Ep 107 – Blair Enns, Win Without Pitching – The Fourth Conversation
Listen & subscribe on the platform of your choice
Featuring: Blair Enns, Win Without Pitching
In episode 107 of Agency Bytes, I sit down with Blair Enns, founder of Win Without Pitching and author of The Win Without Pitching Manifesto and The Four Conversations. If you’ve heard Blair on other shows—or are one of the many who’ve followed his work for years—you might think you’ve heard it all. Not this time. In this conversation, we go beyond the usual talking points and uncover insights he’s never shared before.
Blair opens up about the real mindset shifts creative professionals need to make if they want to stop selling like vendors and start showing up as experts. We break down the Four Conversations model, what most agency owners still get wrong about pricing, and how to rewrite the dynamics of the sales process to work in your favor.
We also explore why repetition beats inspiration, how to protect your power in client engagements, and what Blair believes is the single biggest opportunity for agencies right now—even in a time of AI disruption and economic uncertainty. If you want to charge more, pitch less, and finally own your value—this episode brings the fire.
Key Bytes
• Blair Enns emphasizes the importance of lifestyle choices in career decisions.
• The Win Without Pitching Manifesto serves as a foundational text for creative professionals.
• Sales should be viewed as a series of conversations rather than a pitch.
• Pricing is a critical area for agencies to improve profitability.
• Repetition in learning is essential for mastery of sales techniques.
• Creative professionals often struggle with the mindset of being a salesperson.
• The Four Conversations provides a framework for navigating sales effectively.
• Surviving economic uncertainty is crucial for agency success.
• Agencies should focus on their unique expertise to stand out in the market.
• Building strong client relationships is key to successful sales.Chapters
00:00 Introduction to Blair Enns and His Journey
02:59 The Catalyst for Change: Lifestyle Choices
06:00 The Birth of Win Without Pitching
09:06 Understanding the Win Without Pitching Manifesto
12:12 The Four Conversations: A New Model for Selling Expertise
17:54 Lessons Learned from Coaching Agencies
20:50 The Importance of Repetition in Learning
25:56 Navigating Sales Conversations Effectively
31:59 Mindset Shifts for Creative Professionals
35:05 Opportunities and Challenges Ahead for Agencies
Blair Enns is the founder of Win Without Pitching and the author of three books on selling and pricing for expert advisors and practitioners, including the brand new The Four Conversations: A New Model for Selling Expertise.
A former advertising professional and consultant, Blair launched Win Without Pitching in 2002 to help creative professionals learn to win more business at higher prices without giving their services away for free in a pitch. His selling philosophy and pricing strategies resonated beyond the advertising and design professions to the point where today Win Without Pitching serves expert advisors and practitioners around the world in over a dozen professions, including finance, marketing, consulting, engineering and healthcare.
Blair also co-hosts, along with David C. Baker, the popular podcast 2Bobs: Conversations on the Art of Creative Entrepreneurship.
Contact Blair on winwithoutpitching.com.
-
Steve / Agency Outsight (00:00.886)
Welcome to Agency Bites, a podcast dedicated to helping creative entrepreneurs thrive. I'm Steve Guberman from Agency Outsite, where I coach agency owners to build the business of their dreams. Today, my guest really needs no introduction, but I'll read through the short one anyway. Blair Ends is the founder of Win Without Pitching, the author of three books, including his latest, The Four Conversations, a new model for selling expertise. Blair helps creative professionals and expert advisors worldwide win more business at higher prices without giving away their work for free.
He's also the cohost of the popular To Bob's podcast, Exploring the Art of Creative Entrepreneurship with David C. Baker. Blair, it's an honor to have you here. Thank you for joining me.
Blair Enns (00:39.362)
Thanks Steve, I'm happy to be here.
Steve / Agency Outsight (00:41.28)
Yeah, I'm curious, I I've followed Win Without Pitching for, I don't know, maybe 15-ish years. Prior to that, you've got agency experience. What was that catalyst that said, I'm gonna jump into consulting?
Blair Enns (00:56.094)
The catalyst was really I wanted to move to this little village, remote mountain village in British Columbia, Canada, where I currently live and I needed to find a way to earn a living. So it was really driven by a lifestyle choice.
Steve / Agency Outsight (01:10.53)
I love that you put lifestyle first and said I'm going to build a business that's going to support that. The agency wasn't going to do it from the little village, I guess.
Blair Enns (01:18.572)
Yeah, I was working for one of the large brand name multinational agencies at the time. Actually, I had been fired from that job and I was working for a smaller Canadian agency. But I said to the owner, I said, I'll come work for you for a year. And then I'm moving to the woods because the experience with the multinational, the second one that I worked for, it wasn't great. So my wife and I decided to take this leap. And then I went to work for a firm.
Steve / Agency Outsight (01:32.93)
interesting.
Blair Enns (01:46.702)
for 12 months, which turned into 20 months, which restored my faith in the profession of advertising because I'd kind of lost, I'd fallen out of love with the business. And as I, so I had a client in this last agency and he and I were having a goodbye lunch. And I told him, I'm moving this village in the middle of nowhere. And I didn't know what I was going to do for a living. had a vague idea of a consulting practice. And he said, you know, I have the same dream. He said, one day,
I want to be able to just tell the world to go to hell. I want to have enough money to be able to tell the world to go to hell. This man owned four Ferraris. And it struck me in that moment that I was willing to be poor to be happy. And I had more freedom than this very rich, wealthy, this wealthy individual who didn't have enough money to tell the world to go to hell yet. Now I'm no longer willing to be poor to be happy. And I hope I'm never put in that place where I have to be.
Steve / Agency Outsight (02:23.212)
He didn't have enough yet.
Blair Enns (02:43.598)
make that choice again. But in the moment, it was just so liberating. I was just unhappy generally with where we were in life. I didn't care how I was going to earn a living, but it all worked out.
Steve / Agency Outsight (02:59.426)
freeing opportunity or freeing experience to just be kind at that point where that doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is happiness and like I said, we'll figure the rest out. But also I don't need to be poor for that to equal happiness. But if that's what it comes to, then happiness comes first.
Blair Enns (03:17.036)
Yeah, I thought I was willing to pump gas in the local gas station here to get here. And it didn't come to that. I was and that's not an exaggeration. I was willing to do that. I wanted to be here with my young family in this beautiful place in the middle of nowhere. And it's it might be the best move we've ever made.
Steve / Agency Outsight (03:35.862)
Love that, and that's been 20 something years now.
Blair Enns (03:38.252)
Yeah, 23, 24.
Steve / Agency Outsight (03:41.046)
And then at what point did writing, without pitching come out and that turned into a coaching practice.
Blair Enns (03:47.938)
Well, when I moved here, was having another goodbye lunch goodbye with the owner of the agency I worked for. And he said, well, what are you going to do from this place in the middle of nowhere? And I said, maybe I'll build furniture, which is if anybody who really knows me would laugh at that. Like my father's, if he listened to this, he'd laugh his ass off. Maybe I'll build furniture. Maybe I'll start a consulting practice. I had a vague, a few vague ideas about consulting. And he said, well, why don't you keep working for, why don't you do
new business development for me remotely. So this is in 2000. Why do you do it remotely? And so I did that for about a year while I was launching the consulting practice. And to launch the consulting practice, I wrote down everything I knew along with a co-author and a woman who was effectively my business partner. licensed some material from her for a little while.
And we published, self-published this book. And I just called it Win Without Pitching. It wasn't the Win Without Pitching manifesto. It was a big, thick binder that contained everything that I knew. And I sold it for $1,000 a copy. So that was another lesson. I just started writing out, you know, codifying my knowledge. And then I realized, oh, this is a book. I should sell the book. And then I thought, well, books go for $20 to $30. That would be ridiculous.
So I priced it at $995 and I started selling the book and from that selling consulting engagements. so that was in 2002. And then the beginning of 2002. And then I published what I consider to be my first book, The Win Without Pitching Manifesto in 2010. So that was eight years later. What was the impetus for that book? I felt like I should have a proper book, not just kind of a system in a...
in the package of a book that would go out into the world and give me some credibility as an author.
Steve / Agency Outsight (05:47.264)
And so for those who are not familiar, maybe there's one or two listeners that are living under a rock, not familiar with the wind without pitching Mindset Manifesto, what's the kind of top level brief understanding there that you really push for?
Blair Enns (06:00.248)
Well, it started out as a blog post titled 12 Proclamations for a New Year. And I forget what year, probably 2008, January of 2008, where I was experimenting. I've always loved manifestos and I'd like like the aphoristic writing style of Confucius and Nietzsche. So I wanted to write up like a big bold book about like bold proclamations or idioms like it just. And so I
I wrote this blog post in this experimental tone, we shall, we will, third person plural. And I was more nervous publishing that post than anything I'd published previously, just because the tone, it was a little grandiose. But I was really feeling it and I really, the proclamations really just came to me and I got more feedback on that post than anything I'd written. And so,
A year or so later, I'm thinking, okay, I really have to get a book out there. And I'd been thinking that for a while, and I felt a lot of pressure to publish a book is I think anybody who's a who's an entrepreneur in the knowledge, some sort of knowledge worker, you you feel some sort of pressure to write a book, especially if you see yourself as a writer as I do. But I didn't I didn't want to publish it like a book of lists. Like, here's everything you need to do.
And then it occurred to me to use to blow up that blog post of 12 proclamations into a book. So that turned into a 24,000 word book, which isn't very long. And I think that's part of the appeal. I actually, because I didn't know how to write a book and I didn't, I actually figured out what physical size I wanted the book to be. I took a book of the right thickness and I actually physically cut it down. And I said, okay, the book needs to be this size.
And then I wrote to that length and I mean it's now it just strikes me as so odd But I kind of wish I had done that again when my most recent book I was it was so naive but it was so the right thing to do and so that book came out in July of 2010 so it's been out for we're coming up on 15 years and It's got a niche audience. I wrote that thinking of a solo designer and obviously that the market is bigger than the target
Blair Enns (08:23.138)
So I knew it would have a wider audience, but 15 years later, it sold 100,000 copies and it keeps going. So I'm pretty happy. I see that almost like a child, like it's its own thing. I know I gave birth to it, but it really is its own thing. And I'm proud of it. It is doing well.
Steve / Agency Outsight (08:28.62)
Wow.
Steve / Agency Outsight (08:42.976)
Yeah, I know creative professionals, you know, of all sizes, solopreneurs up to 20, 30 person agencies and maybe even larger who kind of adopt, you know, part or parcel of it into their pitching process, their sales process, their pricing process, things like that. So, so yeah, I guess it has a life of its own and fits all sizes. Intentional or not. Yeah. And so the latest book, the four conversations.
Blair Enns (09:06.082)
Yeah, again, I'm really happy with it. Yeah.
Steve / Agency Outsight (09:12.322)
kind of walk through the four conversations, a new model for selling expertise. How does that differ from kind of traditional sales approaches walk through what the concept behind that is?
Blair Enns (09:23.63)
Yeah, so I really see it as the here's how to follow up to the manifesto and in between these two books in January of 2008 I published pricing creativity a guide to profit beyond the billable hour and that's that was in a manual form and that was and you can still buy that at pricing creativity calm and It's not a it's an expensive book Different options price but 100 200 and roughly $300 depending on the format you want
But pricing is such a high ROI topic. I've just heard so many stories from people who've returned many, many, many multiples of the investment in that book. So The Manifesto is a yes, can book. Pricing Creativity is a here's how to book specifically on the subject of pricing. And the four conversations.
again, is kind of the here's how to follow up to the manifesto. So it's the same third person plural voice as the manifesto. And it does have a lot of principles in it that are manifesto-ish, but it is mostly a framework book. It's how to take these principles, these lofty ideals, and how do you translate that into the way you show up in the sale, the tools you use, what are you looking to accomplish in the sale? so the
It's a model book, our model, this book, The Four Conversations is effectively what we teach in our training program. And so our model is we view the sale as a series of four linear and discrete conversations. So at any point in the sale, you simply stop and ask yourself, what conversation is this? Number one. Number two, what is my objective in this conversation? And number three, what framework do I use to navigate to that objective?
So that's it in a nutshell. It's frameworks and principles, principles being the ideas that you embody as you use a conversation's framework to navigate to its objective. And the subtitle is a new model for selling expertise. And I believe that those who are expert advisors or practitioners, so you take my traditional creative audience, that has broadened out as we have heard and trained.
Blair Enns (11:44.886)
organizations, consulting, accounting, financial planning, engineering, et cetera, all of these other professions. Our audience and what I was writing the book, I broadened out the audience, the target that I was thinking about and the examples that I use. Excuse me. I broaden that out to basically expert advisors and practitioners, people who are experts first and salespeople second. So you fall in love with whatever your business is, you're an advisor or practitioner of some kind.
Steve / Agency Outsight (12:12.13)
Mm-hmm.
Blair Enns (12:15.266)
And then you go to work to do that, to, you know, to do that first job. And then you find out, there's this other job that you have. And if you want to do the job you love, you actually have to learn how to do this other job and it's called sales. So I really wrote this book for the people who see themselves as experts first and, and, never signed up, never got into this because they love selling. And it's a model for how.
You just let the expert you show up and you don't try to be the salesperson that you're not.
Steve / Agency Outsight (12:52.99)
Is there thinking about like the mind and most common personality of a creative professional, is there one of these conversations that is more challenging for somebody in the creative industry to embrace that you think?
Blair Enns (13:08.818)
That's a good question. I think of the four conversations, the one that would be most common to most selling systems would be the qualifying conversation. So it's the vetting conversation. So that one's the most similar and it kind of feels like a prototypical sales conversation, but it depends on the principles that you're embodying as you're navigating that conversation. The other three are different. The first one, the probative conversation.
It's, we call it a conversation, but it's really a conversation that happens without you present. It is a function of your business's strategy, your positioning, and how you go about lead generation. So it's a whole lot of decision-making effort and time wrapped up in this construct of a conversation. And the conversation is effectively the conversation that a prospective client has with you via your reputation.
So we have to look at all of these elements of the reputation, the decisions you make around shaping the business, the decisions you make around communicating the business and positioning the business, the decisions you make around proving your expertise in the public domain in an effort to drive inbound inquiries. So there's a lot of work and it's the most different.
Steve / Agency Outsight (14:25.858)
So it's kind of what they're saying without you even being part of the conversation. It's the conversation that's going on because somebody made a recommendation or they read something on your website and it's what they're saying about you or the service you provide or the results you get before you even engage one-on-one.
Blair Enns (14:41.378)
Yeah, I would have the listener imagine two different scenarios. So two different inquiries come in via your website. And you get on the phone or on the Zoom call with the first one, and you say, hey, thanks for thinking of us. How did you hear about us? And they say, well, we Googled ad agency Houston, and you came up ninth. And you think, OK. I am one in a sea of many. So in my parlance, you're seen as a vendor, not the expert.
very little power in the buy-sell relationship. As I say in the manifesto, the source of the client's power is the availability of substitutes. So they're looking for a generalist service provider and you showed up in a list of 10. And if they don't hire you, that's fine because there are nine others just like you and probably not 90 or 900, right? And then think of a second scenario. You get on the Zoom call and you say, how did you hear about us?
Steve / Agency Outsight (15:30.432)
And that's just on page one. Yeah.
Blair Enns (15:41.164)
And they say, we, your very best client who I look up to cannot stop talking about you. And she said, you have to use these guys. So I just reached out. Now that's, now you are seen as the expert. You're in the, you're in the power position in the relationship. And your job as you navigate through the sale is to not give that up, to not do needy vendor things that would see you relegated from the position of expert to the position of vendor.
And so accomplishing that objective, that's what we're trying to accomplish. And that is the objective of the probative conversation, to move in the mind of the client from the position of a vendor to the expert. And then with that, you can just imagine how the power dynamics are different. In the latter scenario, you're free to say to the client in the sale, all right, here's what happens next. Here's what we do next.
And in the former scenario, the client is dictating the terms of the sale to you. So, and I'm fond of saying the sale is the sample. It's the sample of the engagement to follow. The client tries on in the sale what it would be like to work with you in the engagement. And the roles each party will play are established in the sale too. And specifically, we make the generalization that there are only two roles you can play, either a vendor or the expert.
Steve / Agency Outsight (17:06.922)
Interesting a vendor one amongst many the expert the only option really available gives you all of the leverage. Yeah Are you so the way that you brought out? The one without manifest when without pitching with workshops trainings things like that. Are you doing that with this book as well?
Blair Enns (17:25.218)
Well, this book is really the workshop in a book. It's the book. So, and I know lots of training businesses like ours have grappled with the question, should I really put the whole system in a book? And the case for putting the whole system in the book is when people, so, you know, this will sell thousands of copy, many thousands of copies and people, many people will read the book and be able to implement. Whereas
Steve / Agency Outsight (17:28.545)
Okay.
Blair Enns (17:54.382)
The win without pitching manifesto is short on implementation. But if they do want training, then in the training we can spend less time downloading information and more time just practicing the conversations and coaching them on those conversations.
Steve / Agency Outsight (18:09.59)
Love that. All these years you've helped what thousands of agencies probably help them command better fees, close deals better, be perceived as experts, tighten up their pitching process. What are some of the lessons that have surprised you the most?
Blair Enns (18:15.939)
Mm-hmm.
Blair Enns (18:25.87)
Hmm.
Blair Enns (18:29.772)
Well, the lessons that I've learned that has surprised me.
Steve / Agency Outsight (18:34.23)
Yeah.
Blair Enns (18:36.364)
Yeah, so in the beginning, it was all about positioning. I had to bang. And other advisors like Tim Williams and David Baker and a few others, we were banging the positioning drum. And it was a fight in the beginning. And that fight's been over for over a decade. So everybody understands the rationale for narrowing your focus. Not everybody does it, but they understand the rationale for it. And if they choose not to do it, they go into that with their eyes open.
They know it's a trade off and that the more broadly positioned you are, the more pressure you're putting on your sales skills. So that's not new. think, know, what's...
Pricing in the last 10 years I wrote pricing creativity in 2008 and it took me it takes me years to write a book and the long as more time goes by it takes me longer but when I started writing that book about four years before I Realized I knew nothing about pricing. I need nothing about pricing and value creation So I read the canon of literature on pricing which takes takes you down all kinds of rabbit holes and after that so today I sit here and I think
Pricing is the lowest hanging fruit on the profit tree and I I did not know that You 12 years ago but if the lesson that I've learned as kind of an advisor is would it would be What's called the curse of knowledge? So I've been teaching some things for 20 years now So if I tell you something in a training scenario Steve I now assume that you have that knowledge and that
I largely assume that you have it, you understand it to the degree that I understand it. And it's taken me a long time to understand the value of repetition. Like the coaches, our coaches, they go through our training program multiple times. And with every pass, even after the fifth, sixth, and then now they're delivering it. And with every pass, they come back and say, wow, I learned so much. And it's like, well, you've been through this thing.
Blair Enns (20:50.54)
multiple, multiple times. And so I think the lesson is the value of repetition. I actually, I don't like writing about topics I've written about before. I'm trying to force myself to be a little bit more repetitive. And my team will say, you you wrote about that 12 years ago. And I had to say, I don't care if I wrote about it last year. I need to keep harping on some of the same things. So yeah, the curse of knowledge. think that once I tell you once, I think you have it. And I just have to remind myself.
Steve / Agency Outsight (21:20.322)
I think there's a lot to that in, in yes, repetition, but also in the act of implementation and having not gone through one of your courses. don't know if that's a piece of it, you know, a section or whatever, but I think when we learn something, then there needs to be a time where I go ahead and bring it into my agency or bring it into my home life or my personal life or whatever. And now I'm living this thing that I'm learning about. then.
Blair Enns (21:21.057)
repetition.
Steve / Agency Outsight (21:48.852)
revisiting it and revisiting it. so to your point, talking about it is one thing, but actually implementing it and seeing how it's going to work, living and breathing in the practices, I think a whole other level.
Blair Enns (22:00.514)
Yeah, and you know, people often say practice makes perfect. actual practice doesn't make perfect. Coached practice, practice makes perfect. We just launched after over 20 years, we just launched this, what we call the win without pitching Academy. It's after you go through training, and it's still in beta. But after you go through training, you go into our Academy where there's all your all the training material.
that you went through and a whole bunch of resources, including a forum with hundreds of other people who've been trained on the system and access to coaches and all these things. And it's free for the life of people who've been through training. And I'm, really proud of it, but I'm embarrassed that it's been this long. I'm embarrassed at how poorly we have supported our clients post-training because training is just the beginning. then I've had so many conversations with people who say, yeah, we do win without pitching.
and I'll ask them what that means. Or they'll preface that and ask a question that communicates that they're doing something, but it isn't win without pitching compliance something. They're doing something entirely different. So the Academy is a really good resource to offer feedback and to help kind of coach people as they're practicing and give them resources they need. But it's
It's I continue. think you can hear the chuckle in my voice. I smile at people who've.
Yeah, again, this is the curse of knowledge. They've implemented some stuff and maybe wildly different. I had a client in 2005, I think.
Blair Enns (23:43.38)
And a couple of years after, I worked with her firm for a little while, and then two, three, four years later, we were having a conversation. And she said to me, you'd be really proud of me. We received an RFP from a Fortune 500 company, and we said, no, we don't respond to RFPs. And I said, great, I am proud of you. What happened after that? She said, they went away, nothing. And I went, my God, what have I done?
Steve / Agency Outsight (24:07.979)
You
Steve / Agency Outsight (24:11.606)
Yeah, yeah, I'll work with agencies this. Yeah, I'll work with agencies and say yeah, we do win without pitching. We don't send out our proposals. You know, we walk through it on a screen or in person. I'm like, OK, I'm sure that's a piece of it. No, that's not the entire thing. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Blair Enns (24:12.142)
Yeah, is the beginning of what happens next.
Blair Enns (24:28.13)
That's a piece of it. It's a good piece of it, too. I love hearing that. As soon as you lob the proposal in over the fence, then you lose control. And the way I would have people think about this, sorry, I kind of cut you off there.
Steve / Agency Outsight (24:40.63)
Nope, you're good. I might have cut you off, so we're good.
Blair Enns (24:42.914)
The way I have people think about this is it's a trade. You're creating a proposal for them in exchange for something. the exchange is that they will assemble the decision makers and make a decision. So it's not an unreasonable request to say, absolutely, we'll put a proposal together for you and your partner. I just need the two of you to agree to.
review it with me in person with let's set up a call for tomorrow or the day after tomorrow better for you.
Steve / Agency Outsight (25:15.244)
Yeah. The other thing I guess is not directly tied to win without pitching, but that I know millions of people leverage is your kind of kiss off email or I forget what the exact naming of it is. But hey, you haven't heard back from you. Safe to assume that we're not moving forward or whatever. What is it exactly called that you referenced?
Blair Enns (25:34.722)
Well, it goes by many names. If you search winwithoutpitching.com for it, I think it's called the million dollar email, but we call it the takeaway email. And I wish I could give credit to the origin, to the true origin of this. It was taught to me 25 years ago as a voicemail script. And I don't remember where, I remember who taught it to me. don't remember.
Steve / Agency Outsight (25:40.684)
Yeah.
Blair Enns (25:56.406)
or even know where she got it from. So somebody else is the author of this and it was a voicemail script, but I'm getting a lot of credit for it online. I'm happy to take it, but I would be happy to redirect the credit to the proper author if anybody knows who it is.
Steve / Agency Outsight (26:11.434)
Yeah, I've used it many times. know a lot of people that have and I've directed clients to it and friends over the years. So it's super valuable. I'm curious in your kind of projection of what you hope people will take away from the four conversations, like not just in their work, but in how they approach client relationships. What do you expect that could be?
Blair Enns (26:31.394)
would hope people take away from it that the sale really is a series of conversations. And when it ceases to be so, then that's when things start to go wrong. When you go into presentation mode, you start building decks, you go into convince mode. That's when you wreck the dynamics of an otherwise kind of healthy two-way open conversation. I always say to our clients,
You're an excellent communicator. You would not get to where you are in your career if that were not true. And you're almost certainly an expert conversationalist. But something happens to us, almost all of us, when the domain of that conversation moves into sales, we become somebody else. We feel like we have to be brilliant. We can't make a mistake. We can't be human. We have to always be smiling and nodding yes. I'm not exactly sure where all this comes from.
a few different theories on it, but it's just the oddest thing. You lose your ability to converse like a normal person when the stakes are you selling something to somebody. It's just the oddest thing. So if I could do one thing for my clients, it would be just to reach into them and pull out everything they think they know about what it means to sell. And then if salesperson U disappears,
then expert you will step into the void and show up. And now all you need is a model, a set of frameworks for expert you to do your expert thing. If you're a coach, you should see selling as a coachable moment. If you're a consultant, you should see you're an advisor of any kind. You should see the sale as an advisory moment. You're not giving your thinking away for free. You're behaving as the advisor that you that who will show up in the engagement. So
this salesperson you, the second persona that we adopt, either because it's been trained into us or because we've inferred from all the bad selling practices that we've been on the buying end of, we infer that that's how sales should be done.
Steve / Agency Outsight (28:40.01)
Over the past few years, sales, engagements, discoveries have happened more on Zoom than probably ever before. Do you see that these conversations are harder to have or easier to have or more fluid in person than they are on digital platforms?
Blair Enns (28:57.016)
think Zoom sales calls are fantastic because you get to look people in the eyes. So it's better than a phone call. And I also think it's a great, because everybody understands that most of these conversations are recorded now. I record all my Zoom calls by default unless somebody asks about it or asks me to turn it off. It's just my, I don't even think to ask. don't think to, it's just my default. And so.
If you are recording and those in your firm are recording the sales conversations, then you can go back and review those conversations. Our coaches do that for some of our clients too. You can get a third party to review them. You can ask Chatchie PT to review your sales conversations.
I'm still here, can you see me?
Steve / Agency Outsight (29:44.874)
I cannot see you but I definitely still hear you.
Blair Enns (29:48.833)
Okay.
not sure what happened here. I know what happened. Hold on a second. I'll switch cameras. My other camera unplugged.
Steve / Agency Outsight (30:03.148)
Cat in the office unplugging things for you.
Blair Enns (30:04.896)
No, I'd move things around. Hold on.
Blair Enns (30:29.159)
you
Blair Enns (30:40.76)
Sorry, it's not an easy fix. Would you like me to take the minute and to fix it?
Steve / Agency Outsight (30:44.962)
Whatever. Yeah, we have time. No worries. Don't feel rushed.
Blair Enns (30:47.576)
Okay, well done.
Blair Enns (31:11.374)
should be back in a sec.
Blair Enns (31:19.832)
Well, you're going to have to do some editing now.
Steve / Agency Outsight (31:22.336)
Yeah, no big deal. Easy enough to do.
Blair Enns (31:33.697)
I unplugged the camera and it was running on battery, so now it's plugged in, but I might have to turn it off and on again.
Steve / Agency Outsight (31:59.5)
And you're back. No worries.
Blair Enns (32:00.59)
about that.
Steve / Agency Outsight (32:04.77)
I don't remember what specifically we were talking about, but I can jump to another question. All good. So for an agency that wants to kind of shift away from the way they're doing it now, free pitching, under pitching, crappy RFPs, and I know that's a long journey to get to a better place, but what's that first mindset change or first tactical change that you'd recommend they start heading down?
Blair Enns (32:09.411)
Me either.
Blair Enns (32:32.27)
The mindset change, I'm going to quote Orrin Clough, who wrote a great book, the opposite of my book. It's called Pitch Anything. And somebody suggested it to me years ago. And I thought, I'm the win without pitching guy. I'm not reading a book called Pitch Anything. And then I read, I started reading it on Amazon. I thought, this is really well done. And his context for pitching is different. It's raising money.
And he's got, I don't know if he's the originator of this idea, but, we borrow some of his, I borrow some of his language with attribution in the book, the four conversations, and cite them in our training. This idea of who is the prize in the relationship. So his line, I am the prize. And we borrowed that language. I am the expert, I am the prize. As Clath points out in any kind of social interaction,
there are, each party brings kind of a view, what he calls a frame to the conversation. And I'll generalize and say there are only two frames in a sales conversation. One is, I am the expert, I am the prize. And the other is, you are the client and you have the money, therefore you are the prize. And what Claff points out is these frames,
they don't play nice at the end of the interaction. One frame destroys the other and you both share a frame. You both basically agree on the roles and the dynamics of the relationship. So if you think about what I modeled off the top of the call, these two different inbound inquiries where in the first one,
the client sees themselves as the prize and you probably do too. In the second one, the client sees you as the prize and you should see yourself as the prize here. that mindset wise, that's the first thing that needs to happen. If you do not recognize and value your own expertise, then you cannot expect your clients to as well. So if you value it, show up in the sale without overplaying this idea.
Blair Enns (34:44.588)
show up in the sale as somebody who recognizes and values their own expertise.
Steve / Agency Outsight (34:49.174)
Yeah, I love that. I think there's too many people that show up kind of like in the desperation of need another client, need another whatever, and that comes through. so yeah, in that case, absolutely the client is the prize and the agency's gonna do whatever it takes to win that over.
Blair Enns (35:05.772)
to the creative world context and away from class of fundraising and venture capital trying to raise money for a startup. In our world, any pitch communicates to the client that they are the prize. Any pitch. So, know, this one without pitching, it's built right into the name of the business and the name of the first book. You cannot be the expert if you're pitching. You just cannot.
Steve / Agency Outsight (35:26.72)
Yeah, looking ahead.
Steve / Agency Outsight (35:31.436)
Yeah, I love that. can't. Looking ahead, where do you see the biggest opportunities for creative agencies, experts, advisors, I guess in the next three to five years?
Blair Enns (35:41.672)
it's, you know, it's such a tricky time right now. We've got basically a software recession. The whole Zerp era VC hitmaker model funding technology and particularly software startups is that that's frozen like a block of ice. Those days may never return, although, and then we've got this massive disruption called AI, add in offshoring.
the AI and economic uncertainty with your political craziness all over the world. It's a tough time for creative firms right now. And I'm constantly in contact like every day with my friends who also serve this space, other advisors, many of whom you would know. And I cannot tell you what a year from now looks like. And so what I'm saying to people is, and this is more David Baker's domain of
financial advice is you need to have your overhead low and make sure you can survive. I mean, there's still, there's some firms that are thriving out there and that's fantastic. There's just something about the nature of the work that they're doing or the audience that they're serving where they're insulated from this. But largely speaking, and I get more data points every day. Largely speaking, there's a lot of struggle out there and I could not begin to tell you.
what a year from now looks like. Just, I have no idea. So in times of massive uncertainty, you know, get your costs down. And when you see an opportunity, go for it, but avoid existential risk. And that's the, I'm not a very conservative person by nature, but right now in this environment, surviving is the new winning.
Steve / Agency Outsight (37:32.342)
Yeah, get your costs down, build up your cash reserves, extend your days to zero, far beyond what you typically would have. Widen the net, widen the funnel, whatever you want to call it and look for new opportunities. Yeah. I want to wrap up with a couple of random rapid fire questions for you. The first is if you had to rename your agency based on your last meal, what would it be called?
Blair Enns (37:44.27)
You got it.
Blair Enns (37:55.232)
I don't own an agency, so my last meal, bacon and eggs.
Steve / Agency Outsight (37:57.024)
Your consultancy. Canadian bacon? If you weren't doing what you do now, and you kind of alluded to it, not building furniture, but what would you be doing?
Blair Enns (38:02.956)
Yeah, nope.
Blair Enns (38:11.874)
That's a good question.
Blair Enns (38:18.222)
I don't know. I would probably be doing something local in the community, small remote community I live in. And I probably wouldn't be doing it for too long. I think there's an itch I'd like to scratch. I might own a cocktail bar.
Steve / Agency Outsight (38:36.373)
Okay, do you have a name and a brand sitting in a shelf somewhere waiting to kick off? Say it again.
Blair Enns (38:40.3)
The Horry Marmot. The Horry Marmot.
Steve / Agency Outsight (38:45.098)
Okay.
That sounds just perfectly Canadian. Yeah.
Blair Enns (38:49.358)
Those from Western Canada will know it, others will not.
Steve / Agency Outsight (38:56.93)
Finally, if you could eliminate one task from running your business, what would it be?
Blair Enns (39:03.899)
the nightmare that is the governmental compliance of accounting.
Steve / Agency Outsight (39:10.22)
Yeah. I imagine it's different.
Blair Enns (39:13.262)
Flat tax for everyone. it's such a, it drives me crazy. The percentage of resources of this business that go to financial compliance drives me crazy.
Steve / Agency Outsight (39:26.828)
Yep. think all of us face that different governments, different countries, nonsense, but yeah. Blair, again, I am super, super grateful for you joining me, humbled by this opportunity to spend some time with you. We could also just chalk this up as a, what do call it? This is me applying for the position of three Bobs, if that ever opens up with you and David, so.
Blair Enns (39:50.766)
No, but one of the bombs might need to be replaced at some point, so we'll put you on that list.
Steve / Agency Outsight (39:56.738)
Put me on the short list. Really, I appreciate your time. Appreciate you sharing your expertise. Grab the not so new book anymore, The Four Conversations, a new model for selling expertise. As always, grab one of the older books as well, because they're always relevant, always timely, and game changing for agencies. So thank you again.
Blair Enns (40:15.758)
Thanks, Steve.