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.

Positioning is the foundation of business development success, and of business success.

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 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.

Presentation, like pitch, is a word that we will leave behind as we seek conversation and collaboration in their place.

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.

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

It is not our job to convince the client to hire us via presentation or any other means.

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 never put our clients or ourselves in the position where we are prescribing solutions without first fully diagnosing the client’s challenge.

There are four phases in our client engagements: Diagnose the problem/opportunity Prescribe a therapy Apply the therapy Reapply the therapy as necessary

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

We will view our claim of expertise as a beginning and as a rallying cry for perpetual progress. Once focused, we will work to add to and deepen the skills, capabilities and processes from which we derive our expertise, and we will commit to the idea that continuous learning is mandatory.

Our thinking is our highest value product; we will not part with it without appropriate compensation. If we demonstrate that we do not value our thinking, our clients and prospects will not. Our paying clients can rest assured that our best minds remain focused on solving their problems and not the problems of those who have yet to hire us.

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.

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

We will build our practice one profitable assignment at a time. Excepting our carefully selected pro bono engagements and the occasional favor to our best and longest standing clients, every project will generate a profit that recognizes our expertise and the value we bring to our clients’ businesses.

As our expertise deepens and our impact on our clients’ businesses grows, we will increase our pricing to reflect that impact. We will recognize that, to our clients, the smallest invoices are the most annoying. Through charging more we will create more time to think on behalf of our clients and we will eliminate the need to invoice for changes and other surprises.

Our strategy – diagnoses and prescription – is how we do what we do.

Another reason larger clients must pay more is they derive greater financial value from similar work we would do for smaller organizations. To charge John Doe Chevrolet what we would charge General Motors for the same work would be irresponsible of us. The larger client pays more to ensure his commitment to solving his problem and to ensure his commitment to working with us – and he pays more because we are delivering a service that has a greater dollar value to him.

We will see ourselves as professional practitioners who bring real solutions to our clients’ business problems. We will seek respect above money, for only when we are respected as experts will we be paid the money we seek. This money will allow us to reinvest in ourselves, become even better at what we do and deliver to our families and ourselves the abundance we deserve.

The ideas of David C. Baker (davidcbaker.com) – mentor, colleague, publisher and friend – also appear throughout these pages. David’s impact on my work is so profound that I no longer attempt to keep track of what is mine and what is his.