Phase Your Client Engagements

Blair wants firms to get paid to write their proposals, which is the first of his four phases of client engagement.

Links

“Different Pricing Models” - 2Bobs episode 61

“A Beginner’s Guide to Negotiating” - 2Bobs episode 53

“Alternative Forms of Reassurance” - 2Bobs episode 46

Transcript

David C. Baker: Blair, you threw this topic at me, and I got excited immediately, unlike a lot of the other ones that you've sent my way.

[laughter]

Blair Enns: This one is on phased engagements.

David: What got you so excited about phased engagements?

Blair: Well, because it's something that I just believe in so much and I also don't see enough people doing them yet.

David: What we're talking about is starting an engagement, a lot of your client relationships with a specific package service. A phased engagement, a diagnostic you call it sometimes. About-- I don't know exactly when. I should have compared notes with you earlier, but maybe 15, 14, 12 years ago, is when a big switch took place. When before that people were putting just enormous amounts of work into writing proposals and the prospect, would just say yes or no. Essentially, the agency was getting to do everything that they had already recommended, but they weren't getting paid for that. I've always thought of this as getting paid to write a long proposal, but we don't call it that, obviously. Tell us about your history with this and how your thinking has changed before we get into the weeds with all of it.

Blair: Yes, and just think about as you're describing it, in the advertising world, they call it a pitch. If I think of what I know now about the importance of breaking up a large engagement with a new client into steps and taking it one step at a time and then presenting options and how you might move forward with the client, those two principles, if you're not embracing both of them, man, you are creating a lot of work for yourself and taking on a lot of risk because you put so much into the proposal and you make all of these assumptions, you put all of this work into it, and then you hand it over to the client or you present it to the client. It's basically a take it or leave it proposition on the client's entire budget.

David: Right. It's even worse on the PR side because they're essentially putting an entire plan together and they're doing it before they've even gotten hired. The phrase you've used many times to describe that in another way is investing in the sale. Time is money here. Once you invest that much in the sale, you lose your own internal negotiation position because you hate to walk away from all that labor you've just invested.

Blair: You give away all your power, it's the beginning of everything going wrong. Maybe some owners or folks who work in larger independent ad agencies and PR firms are listening to this and thinking, Well, look, you don't understand. That's just the way it has to be done.

David: Right.

Blair: That's absolutely not the way it has to be done. I accept that the larger your firm, the larger year clients, the more you are a pure ad agency or pure public relations firm, the more likely you are to think that this is the way it has to be done. It's actually, once you get comfortable using these tools, closing on a diagnostic, and then at the end of the diagnostic, presenting options and how you would move forward, the idea of selling and being in business without these tools just feels absurd. It would feel like you're being sent back into a gunfight, but somebody is taking your gun away and now it's just hand to hand combat, or you're taking a knife.

David: Right. If you're just now starting to listen to these podcasts, you're probably going to be struck by--

Blair: You're a late bloomer.

David: You've been-- Yes, there's so many things I want to say, but I'm not. You may be surprised by what seems like a lot of contrary positions that Blair and I take. It's not like we're contrary by nature, even though we are, that's not what motivates this. We generally believe that the majority opinion is suspect. It's not always wrong, but it suspects. Let's at least look at it and see if there's a better way to do it. The fact that almost everybody is doing something will automatically raise a flag in your mind and my mind.

When we talk about these things, we're talking about them from the perspective seen inside of firms who are really doing things differently and succeeding because of that. It's very exciting to me to see that you can actually, to weave the name of your firm in here, win without pitching, which is really relevant to what we're talking about here. This is the first phase in an engagement. I like to think about this so simply because, in many cases, a lot of agencies out of creative verbs are not giving their clients something that's easy to buy at the beginning. This first phase, which you're calling a diagnostic or something else, is the first phase, how does it fit into the context of multiple phases they might have?

Blair: You can think of the phases of the engagement, not the sale itself but the engagement after you're hired as these four phases, and I borrow from a medical analogy or metaphor. Phase one being to diagnose the problem. Essentially, in the diagnostic phase, you're getting paid to understand. It's important, especially as a creative firm, it's really important to you and it's important, ultimately to the client, it's the outcome that you're trying to achieve, that you be allowed to bring your perspective, your point of view on the problem itself to bear.

The worst client is the client that shows up and says, "All right, we've already diagnosed our problem and we've prescribed the solution and we want to quote from you on executing on the solution or this prescription."

Phase one is where you diagnose the problem. When the client comes to you self diagnose, you should see yourself as having a professional obligation to validate that diagnosis. We've talked about that before, but if you really are a professional, then you will see it as your professional responsibility to diagnose the problem before you prescribe a solution or before you agree to work on a client's self diagnose self-prescription. That's phase one, diagnose the problem.

David: Phase two is what we're assuming they've already paid you to do diagnostics, you're not investing all this time for nothing. You're getting paid for what you're doing. You're not necessarily taking a bath on it either, right? Or are you?

Blair: No, you're not. We'll talk in a few minutes about what you should charge for a diagnostic, but we're talking about a paid diagnostic.

David: Okay.

Blair: You've got a situation where a client comes to you with a challenge or an account or something, and they're looking for a proposal from you to move forward, and you recognize these four phases, recognize that there are four phases in the engagement, and I promise we'll get to the other three in 10 seconds. You propose to break up the engagement and start at the beginning.

There are lots of reasons why you would want to close on a diagnostic first. The biggest one is just to make it less risky for the client. Let's say the client has a million dollar budget and they come to you for a proposal on how to spend a million dollars, and you say, well, first, we're going to have to roll up our sleeves and get a better understanding of the problem ourselves. You've got to grant us the ability to think differently about the problem, we might come up with something different. That's phase one. Why don't you just pay us for phase one? We'll come back to pricing in a second. Phase one is diagnose the problem.

Phase two is to prescribe a therapy or a solution. The first two phases are to diagnose and prescribe, and those are what I consider to be the thinking phases. Phase three is apply or initial application of therapy, and phase four, is ongoing re-application as necessary. Phases one, diagnose the problem. Phase two, prescribe a solution or a therapy. Phase Three, the initial application of that solution or therapy, and phase four, the ongoing reapplication as necessary. Phases one and two are the thinking phases and phases three and four are the application phases.

David: Back 30 years ago back when brochures were a thing, do any of us remember those? You would get a request from a prospect who would say, "Hey, I need this, what's it going to cost?" You'd not only have to estimate your fees, you'd have to go to a printer, and give them real specifics about what this thing was going to look like specs, quantity, colors, all that stuff type of paper. You had no idea of what the client needed yet, right? It was so crazy. That's an extreme example of how we were, I guess, sending people down this path without really taking the time to think about what they needed.

These four phases, it's something that safer for you, because you don't invest a lot of time solving their problem and not getting paid. It's safer for the client. Why is that safer for the client? They get to experience working with you. They get to test how well you think about solving the problem. Is that the substance of why it's safer for the client?

Blair: Exactly. In our example of a million dollar account where the client is looking for your million dollar proposal on how you would spend their million dollars, you come back and say, well, we're not entirely sure, because we don't understand the problem to the extent that we would like to understand the problem. We'd like you to chip off a little bit of that million dollars and pay us to first understand the problem, diagnose, and suggest a solution, prescribe. We can jump ahead and talk about numbers, I think is a rough starting point. 10%. There's no right answer to the question, How much should your diagnostic cost, but in the hypothetical examples that I use, I'm usually picking 10%. You might say, pays 100,000, it might be 50,000, it might be 10,000. There are all kinds of reasons why that number might be different, but you're saying to the client, let's take this one step at a time.

If you really want to derail a pitch, if you find yourself in a competitive situation and you want to derail the pitch, the most effective combination of tools that I know of to derail a pitch is; number one, try to break up the sale into a phased engagement where you get paid to diagnose. They actually pay you to diagnose the problem. This works great if they're offering to pay every agency or firm that's participating a pitch fee.

Let's say there are four firms under consideration and they're offering let's say it's 10,000 per firm, you would counter and say, "You know what, instead of paying four firms 10,000 a pop, pay us the 40,000 and we'll do phase one. We’ll come in, we’ll follow this diagnostic methodology that we have that we'll explain to you, and we'll understand the problem and we'll essentially scope the solution and so you'll have a detailed price. When we present our findings and recommendations-" so diagnostic outcomes our findings, prescription outcomes or recommendations, and they always travel together. We'll come back to that. "When we present our findings and recommendation, you can agree to move forward with us on one of the options that we present to you, or if you decide that you don't agree with our findings, you don't like our recommendations or for any other reason you don't want to work with us, we'll park company then and we'll give you your money back." We're trying to derail a pitch. We're combining a phased engagement. Let's take it one step at a time where you're paying us with a money-back guarantee.

David: All right. At this point, I think we haven't lost anybody. They like the notion of this. There's fog around what the client needs, and we say to the client, "Listen, if we don't do something, so that this fog starts to lift, then we're going to have to cover ourselves by shooting really high." That doesn't really make sense. Let's just figure out to do something. You've talked a lot about that and how that works. That makes sense.

What are diagnostics really look like though? They could just be a plan, but what are some of the things that you might weave into a diagnostic because you haven't said it yet today. If I can predict where you're going to go with this, you're going to say that the diagnostic needs to be pretty prescriptive, so it looks very similar from one to the next, which is a part of the confidence you're giving to the client that you can say to them, "Now you haven't engaged yet. We have a policy, we can't start to solve your problems until we're engaged."

What we can do is explain this process that we have used many times, and it invariably leads to really accurate recommendations. We can walk you through that. What is that in this process?

Blair: That isn't the prescription. Although the prescription is once you diagnose, then the prescription will be the very next thing. Again, I made the point, I'll make it again, that you never separate these things. It's a common mistake to charge a certain amount for the diagnostic and then a certain amount for the prescription. Even though we refer to it as selling a diagnostic, you're really selling a diagnostic and a prescription. You're essentially getting paid to write the plan by undertaking this diagnostic methodology.

Think of a diagnostic tool. You go to see your doctor, and you come in maybe self-diagnosed already. You've been on WebMD or whatever the latest website is. He says, "Stop, stop, stop. Let me ask you a few questions." The doctor starts with what I consider to be a subjective sweep. A subjective sweep is, "Tell me in your own words, where does it hurt? What's going on?" You're asking the patient for information.

You would typically do that in the sale, you're asking the client for information about their situation, and the doctor gets some basic information from you. The doctor probably has a suite of somewhere between 40 and 400 diagnostic tools, maybe even more, that they could run on you depending on what they hear from the subjective sweep. Once they get the basic information from you, they say "I'm going to run the big four; blood pressure, blood work, heart rate." I forget what the other one is. "I'm going to run some basic tests."

They winnow the set of tests down to a small number. You should see yourself as doing the same thing. In the sale, you're asking questions about their condition, "Where does it hurt? Where's the pain? What's the problem? What's the opportunity that you see?" Then from that sale, for you to scope a detailed solution and put prices next to it, you probably need to do more work beyond just ask these client contacts and key questions.

If you need to do a whole bunch of work to scope and price, to essentially write a proposal, then you should get paid to write that proposal, and you get paid to do it by selling this diagnostic. Your question is, what does the diagnostic look like? It's essentially research in all of its forms, primary and secondary research. I'll just throw out some names that cover broad categories of different types of diagnostics, but their names that I like.

My favorite one is the gap analysis. You think, "What's a gap analysis?" It's whatever you want it to be. The gap in your detailed diagnostic could be you endeavoring to determine if there's a gap between the company's perception of itself or of its products and services and the market's perception of itself. There's a gap there. It might be a gap between the company or the company's products or services, and the competitors’ products and services.

I just like that as a catch-all. That term "gap analysis" has always been a fun term that you can fit a whole lot of things into. People say, "What's a gap analysis?" That just you hold up one thing, here's what somebody said, you hold up another thing, here's what somebody else said, there's a gap. Often the gap is on the client-side among various decision-makers on the client-side of the table.

You might find yourself in a situation, you're in a sales call with a prospective client and they are articulating the problem as they see it to you, and you start thinking, "This vice president that this person is throwing under the bus, I wonder if they see the problem is the same way." You might say, "My next step would be to interview other key individuals in the firm and see if we can come up with some cohesive understanding of what the problem is." That could be under the banner of gap analysis.

I'm rambling here, but research in all forms, gap analysis, audits, surveys, or interviews of any kind, focus groups. I've also gotten on my list "discovery sessions." We can come back and talk about what is a discovery session. You've got things you would add to this list. Some things that you've seen from your clients. What do you like under the banner of diagnostics?

David: This is where I love for there to be some sort of a black box where another competitive firm, competitor to you, could not step in and either be as efficient at solving the problem or as accurate or maybe both at solving the problem. I’ll give you just a simple example. Let's say that you develop this really unique way to determine how aligned employees are at the client with the company's mission.

It's mathematical, you run it through SPSS, the statistical analysis software, and you've done this so many times now that you say, "The ideal score is 5.0. When the score and this vertical industry is 4.6, then we have a really serious problem. It usually means these two things need to be addressed first." I'm just making everything up here, but that's what you're looking for. You're looking for some answers that are difficult for the client to dispute, but not difficult for them to understand.

This is the ideal place as I said earlier for some of that black box stuff. If we take this a little bit further, what makes this really beautiful is if people who are not as experienced can implement the work itself. You could shove this down in the organization as a way to get those folks more up to speed, but it doesn't require a lot of smart people who observe things just naturally. They're simply applying a tool that has been validated either with a Ph.D. survey design person or whatever it is.

I get really excited thinking about this stuff. I've seen some really smart things being applied in the marketplace.

David: Can I ask here, how formal does this need to be? I'm not necessarily asking this question, but I think some people are going to say, "Are you going to name this diagnostic process and prescription, and does it need to have lots of charts? How long does it take?" As you were talking, I was thinking, "This probably needs to take anywhere from three to five weeks." Or how long do you think something like this takes typically?

Blair: First on this subject of formalizing it, you should formalize it, you should name it, you should package it up, you should have a one-page written description of it that is not customized to the client. When you're in a conversation with a prospective client, and you broach the subject of possibly beginning with a diagnostic, you might pull out one piece of paper and slide it across the table. In the medical analogy, earlier I said the doctor has dozens, maybe even hundreds of diagnostics.

In the beginning, you'll probably have one, then you might end up developing a suite of diagnostic tools, but you'll have a primary diagnostic that you'll use to begin most of your client engagements. You want to resist the urge to customize it, to putting your clients logo on it. You want to be able to pull out this piece of paper, slide it across the table and have it looked like it came out of some sort of policy manual or something. Basically, we do this all the time. We've done it before, we've done it many times. This is how it works, here it is written up. Here's how long it takes. I recommend you don't put the price in the document, but you would deliver the price in that moment.

You do want to package it up and you do want to communicate to the client that we've done this before, we do it all the time, and it's bomb proof, we're not going to screw this up. Now, I want to go back to what you were saying about you're describing this firm that had the ability to go in scientifically or statistically and measure certain things and push that work to the lowest level of the firm. I get excited about that too because what you're describing is a firm that has actually developed intellectual property and that IP is reflected in the diagnostic itself.

As an example, you and I, when we both started our businesses and thought, "Okay, how are we going to help these creative and marketing firms move forward?" We both started with positioning because positioning is the foundation for success. When I think of positioning, in my world, the way we have clients start, is start with focus. You should be able to describe your discipline and your market, what do you do, who do you do it for? Once you have that nailed, then you work on bringing a perspective to bear, an overarching point of view on how discipline for a market should be done.

Once you have a perspective, you start writing from that point of view. Once you start writing from that point of view, you will find that the clients who are attracted to you because of that point of view on how this discipline for market should be done, they'll be drawn to you and they want you to bring that perspective to bear. In the example that you just gave, David, about employee alignment, I'm imagining a firm that is positioned in the employee alignment, employee engagement space, it could be internal comms, it could be any number of things.

The results of these diagnostics that the stuff that they're learning are forming the fodder or the basis for the articles that they're publishing. Somebody reaches out and says, "I think I might have that problem. I'd like to talk to you about how we might work with you." The first step is you describe, "Okay, well, first, let me just walk you through our methodology, starts with the diagnostic phase where we come in, we measure your employee alignment as it is currently." You go from your positioning, which is focus and point of view, to the content in your content marketing.

You're writing about this point of view, that becomes the bait people are attracted to and say, "I want you to bring that point of view to bear in my firm," and you have this IP that you then unleash. In the beginning of that IP, that first step is the diagnostic phase where you propose to go in and measure the starting point. In this case, well, let's measure how good or bad alignment is now. Then you uncover the opportunity for growth or improvement and then you put forward a prescription, a plan or a proposal to help that organization close the gap. That is the highest level of positioning where it goes from positioning to point of view, to IP, to diagnostic, to closing on that diagnostic as the first phase in the engagement.

The other thing you said is pushing it to the lowest level of the organization because the magic is no longer all wrapped up in the people. Not that you don't have great magical people. When you have these methodologies codified via IP and the diagnostics that arise from them, it enables you to push higher-quality work down to lower levels of the organization knowing that they're not going to screw it up.

David: Absolutely. As you were talking, and I was reflecting back on something you said right before this and trying to tie the two things together, this diagnostic would not be all that powerful if it could be picked up say by a helicopter, moved over and dropped on another firm. In other words, this diagnostic, if I'm understanding correctly, needs to emerge from your positioning from your IP. It is not interchangeable with another firm. You are bringing to bear all the things that you have learned that other folks who don't either focus in the same space or aren't as observant as you are, they simply don't have access to the same way of thinking.

Blair: At the highest level, you can close on diagnostics while still being a poorly positioned firm and having no IP and having no point of view and just saying, "Let's begin this phase by first getting in and understanding X. There might be no science around it, might be this discovery session that I heard in air quotes, where it's just all subjective sweet. "Well, what about this? Tell me about this." You're just groping. Being highly creative people, if you grope in the dark long enough, you're going to come up with something really interesting, and that will form the basis for moving forward.

It usually begins there, but the place you do want to get to is where the diagnostic is falling out of the IP, the IP is falling out of the point of view, and the point of view is falling out of that discipline and market focus.

David: If your diagnostic and prescription lends itself to some sort of a measurement, then you're also presupposing to the client, you're helping them imagine this longer relationship where both of you will be keeping an eye on moving this number forward. You're also helping them see that you're comfortable with accountability too, so it all ties together really nicely. You mentioned something like 10%. When I get that question, I'll usually throughout somewhere between 5% and 15%. It's rare that it's up as high as 15%. It's more typically in the 5% to 10% of the entire budget that the client might be spending.

What you might spend this is, this might seem like a waste of time, waste of money for you, but it really isn't because what it does essentially is guarantees that how we spend the other 90% or 95% will be so much more on track. Is there anything else you want to say about how to charge for this?

Blair: The only other point I would add is, again, diagnostics can be helpful tools for derailing a pitch. When you think of doing business with bureaucratic organizations, or governments, or procurement-driven organizations where the client that you're talking to, they have to get three bids or a contract above a certain amount would have to go through some process or be reviewed by others or go through a tender process. In those cases, those clients, maybe it's the marketing people or the HR people, they usually have a direct award maximum. They have a certain amount of money that they can award without it going to a competitive tender.

It's often helpful to close on a diagnostic just below that direct award maximum so that you can secure the first step of the engagement where you're getting paid to understand the situation and scope it. That will give you a competitive advantage for when this thing does go to RFP. Sometimes you want to adjust your diagnostic, scale it back, or just scale the price back so that the price is just below that direct award maximum that allows you to get the competitive advantage in a situation that's going to go to tender.

David: You've already talked about throwing in or including a guarantee. What's the reasoning for the guarantee? Is it to help the prospect overcome any reluctance they might have? Do you do it only when that's a part of the story or do you just regularly offer that as a money-back guarantee?

Blair: I'm glad you asked that question because I was surprised you didn't push back on it. Usually when I introduced this, I know you and I have talked about this before, but when I introduce the topic for the first time, people are just shocked. The idea of offering a guarantee, they're horrified by it. There's no reason to throw around a guarantee willy-nilly. God, I keep using these phrases of like 80-year-old people.

David: You're only 10 years away from that, so it's not that bad. A bee in my bonnet and willy-nilly.

Blair: I got to spend more time with my kids. You don't just throw the guarantee around. You don't offer it to everybody. You use it in a situation where you're trying to derail a pitch. It doesn't even have to be derail a pitch, you're trying to move a cautious conservative worried, possibly prospective client forward one step at a time. You try to close in the diagnostic, and if there's a little bit of interest, but still some hesitation or some worry, you can throw in the money-back guarantee. You've taken away all of the downside risk from the client, except for time, so you might have to speed things up.

The risk that they don't like you, that you're not smart, that you can't do the job the way you're saying you can do the job, there won't be a good working relationship, et cetera, all of that risk goes away. It's a way to move a nervous client forward, whether it's a competitive situation or not. Now, when people are horrified at the idea of offering the guarantee, but I always point out, "You're probably going to pitch this stuff for free, anyways."

Before this conversation, you would have just gone in and essentially diagnosed for free as part of your proposal, so you're no worse off financially, And your likelihood of closing the business after somebody is separated from their money pays you and starts to work with you, goes way through the roof. The likelihood that the client will walk away in that moment and ask for their money back is really low, but you have to make sure that they pay. You don't say, "Pay me if you like it afterwards."

This act of separating them from their money, of them paying you upfront a small amount of money and working with you and engaging with you, when you do present your findings and recommendations, if it's not perfect, if you've missed something, if something's gone wrong, it's likely that the next step is not going to be that they will ask for their money back and walk away. Although that can happen, especially if you're completely incompetent. No pressure. It can happen. It just happened, but it's pretty rare. It's more likely, and you need to be open to this, it's more likely that you've missed something and you've got to go back and spend just a little bit more time to get things right.

David: Right. For the record, I still am uncomfortable with the idea of money-back guarantee, but I'm not as uncomfortable as I used to be because of one thing you said years ago that helped me understand one really massive benefit that I had completely overlooked. That's that, if I-- I'm the agency, and I'm thinking about offering a money-back guarantee to my prospective client. What that forces me to do is only work with great clients because I simply will not incur the risk of offering a money-back guarantee to somebody that I think my take advantage of me. That alone helped me feel a little bit more comfortable with the idea.

They do all this. How did these findings get presented to the client? It's not typical findings for a different a process. What does this look like once the work is done?

Blair: Once you're hired to do the engagement, we only touched on quickly a few different ideas of what diagnostics might look like, but there's just they're infinite, you can just look at the things you've done historically, either for free as a way of trying to understand the client situation or where you've been paid to engage outside research. You go away, you do that research, it's best done with a client where you're working with the client, and then you arrive at some conclusion. We've talked about the importance of not going into big reveal mode. When you come to present, what you're presenting should not be a total surprise, you should be foreshadowing and tipping your hand and the client should be somewhat involved. They should have some understanding of what's coming.

When you present the findings and recommendations, you should treat this meeting as a closing meeting. In any closing meeting, you need to have all of the decision-makers present and you want to employ a technique that we've talked about before, and that is putting forward options, ideally three options, on how you can move forward. You go into this meeting, you have all the key decision-makers there who are required to make a decision on the recommendation so that you can close in that meeting you present. Here's what we found and then you say, and here's how we propose to move forward. There's three different ways we can do this at three different price points, depending on whatever variables and you can go back and listen to that podcast. We'll put a link to it in the show notes.

That's how you should view it. You should view it as a closing meeting, where you're presenting the findings and recommendations and then you're facilitating the client's choice or decision on how they want to move forward, and I'll throw in a caveat here. Be careful about overwhelming the client with paper. This is the rookie mistake, I'm sure you've seen this before. Young agency closes on its first diagnostic or gets paid to do strategy. It's essentially the same thing with usually less formality to the process. You understand the situation in your own way. You come up with some high level recommendations.

Because you've just been paid $10,000, or whatever the amount is, you feel like you need to support that recommendation with a whole bunch of papers. You do this big long deck or big long report. Now remember, this is your presenting findings and recommendations and you're trying to facilitate a decision on how the client would move forward with you. If you give them a whole bunch of homework in this meeting, if you give them a big long report to read, or data to crunch, et cetera, then you're going to lose all momentum by neutering your ability to close on one of your three options in that meeting.

I'm fond of saying, in these meetings, there's an inverse correlation between the value of your thinking and the amount of paper it takes you to communicate it. You're going to air on the side initially of too much paper,

David: Right. Then you'll get more and more comfortable over time, and it will be shorter, more concise, more powerful.

Blair: Yes.

David: Just to wrap this up, what are some rookie mistakes that we all might try to avoid as we think about doing this? Let me just add something too that just occurred to me as I was listening to you. In this day when agencies need to be more cooperative with a client, they're working alongside the client, often with an in house department and so on. This could be one of the ways that the agency's clients buy objectivity from the outside without any expectation that they will actually do the work that's been recommended. The recommendations might be something that the client decides to implement internally with their team. This is a way for you to keep getting paid for high-level thinking in a world where you're not the only game in town anymore.

Blair: Yes. We talked about the idea of presenting options in your proposal, one would be just here's the plan, you've paid for it, go deliver it. The anchor option might be will implement all of this stuff and the one in between might be your people can implement it and will offer some oversight, guidance, training, et cetera, of various form. It's a great way to think about it.

Your question, rookie mistakes, the first one, which I've already mentioned, is too much paper. The second one is your diagnostic takes too long. When you start to formalize your diagnostics, a common trend I see, as you fall in love with them, you make them too big, too long, too expensive. Too much paper, too long, too expensive. Then the other rookie mistake is separating diagnosis from prescription. We call it selling a diagnostic, but what the client is really buying is the prescription, is the path forward. You have to be careful about that language.

If you put forward a proposal that says, here's what we get paid to diagnose and here's a separate amount that we get paid to prescribe, the client is going to look at and go, well, let's just skip the diagnosis. In fact, they might say, let's get the diagnosis and prescription. Never separate those two things that always combined in the sale. You and I, David, talk about selling a diagnostic. It's really the diagnostic is the method by which you arrive at an understanding and then a prescription or a plan.

David: Yes. This has been very, very helpful. Anything else we need to throw at folks. We've gone longer than normal, but I've actually enjoyed it and haven't even noticed the time going by. It's been a fun discussion.

Blair: It's one of my favorite topics. I think I would just reiterate a point that we made earlier, which is if you're not selling this way, just like you're not using options, you're missing so much. You just talked to those firms that are selling this way. They have a significant advantage over their competitors who are not. I would say, majority of the folks listening to this podcast, the majority of your new client engagements probably need to begin with a diagnostic.

David: Great discussion, Blair. Thank you, look forward to this next year of all kinds of fantastic topics. I've enjoyed all of the interaction we've had and all the notes we've had from listeners, keep those coming and look forward to working with you, folks, again for another year.

Blair: Thanks, David. And you've got a book coming out this year. Are we allowed to talk about that yet?

David: We are except that I haven't settled on the title. I might stumble around a little bit, but it's about the consultants' tradecraft. Anybody involved in advising clients, whether it's through consulting or through marketing or whatever, it's a look down in the weeds at some of those tricks. I've really enjoyed writing it. The manuscript is pretty much done and it's just getting ready to go to the printer soon. Probably a couple months from now.

Blair: Fantastic. Looking forward to reading it.

David: All right, thank you, Blair.

Blair: Thanks, David.