Everything Can Change in One Conversation

Blair identifies six variables that can change the trajectory of the sale conversation with your prospective client.

Transcript

David C. Baker: All right, Blair. From what I can tell, everything can change in one conversation.

Blair Enns: Wrong as usual.

David: I'm just reading your freaking title. I don't have a reading problem. Is that not the title of what we're talking about? What's the title?

Blair: Yes, it's a post, it hasn't been published as of this recording, but probably will be about the time this drops and it's titled Everything Can Change in One Conversation. I don't know, maybe there's a better title.

David: Did I learn this from you, or was it somebody else?

Blair: If it's good, yes.

David: No. It was about how to screw your clients. Was that the thing you taught me?

Blair: What?

David: You pre-admitted that it was you, so I just thought I'd insert something. No, it seems like when we used to be doing those new business summits for 10 years, there were always people that didn't want to do any outbound calling for obvious reasons, and you would say, "But that is one of the times when you can learn in real time from the nos." Was that you who said that?

Blair: Yes.

David: It always stuck with me like, "Oh, I never quite thought about it that way." Give me a summary of what we're talking about here.

Blair: The title is everything can change in one conversation and I'm just trying to drive home the importance of actually having a conversation, so conversing instead of presenting. Or the standard dynamic in a client agency relationship is this brief and present dynamic where it's one-way communication at a time that's interrupted by time and space, the other party listens, gets briefed or presented to, and then the feedback gets stilled and then insights are delivered back to the other party at a later date.

Because there's no real proper two-way at a time communication like you have in a conversation, so much gets lost and so much opportunity gets lost. If you enter into the sale in certain position in the relationship or with certain assumptions in place that the client has made, you can try to change those or derail those assumptions, but the best place to do that is in a conversation. I maintain that we in the creative professions, when it comes to selling, we are not conversing enough. We default to this dynamic of brief and present and the things that we want to accomplish to change the trajectory of the sale or any of enumerable variables of the sale, they're really best accomplished in a conversation.

David: I just want to make a distinction here. There are a lot of "conversations" that are happening that are really not conversations. You're not saying that we need to talk with our prospects more, obviously that would be good, but you're saying we need to talk differently. It's a real conversation and not, "I talk and then you talk," and it's all prepared either way and full of objections. It's a different way of conversing. Yes, it does happen in person, but it's a different way of conversing as well.

Blair: If there's a deck involved, it's not a conversation. If you're busy thinking about what you're going to say next, so you can impress the client while they're talking, it's not a conversation. I really do mean getting back to the fundamentals of let's just us human beings have a normal conversation because in a conversation, when both of our guards are down, we're trusting each other, and there's this healthy two-way flow of information, both parties are open to change. Very often in a sale of creative services, the client comes into the conversation or the relationship with a whole bunch of assumptions made that it's in everybody's best interest for those assumptions to change. That's what we want to engender.

David: Also, there's a pretty significant percentage of listeners who feel like the biggest thing that needs to change for them is they need to get in touch with more prospects, they need to have more conversations. That's also not what we're talking about here, because the kind of conversation you're talking about, it's not only just a type, but it also has a lot of assumptions underneath it. It assumes, for instance, that you are building this conversation on a really powerful, differentiated positioning. It assumes that you know in advance what it looks like for a client to be qualified. It's not just, you need more conversations, you need different types of conversations, but built on a lot of foundational things ahead of time too.

Blair: Clearly, I like conversations. The second proclamation of The Win Without Pitching Manifesto is we will replace presentations with conversations. We may have done an episode on that. Our overarching training model at Win Without Pitching is this idea that you view the sale as a series of four linear discreet conversations. Any opportunity I can get, I'm trying to bring the focus back to the basics here that selling really is human beings having conversations rather than going into persuasion mode as is our want as creative people who love standing at the front of the room with a keynote deck.

David: Psychologically, what's driving this? Is it the terror of transparency, the terror of unscriptedness? What drives our desire to have the kinds of pseudo conversations we're having instead of the kind that you're talking about?

Blair: There's so many variables that drive it. One comes from the client side where they really believe that they've got to bring this kind of formality. As a friend of mine says, "A veil of legitimacy and transparency to the selection process." They keep everybody at arm's length and brief them and ask them to present and often go out of their way to make sure that they don't have a direct conversation with one party because that would be unfair. Then on our side of the table, the creative firm side we tend to default to what we see as our best tools.

As I've said before, creativity is the ability to see and that is tied directly to the ability to think on your feet. We love being in situations where we're standing up in front of the room presenting and not knowing what kind of objections we're going to get or having to deal with things in the moment. We love that moment of presenting and we default to marketing-based techniques or tactics over sales-based tactics or techniques because we in the creative professions tend to see marketing as a more noble path to the same objective as sales which is to drive a transaction. There are three variables there and there are more, but it's ingrained on both sides of the buy sell relationship.

David: Just listening to one of the phrases, I forget exactly how you said it, but they're doing their best to not have a conversation. I'm just thinking, you want to spend millions of dollars with this firm and you want this firm to understand the core of what you do and what you solve for your clients, but the last thing you can afford is a conversation is such a ludicrous idea.

Blair: Yes.

David: Oh my goodness. Here we have a spotlight on the right kinds of conversations and we're going to shine it on six different things that can happen. Six different categories that can happen with the right kinds of conversations. The first one, the first big thing that can change is you are standing with the client. Let's talk about that one first.

Blair: Six different variables that can change in a moment, in a conversation. Some of these things can change outside of a conversation, but the key is, you won't know they've changed. You won't know until later. Until you've affected a variable or the variable has changed, and then they have decided on the next step after that. One of the key takeaways here is, if you can affect this variable, if you can have a change in the conversation, you will see it change. You will be aware of it changing in the moment and then you can replace the next step.

The client came into that conversation thinking, "Okay, here's what we're going to do in this conversation. Here's the next step or the possible next steps afterwards." When the variable changes, you now have the opportunity to insert the next step. There's this moment in time, this window when that next step is in flux. There's a void and instead of waiting for the client to fill it, you fill it. The first variable, as you said, is you're standing with the client. I think we did a whole episode on this.

There's a name for this moment in time that we at Win Without Pitching give when the client goes from seeing you as a vendor with lots of direct competitors and little ability to affect the sale, to seeing you as the expert practitioner with few direct competitors and therefore lots of ability to affect the direction of the sale. That moment is called the flip. That's what we call it. That's what I mean by you're standing with a client.

You go into the conversation where the client sees you as one in a sea of many, you can tell from the power dynamics, you can tell by how they're treating you. You can tell by their clothes, the body language that they don't see you as all of that prize worthy, I guess, would be the word. Then in the course of the conversation something changes and you notice that dynamics change immediately. Their body language opens up, they start leaning forward, they start taking notes, they start asking questions and they're really interested in your answer. Again, we call that the flip. That's the moment when your standing with a client changes. The generalization that we use is you've moved from a vendor with little power in the relationship to the expert practitioner with all kinds of power in the relationship.

David: What I like about that is, is how important it is to tie that to the power it brings if it's in a conversation because you could sense the flip in another way, like in an email, but you don't have the power to immediately bend the conversation in the right direction after that. Does the flip happen in a negative way as well? I am honestly curious about that. It feels like they already see you as the expert practitioner. Does it ever flip the other direction?

Blair: Oh, yes. We did an episode on this four conversations model.

David: Was I there for that episode?

Blair: You were there and it's been a while now, but I named the four conversations, described them and explained the objective of each of the conversations. The first conversation is the probative conversation where the objective is effectively the flip. To move in the mind of the client from vendor to expert practitioner. Then that objective of the probative conversation becomes the secondary objective of each of the three subsequent conversations where the secondary objective is to maintain the expert practitioner position. What you're trying to do, the secondary objective of the subsequent conversations is to make sure that the reverse flip does not happen. That you don't do anything silly that causes them to realize, "Oh, you're not really the expert practitioner," and start to view you as a vendor again.

David: Yes. When I'm having a conversation with a prospect, the flip happens in one of two ways. Of course, now, I can't do this anymore, because everybody's listening, but is to take a pretty educated guess at what the principal is really nervous about, even though he or she hasn't said anything about it yet. It's the moment where they feel like I have a camera in the office. The other is, if I'm feeling particularly confident, I'll guess what their revenue is, and get really close, like within 5%, and you can hear this pause, and it's like, "How did you know that?" It's reading between the lines and making some assumptions that are fairly safe?

Blair: Well, that's the key to the flip here, and I talked about this in this post. The flip doesn't happen through a moment of persuasion. It's not you with your deck, running through a presentation. It's through the intelligence of your questions, the observations that you're able to make, like that guess that you're able to make some of somebody's revenue based on a few other variables, that only somebody who's got a depth of experience would be able to make. That moment changes, you're aware of it, the client's aware of it. A distracted observer in the room might not pick up on it. It's not a moment of force, you're not brute forcing anything. It's kind of a quiet, almost subtle moment, but in that moment, everything changes.

David: If this has been done remotely, I could see the argument for why, ideally, you're on video, because you could pick up the signals easier, like the body language you were talking about.

Blair: Yes. If it is remotely and you're not on video, if it's a phone call, spacing is really important. Silence is really important. Leaving big gaps is a really effective tool of the expert practitioner.

David: Yes. All right. The second place where big things happen in conversations is how the client understands their problem, the client's understanding of their problems. Let's talk about that one next as a second example.

Blair: Let's go back to the first one, the flip. Your standing changes based on an observation that you've made or a question that you've asked, like an insight. Often, that insight or that question is something that gets the client to rethink the various assumptions about what the problem is, or what the solutions might be that they had going into the conversation. So that's what I'm talking about. Most clients come to you in the sale self-diagnosed and self-prescribed. They already have an idea of what the problem is, and the solution that they want to buy from you and there might be some room to move on the solution, but in their minds, it's like, "No, we need to go hire a firm like this one to deliver X for us."

David: You're a pharmacist at that point. You're not a doctor.

Blair: Yes, that's a great way to think of it. A client comes to you that way, and through the intelligence of your questions and the depth of your experience, you're able to ask the questions, offer the insights that get them to think, "Oh, my God, maybe that's not the problem at all," or maybe the solution that I've been thinking about isn't the right solution. That is a fundamental change, that the whole book, the challenger sale, is rooted in this idea to challenge the client's assumptions of what the problem is, what the solutions might be, and therefore add value in the sale itself by getting the client to rethink their underlying assumptions.

When you can do that in a conversation, then the next step really is yours to drive. An appropriate next step might be to sell a diagnostic, it might be to meet with missing decision-makers, it might be something else that you want to do that was not in the clients' plans, but that is a key one. Key one. Right up there with the flip, with changing your status in the eyes of the client is getting the client to see or at least think that, "Maybe the problem isn't as I thought it was." Or, "The solutions that I've come to you looking for aren't necessarily the right solutions or the only solutions to the problem." You get the client to think bigger, to think differently, to rethink their own assumptions.

David: I'd say that a lot of people having these sales conversations are capable of doing what you just said, but that most of them don't. They're too eager to get the project, to get it started, and so on. Then they do what I call the reverse Trojan horse syndrome, where the client drops the bridge, you go over the moat, you enter, everybody's happy, this seems safe. Then instead of bouncing out of the horse, and all these warriors that are going to kill everybody, no, it's all these strategists and researchers. The client looks around and says, "I thought we hired implementers. What are these people doing?" Then the more they listen to them, the more impressed they are. You're not getting hired for your ability to lead the client to a deeper understanding of what's really going on, but you're surprising them with this later.

Another way to look at this is that we want to bring that into an earlier phase, the very sales phase because otherwise, it's not going to show up in how we're charging the client. You didn't have that in your notes, but I just can't help but think about how, if you don't surface what's really happening with the client in the sales, you're not going to get paid for it. You may still convince them of it later, but it's not early enough to really benefit you.

Blair: That's a great point, and I love your Trojan horse metaphor. Even to your point of you need to do this in the sale, I hear from a lot of firms when I talk about the need to challenge the client's assumptions of their problem and the solutions they're looking for. I hear from a lot of firms that, "Oh, yes, we do that. We do that in the proposal," or, "We do that in the pitch."

My point is, it's too late. You do that in a conversation because if you are able to affect this variable, in the moment that it's changed, you want to know. You want to be there so that you can then lead. You can take control and drive the next step. Otherwise, you're just going back to the office and hoping that it's kind of landed. When people tell me this, "Oh, yes, we do that. We do that in the pitch or the proposal." That sentence is often said with a lot of pride that really should not be there. If you've got guts, do that in a conversation without you standing up in front of a room, without building it into a deck.

David: The first thing that could change in a conversation is you're standing with the client. The second is the client's understanding of their problem. The third is scope. That's the one we want to talk about next.

Blair: Yes, and again, a client comes to you self-diagnosed and self-prescribed. We do this exercise in a lot of our training programs, where we'll pair people up with one party playing the client and one playing the consultant. That consultant has to discern what the problem/opportunity is. We send them away to do a little breakout exercise. They come back, everybody comes back in the main room, and then we debrief on that. At some point we'll ask, "Okay, consultants, how many of your clients expressed the problem as a solution?" Everybody thinks, furrows their brow, and you see the look on their faces like, "No, no, not mine." Then they think about it and go, "Oh, yes." Between 60% to 75% of the people raise their hands.

This is pretty normal. A client comes to you and says, "I need X." If you do your job as a discerning professional, you ask the right questions, this is a qualifying issue. It's also a value conversation issue where you're endeavoring to uncover the value that you might create and then what your share of that value might be in the form of fees.

When you move a prospect or a client from the stated solution that they came to you looking for, and you put them into this space of what we call the desired future state, which we've talked about on other episodes, you put them into the future and you get them to describe success, you now shift the conversation and the focus from the specific solution they were looking for, maybe it's a website, a campaign, an identity, whatever, onto the value to be created. Onto the desired future state. What they want to be true in the future, and then the value of achieving that.

When you do that, you transcend the problem or the solution, as it was stated, and you get the focus onto this beautiful new world that the client would love to be their reality down the road and the value of arriving at that beautiful new world and the initial solution, as it was stated, just disappears in a good way. It's a bit of a blunt statement. There's a lot of nuances there, but generally, when you're able to do this, the initial solution dissipates and the focus of both parties is now on this desired future state and the value to be created.

That is the-- I want to say the easiest way to transcend scope. It's not easy because mastering the value conversation isn't easy. We did a whole episode on the value conversation, which I think the ability to master is the most valuable skill in all of business. I wouldn't say it's easy, but once you learn to do it, you will find yourself almost always transcending the scope as the client initially described it.

David: Yes. There's something about humans that we pat ourselves on the back when we're solving problems, even if they're not the right problems to solve. We're just so pre-determined, predestined. We have this urge to do something, even if it's not the right thing and that carries over into these kinds of conversations. If you think about the access that we have to our clients, compare that with the access of say an accounting firm or an engineering firm, the hunting grounds we get, the licenses we get to hunt, get us right down into the humanity of a firm and what they do and why they do it.

We are bound to see so many other things in there that are really pointing to the actual problem and hopefully the actual solution and there's nothing quite like the empty feeling of sitting there working on something that is solving a problem, but it's not the right problem. What I love about this one is that everything about this is in the client's best interest, listening this way and changing the scope. It's beautiful.

Blair: Yes, it absolutely is. It's something you have to learn, especially if you come from this place of seeing yourself in the service business where the customer's always right, you have to unlearn that and you have to bring this mindset to the conversation that the client stated solution and their assumption of the problem. They're backing up to the previous variable, it's probably wrong or incomplete. It doesn't mean your clients are idiots. It just means, as you would say, they're inside the jar and they can't read the label, right? You've got this outside perspective. They've made a bunch of assumptions, probably some leaps in there, and think, "We need X," and you really need to put X aside and think bigger and explore the bigger possibilities. You owe it to the client to do that.

You'll see. After you've done this a few and you see that it's the norm that you can get the client to transcend the solution, as they've stated, and focus on the outcomes that they're seeking. You'll start to see it as an obligation to do this because you'll look back on the previous part of your career. We've all been there and you look back on the moments when the client said, "I need X," and you went, "Okay, we'll build X. All right, people were building X." Then you start building X and you realize, you don't need X. Or, "Yes, okay, you need X, but you also need these other things."

Again, that's a conversation. That's something that you don't want to have to discover while you're building X. You owe it to the client to put that initial solution that they've come to you with aside and have a bigger conversation, get them to think bigger. At the end of that conversation, what we call the value conversation, if there isn't something bigger there, that's fine. If the solution that they've stated X is indeed the right solution, then of course you go ahead and build X. I'm not talking about trying to sell somebody something that they don't need.

David: It's almost like we discover the Hippocratic oath.

Blair: Ah, yes.

David: Whatever the equivalent is. Right? We discover it in our careers because we've seen the emptiness of solving the wrong problem and we've seen the impact of solving the right one. We discover the Hippocratic oath and then we realize, "Oh my God, I cannot do justice to the Hippocratic oath less I have a lot of conversations with my clients. Listen differently," and so on. That's the message I'm getting from this.

Blair: Yes. I love it.

David: All right. I'm having fun here. That's all that matters. I hope you're having fun.

Blair: That is all that matters.

David: Well, the fourth one is price, which is-- there's a little bit of connection here between price and the value conversation, but this isn't so much the actual number that follows a dollar sign, it's price in a slightly different sense.

Blair: It isn't?

David: Well, it we're going to be eventually.

Blair: Me being punchy. You just think of the three variables that we've discussed already that can change. You're standing with the client. They're understanding of the problem, the actual scope of the solutions. It just follows inevitably that if all of those things can change then price can change too and it can change even when those variables don't change. Just back to this idea of the value conversation. Somebody comes to you self-diagnosed, self-prescribed and they say, "I need solution and my budget is X."

Well, if you're able to transcend the solution and say, "Hey, let's focus on the value to be created here." Then all of a sudden-- this isn't universal, this doesn't always happen. There's some variables that we'll talk about, but all of a sudden you open up the possibility that, well, if we're putting X aside then we're putting aside the small measly little underfunded budget for X and now we're focusing on the outcomes. What are the outcomes worth to me the client? All of a sudden, the price can change.

David: You mean the real price that follows the dollar sign or the pound sign?

Blair: Yes, so the price can change because we've switched. We've changed the focus from a stated solution to value creation. Even if we don't do that there are other variables that can be at play that can cause the price to change. I remember years ago when I was still a consultant, I had an agency principal client debriefing me on a sales call that he had had and so he had a phone conversation with the vice president of marketing at this client organization.

He got a meeting with the VP of marketing and the president and the VP of marketing had already stated what the budget was, but, in the conversation, the flip happened. I don't remember the dynamics that caused the flip to happen, but all of a sudden in that moment this agency went from being seen as a vendor to the expert practitioner and then when the agency principal revisited the subject of budget, the VP of marketing very quickly said, "Our budget is X." He repeated the number that he had stated on the phone. Then the president overrode his subordinate. He said, "The budget is whatever it takes to do this properly."

That changed in that moment in that conversation. It speaks to another variable which we'll talk about next is like the importance of getting senior decision makers in the room. Because if he had not got that senior decision maker in the room, he wouldn't have heard that. In fact, he wouldn't have engendered that response among the more senior person on the client side of the table. He wouldn't have been able to affect that response, therefore would not have heard that information.

There are two examples of where price can change in a moment and there are all kinds of other examples and other reasons why price might change in the moment, even middle manager that you're talking to might have the authority to raise the budget based on the impression that you make to them based on your standing in their eyes increasing. Any of the previous variables that we've already covered, one of the few things that flows from those variables is the fact that price can go up. That the budget as stated can be transcended.

We've talked before about the importance of using options in your proposals. That's one of the six rules of pricing creativity and when you present a proposal with multiple options, you have an obligation to show what you can do for the client if they have a stated budget. If you're presenting a three-option proposal and the client has a $50,000 budget, your cheapest option can be 50,000, and then your other options can be multiples of that budget. You should see yourself as having the freedom to present options that are just completely untethered from the client's budget as long as two things are true.

Number one, you do show what you can do for whatever the client has said is their stated budget. Number two, you tell them in advance that your proposal is going to contain multiple options with an expensive one as high as whatever you're thinking. Then you assure them that, "Don't worry. You said your budget is $50,000. At least one option will show you what we can do for 50,000." It's this trade that you're making. You are asking permission to come in with a proposal that is priced much higher than what the client has stated to you as their budget, but in exchange for that you're promising to give them what they've asked for to show what you can do for that budget and the important thing here is it, you are making that trade off explicitly in the conversation itself.

David: That's the focus of each of these six points. Is that these things happen better, more obviously within a conversation. The fifth thing here is access to decision makers. You and I both talk all the time about how important access to decision makers, senior decision makers, and how you can make that happen. The twist here is how it relates to the conversation side. How does that work?

Blair: We could talk for a long period on this one. In fact, I don't remember if we've done an entire episode on decision maker dynamics. Maybe we have?

David: I don't think so.

Blair: We've been doing this for five years. Did you know that?

David: We have no idea what we talked about.

Blair: My memory's not very good.

David: Somewhat senile makes the topic selection a lot easier.

Blair: These variables, we're doing them in the order of most likely to happen. You're standing with the client, their understanding of the problem, the scope, price, and then decision maker dynamics. If these things are starting to change and you're presented with an opening, like a pause where the client had an idea of what the next step was, and now that's kind of off the table or in doubt because of the variables changing, you want to step in and fill that. That's the last point that we'll talk about next.

One of the ways that you might want to fill that is access to senior decision makers. If other variables are changing, let's just go back to one of the variables being price. Let's say multiple variables changed. The low-level client or the manager you're talking to, comes to you with the problem and the solution and the budget stated, and you through the intelligence of your insights get that person to rethink all of those things. "Maybe that isn't the problem, maybe the solution isn't right, and maybe we need to spend more on this."

That person, now they're at a crossroad. Let's say they're a middle manager. They have two courses of action. They can ignore your insight and proceed with the project as it was handed to them by somebody more senior than them. Somebody who doesn't want to spend political capital, who doesn't want to rock the boat, who doesn't have a degree of confidence, who sees their job as implementing on time and on budget rather than creating value, they might choose to just ignore the insight and say, "No. I was told website, $50,000. Get us a $50,000 website."

The other course of action. It is beyond their remit to change any of those things, so they have to go to somebody more senior. If that's the case, you want to ask to be included in that conversation. The willingness to ask to get access to senior decision makers, that is one of the key indicators of sale success. If I know that if somebody who is willing to ask, then a certain percentage of the time, they're willing to get it, they will typically outsell somebody who is not willing to ask for that senior access.

You don't always have to get it, and in the post, I talk about what are some of the backups, if you ask and you don't get it, but this is a variable that can change. It's one of the ones down the list because it's usually changes because of one of the earlier variables has changed. When you see that the appropriate next step is access to senior decision makers, you want to steal yourself to some of the courage to ask.

David: There's something about asking in a conversation that's better than say an email, a text message. Asking to speak with a decision maker.

Blair: The power that you will derive from the insight that you shared that caused one of the earlier variables to change is greatest in that moment.

David: Got it.

Blair: Leverage the power when it is greatest.

David: The last variable, which is a wrap up, you're calling the next step. In other words, where do we go from here? You're saying that this is best handled in an actual conversation.

Blair: We often talk about derailing a pitch. Even if this isn't a pitch, it's just a client dictated selection process. Client comes to you with this process and it's often arduous and sometimes ridiculous. It's a defense mechanism that they have quite often. Especially if it's arduous or ridiculous. They come to you and you ask some intelligent questions. You cause some of the variables to change. Because it's a conversation and not through a proposal, a written document or a presentation where you're transmitting and not receiving, you are aware that the variable has changed.

Now, as we've already said, now is your moment to step into the freshly created void and insert your idea of what the appropriate next step is instead of the client. It might be meeting with senior decision makers. It might be the client to sign off on a small diagnostic engagement to validate your insight or unvalidate the client's assumptions. You wouldn't phrase it that way.

David: Yes. That's why you grinned when you said it.

Blair: Or there can be a-- not innumerable, but there are a lot of different appropriate next steps, and in that moment, this is what we're striving for. This is one of the things we're trying to do as we try to get the client to rethink any of the above assumptions and variables is, we're the expert here. Experts drive. We should be looking for the opportunity to take control to lead in the sale, because if we don't lead in the sale, we won't be allowed to lead in the engagement. We've talked about that on previous episodes. This is your moment. You've created the opening, step into it and drive the next step.

David: One of the things that I love about this is that it indicates a certain level of interest and openness and commitment by the client that they're willing to have a conversation with you. That seems like one of the most precious things they guard closely. Their time is very valuable to them, but they also are nervous about conversations. If you find a prospect who's willing to have a conversation with you, it's such a potentially powerful moment and the subject of this episode is just how everything can change in just one conversation even including your standing with the client, how the client understands their problem, the scope, and then therefore the price and whether you have access to senior decision makers and then what's the next step and this happens best in a conversation. Is that a fair summary?

Blair: Yes, that's it exactly.

David: Thank you, Blair.

Blair: Thanks, David.