Blair Enns
Death to the pitch. Long live the conversation.
If you are in the creative world of advertising, marketing, architecture, public relations and the like, your business fortunes live and die by the pitch.
This is a contrarian view of presentations, what author Bryan Gray calls “the last mile on your journey to win the business.” Another author buddy, Tom Searcy, calls them “the glorious opportunity to finish second,” and there is no money in business in finishing second.
Call them beauty contests, call them bake offs, call them new business pitches. Call them what you will. You know the drill. You are one of three finalists brought in to present a dog-and-pony-show to a decision committee.
The group of six or more might choose one of you, probably the group with the inside track. Or they might choose to do nothing. At least not do anything now. And we all know that time kills deals.
But what if we could win without pitching? That is the gospel Blair Enns, author of the excellent 2018 book, The Win Without Pitching Manifesto, has been preaching for several years. He shared his thoughts with me in a recent phone interview.
Enns said even if we pitch and win, we really lose. We have set up the wrong dynamics between the client and us.
“Presentation, like pitch, is a word that we will leave behind as we seek conversation and collaboration in their place,” says Enns. “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,” says Enns.
His first proclamation is that we will specialize, and the second proclamation is we will replace presentations with conversations.
Enns recommends four phases in a client engagement:
1. Diagnose the problem/opportunity.
2. Prescribe a therapy.
3. Apply the therapy.
4. Reapply the therapy as necessary.
“Blair's principles have really helped us think more strategically about pricing strategies and how to engage with prospects productively during the courtship process,” says John Kadlic, CEO of Colorado-based advertising agency Parallel Path.
”It has given us confidence to talk about financial matters early and often in a strategic manner to get to a good shared outcome with our prospects,” adds Kadlic. “The concept of presenting multiple options and resisting the urge to overinvest in endless proposal iterations is sage advice and very effective.”
Enns says there are four priorities for the win without pitching approach:
The first priority: Win without pitching. “The control that we need in order to do our best work includes the imperative to bring our own methodology into the engagement,” says Enns. This means possessing our own formalized diagnostic methods.
The second priority: Derail the pitch. “Our priority is to derail the pitch, to get the client to put the process aside and take an alternative first step with us,” says Enns.
The third priority: Gain the inside track. If the client gives us extra information and is willing to treat us differently, then it may make sense for us to proceed.
The fourth priority: Walk away. Be selective. “Good prospective clients who recognize and value our expertise will grant us concessions, and those who won’t are not worth taking a long-shot risk to out-pitch the competitors, “one of whom almost certainly has gained the inside track ahead of us,” says Enns.
“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,” says Enns. “This we do as a doctor or lawyer would, through conversation and collaboration and not through presentation.”
