this competitive environment we will never be the expert firm, we will never command the respect or margin we want, and we will never be free of the pitch.

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 Replace Presentations With Conversations We will break free of our addiction to the big reveal and the adrenaline rush that comes from putting ourselves in the win-or-lose situation of the presentation. When we pitch, we are in part satisfying our craving for this adrenaline rush, and we understand that until we break ourselves of this addiction we will never be free of the pitch. Presentation, like pitch, is a word that we will leave behind as we seek conversation and collaboration in their place.

We must move away from the place where the client sits with arms crossed in the role of judge, and we take to the stage with song and dance in the role of auditioning talent. While both parties find the showmanship of our craft titillating, the practitioner’s is a stronger place than that of the performer. It is this practitioner’s position from which we must strive to operate. Practitioners do not present. Stars do not audition.

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.

Mission: Position → First, let us focus on our business development mission – our highest calling and purpose. Our mission is to position ourselves as the expert practitioner in the mind of the prospective client. We must resist the temptation to sacrifice our mission for money or other short-term gains. This mission should guide everything we do in the buy-sell relationship. It is a contravention of such a mission to try to sway someone to hire us through a presentation. This simple idea is radically at odds with what most of us have been taught. It is not our job to convince the client to hire us via presentation or any other means. As we will see in the fourth proclamation, convincing has no place in selling.

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 We will take seriously our professional obligation to begin at the beginning, and we will never put our clients or ourselves in the position where we are prescribing solutions without first fully diagnosing the client’s challenge.

When the client comes to us self-diagnosed, our mindset must be the same as the doctor hearing his patient tell him what type of surgery he wants performed before any discussion of symptoms or diagnoses. Our reaction must be, “You may be correct, but let’s find out for sure.”

To reverse the trend and live up to our professional obligation to diagnose first, we must map out and formalize our own diagnostic process. Then, when we are next in a situation where the prospective client is dictating to us, we must make the case that the consistency of our outcomes is rooted in the strength of our process, therefore we must be allowed to employ it.

In Aesop’s fable “The Frog and the Scorpion,” the latter approaches the former at the riverbank and asks for a ride across on the frog’s back. But the frog is not so stupid as to readily agree to this favor, for surely once out in the river the scorpion will sting and kill him, as scorpions do. The scorpion protests that it would be silly for him to kill his carrier, as it would ensure his own death from drowning. The frog sees the scorpion’s logic and agrees to the engagement. Once in the middle of the river the scorpion does indeed sting the frog, who, with his last breath, asks the scorpion why he has just killed them both. The scorpion replies that he cannot help himself. He is a scorpion and it is in his nature to sting. The lesson here is not that clients are stinging scorpions that cannot be trusted. The lesson is that the 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 are liable. Like the frog, we are the guilty party when we let the client control the engagement and dictate to us how we will go about understanding his problem. Just because it is in the client’s nature to lead, does not mean he should be allowed to do so at all times. It only means that, like the scorpion, he will attempt to do what it is in his nature to do.

If design truly is a process, then we will define and guard that process and we will walk away from those clients and situations, like the pitch, where the process is dictated to us, or where we are otherwise asked to propose solutions without a proper diagnosis.

We Will Rethink What it Means to Sell We will acknowledge that our fear and misunderstanding of selling has contributed to our preference for the pitch. We will embrace sales as a basic business function that cannot be avoided and so we will learn to do it properly, as respectful facilitators.

Salesperson: Facilitator of Next Steps 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.

Proper selling can be distilled into three steps, based on the client’s place in the buying cycle. These three steps replace the art of persuasion. To sell is to: Help the unaware Inspire the interested Reassure those who have formed intent

No – for this future client, we must take the long road of helping him, over time, to see that perhaps he does have a problem. We do this primarily through the dissemination of our thought leadership – our writings on our area of expertise.

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.

Let us be clear: our goal with such a prospect is to inspire him to form the intent to solve his problem; it is not to inspire him to hire us. At this stage, hiring us is but a possible future consequence of his deciding to take action. Our focus needs to remain on the client, helping him to facilitate the change in himself that he is considering.

Our portfolios are our best tools of inspiration. They show the client what could be. They show him what others have done. Our examples of our best work paint the picture of the beautiful world on the other side of his pain. Inspiration is the primary role of our website, our brochure, our sales collateral and our in-person portfolio review. It need not even be our own work that we show here to inspire the interested, just inspirational outcomes.

When we get ahead of ourselves and attempt to inspire the unaware, we create buying resistance and set up the wrong dynamics. Trying to inspire someone who does not recognize that he has a problem is a recipe for defensiveness and resentment. Inspiration is something we must save for the interested.

Phased engagements, pilot projects, money-back guarantees and case studies framed in defined methodologies are among the many viable alternative forms of reassurance. The key is to respond to the motivation and not necessarily the request.

The goal is to win. The preferred means is to not pitch. A firm that does not win will not last.

The First Priority: Win Without Pitching We first strive to secure the business before it gets to a defined, competitive selection process in which we are pitted against our peers and asked to give our thinking away for free. This is easiest when the client sees us as the expert and reaches out to us first. It is also easier when we reach out to the client at a time early in the buying cycle, when he is unaware of any need; and we stay with him as he progresses through the buying cycle, at first helping over time, then inspiring when appropriate, and finally, reassuring at the end.

We Will Do With Words What We Used to Do With Paper We will understand that the proposal is the words that come out of our mouths and that written documentation of these words is a contract – an item that we create only once an agreement has been reached. We will examine all the reasons we ask, and are asked, to write unpaid proposals and we will never again ask documents to propose for us what we ourselves should propose.

Overinvesting Creates Buying Resistance The buying resistance that we engender in the client is partly a result of the obvious investment we have made in the sale. When we spend hours on a lengthy written proposal, one that diagnoses and prescribes for free, it sends the message that we need the client’s business. We clearly imply to him that he has the power in the relationship. Beyond giving him the upper hand, we also make it difficult for him to be honest with us.

For if the client does not recognize and value our expertise then we have failed – failed to build true expertise, failed to demonstrate that expertise or failed by pursuing an opportunity that is not properly aligned with our expertise. In most of these cases it is appropriate for us to retreat.

If we are pomegranates then we will resist being pushed into a process designed to compare apples to apples.

By following the third proclamation (We will diagnose before we prescribe) we demonstrate that our ability to do our best work is rooted in the strength of our diagnostic and strategic development processes. A client asking for unpaid ideas in a written proposal is like a patient asking for a diagnosis and prescription from a doctor he refuses to visit or pay.

We are under no obligation to provide the client with a reference of services, process and price just so that he can find someone else to do what we would do, the way we would do it, but cheaper. Res ipsa loquitur.

One of our new mantras that we will repeat to ourselves and our potential clients is: We do not begin to solve our clients’ problems before we are engaged. Many times, the client’s situation, or the probable solutions, are so complex or technical that we need to better understand the challenges if we are to propose and quantify responsible solutions. Such engagements demand that we begin our diagnostic work in order to present a plan. But let us not make the mistake of doing this diagnostic work for free. No – understanding and diagnosing the client’s situation is vital to the success of any engagement, and it is our work here at the very front of the engagement that will largely determine whether we succeed or fail in our endeavors for the client. We must charge for this work. Doctors charge for MRIs. Accountants charge for audits. Lawyers charge for discovery. And we charge for our diagnostic work as well, whether it is a brand audit or discovery session that we conduct ourselves, or outside research that we commission.

We Will Be Selective Instead of seeking clients, we will selectively and respectfully pursue perfect fits – those targeted organizations that we can best help. We will say no early and often, and as such, weed out those that would be better served by others and those that cannot afford us. By saying no we will give power and credibility to our yes.

Most of us do not suffer from having too few clients. The problem with our client roster is usually one of quality, not quantity. We sometimes attempt to compensate for the quality of our clients by adding more of them; but we know that having numerous small, unsophisticated or otherwise inappropriate clients is no reparation for having the right type and size of clients.

A clear understanding of our goals – a small number of slowly revolving high-quality clients – makes it easier for us to adopt this selective approach. We will not win every opportunity, nor do we need to. From this we should take comfort and patiently go about finding those that we can best help in a manner that is more focused and less frantic.

It is human nature to follow what retreats from us and to back away from what advances. Confucius famously said, “Speak softly and people lean toward you; speak loudly and they lean away.”

The narrower our claim of expertise, the more integrity we earn. By staking a narrow claim we build the credibility for the client to assume we have capabilities beyond our claim, whereas a broad claim generates the opposite reaction. The client knows the great difficulty of amassing broad expertise, and when such a claim is made he assumes our true expertise, if any, must be much smaller than what is declared. In his very first interaction with us, in reading the words on our website without having even met or spoken to us, he makes judgments on our integrity that will impact the dynamics moving forward.

If we are well positioned then we will possess capabilities beyond – often well beyond – our declared expertise. When potential clients approach us with needs within our capabilities but outside of our central expertise, it is vital that we handle these enquiries with honesty. When our claim of expertise is broad, we are inclined to respond to such enquiries with what the client expects to hear: “We can do that!” This reply builds buying resistance and makes it difficult to replace presentations with conversations. The target is not the market. We take precise aim at the smaller target and are happy to hit the wider market. Our claim of expertise should be a lot narrower than the sum of our capabilities. When we encounter an opportunity within our capabilities but outside of our expertise, we owe it to the client to tell him that, yes, we can do this, but no, it is not why we are typically hired. We owe it to him to reiterate our claim and point out the gap between what he needs and what we do. From there, the client can make the decision to bridge the gap or not. He can decide that our experience translates to his need and that he would rather work with someone who is honest about her strengths. Or, he can decide to look for someone whose expertise more closely aligns with his need. If the gap is to be bridged, it’s better if it is the client who does so. The dynamics of objections, and the need to reverse them, apply here, too.