The Win Without Pitching Manifesto
by Blair Enns
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. 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.
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.
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.
To be truly free of the pitch we must change the tone of these meetings with our prospective clients and move from the presenter/complier role to that of the expert practitioner. This we do as a doctor or lawyer would, through conversation and collaboration and not through presentation.
Expertise is the only valid basis for differentiating ourselves from the competition. Not personality. Not process. It is expertise and expertise alone that will set us apart in a meaningful way and allow us to deal with our clients and prospects from a position of power.
We must dispossess ourselves of the notion that we can operate on thin profit margins at the beginning of a new client relationship and then work to increase those margins over time. We know that profit margin, like power, only diminishes with time.
"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."
"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."
"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."
"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."
"To be truly free of the pitch we must change the tone of these meetings with our prospective clients and move from the presenter/complier role to that of the expert practitioner. This we do as a doctor or lawyer would, through conversation and collaboration and not through presentation."
"Expertise is the only valid basis for differentiating ourselves from the competition. Not personality. Not process. It is expertise and expertise alone that will set us apart in a meaningful way and allow us to deal with our clients and prospects from a position of power."
"We must dispossess ourselves of the notion that we can operate on thin profit margins at the beginning of a new client relationship and then work to increase those margins over time. We know that profit margin, like power, only diminishes with time."
- →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.
- →To be truly free of the pitch we must change the tone of these meetings with our prospective clients and move from the presenter/complier role to that of the expert practitioner. This we do as a doctor or lawyer would, through conversation and collaboration and not through presentation.
- →We must price our upfront work, right up to the first creative deliverable, in big round numbers that end in zeros, and thus clearly imply that our pricing for these services has little to do with the hours it takes to deliver them.
- →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.
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