The Four Conversations: A New Model for Selling Expertise
David interviews Blair about his new book, which lays out his proven framework B2B service providers can use to increase closing ratios and average proposal values.
Links
Order The Four Conversations: A New Model for Selling Expertise by Blair Enns
Transcript
David C. Baker: All right, Blair. This is going to be a little bit of a departure from our normal stuff.
Blair Enns: It's going to be good.
David: Actually, I prepared. That's the other thing. It's different.
[laughter]
David: No, we're going to talk about your book that's going to be released very soon.
Blair: Let's talk about me.
David: Yes. I know this will be such a relief to you. The Four Conversations and then subtitle is, A New Model for Selling Expertise. I'm going to let you talk a little bit today about your book, but mainly I'm just going to be talking and making observations and I'll let you slide in [chuckles] every once in a while.
Blair: Observations and jokes.
David: Yes. I'm excited for you about this book. I'm excited for the audience, too. I remember the first, the large notebook, I don't even remember what it was called, and then the Manifesto, and then Pricing Creativity, and now this. I see the impact that your previous books have had and how they've been perennial bestsellers, selling more and more every year. I'm excited, not just for you because I don't have to hear you whining about writing this thing anymore, but I'm excited for the audience. Really excited.
Blair: Thanks. Yes. I think I'm excited. Honestly, I'm not fully at the excitement part yet. Everybody keeps asking me, "Oh, the book's done. You must feel relief." "No."
David: [chuckles]
Blair: [chuckles] "You must feel excited." "No. I'm still waiting for that." Maybe I better fake this because we are in full disclosure, we're recording this a couple of months before the book actually is released. By the time the listener hears this, the release will be right around the corner. You'll be able to pre-order it on Amazon and other places. Maybe I should fake the excitement that I almost certainly-
David: [chuckles]
Blair: -will be feeling by the time this episode drops. David, I am so thrilled. I'm so proud of this book. Actually, I am quite proud of it. I'm so thrilled. I'm very, very excited.
David: Yes. Yes. Okay. Let me just set the stage here a little bit because you're going to be interviewed literally on hundreds of podcasts about this book from not just the industry that you and I have typically served, but in the broader professional selling expertise market. You're going to be on hundreds of podcasts. I want to ask questions that they are not going to ask you. This is not the episode to get a full, complete, detailed summary of the book. It's more background stuff. You haven't seen these questions either, right? You have no idea what I'm going to ask. Are you nervous?
Blair: I'm slightly fraced.
[laughter]
David: Okay. We've talked about the title, The Four Conversations: A New Model for Selling Expertise. How do you feel about this book compared to your previous ones?
Blair: [sighs]
David: When you think about your four children.
Blair: Yes. It's like comparing your children. How do I feel? Here's how I think about this. I think about this as the, here's how to follow up to The Win Without Pitching Manifesto. The Manifesto is a manifesto. Early on I received some feedback, I remember from one friend in particular, "Ah, I liked your book. There's not much how to in it." I said, "Well, it is a manifesto. It is about principles and beliefs."
There is enough how to in that book. 100,000 people have read that and I've heard from not a lot of them, but a bunch of them who've been able to put the principles into action without the detailed here's how to. This, The Four Conversations is the framework. It's the framework off of which we hang everything that we teach at Win Without Pitching.
You and I did an episode called The Four Conversations, I think two or three years back. It really is the here's how to. If you've read the Manifesto, you're inspired by it, but left wondering, "Well, how do I put this in action?" This is really the here's how to. I'm not sure if that answered your question about how I feel about it.
David: Yes. I've been preparing for this for about two weeks. You sent me a copy of the manuscript and every two days or so, I get back down into it and think about something. I just wrote this statement out to myself this morning. What you just said made me think of this. I said, "You'll probably write another book or three, but this also feels like you don't need to write another book."
In reading it, I was struck by how it talks about so many other things besides sales. Almost like telling us everything you believe about being in the trenches for more than 20 years. I really love this quote from Simon Sinek in there, it said, "The goal is not to do business with everyone who needs what you have. The goal is to do business with people who believe what you believe."
I turned that around and said, "The goal is to write a book to align people on not just sales, but all these kinds of things." It almost felt like you weren't intentionally and you could write another two or three books, but it almost felt like this is a compilation of my career.
Blair: Yes. There's something a little bit scary about that. I think you're right. I set out to write a 30,000-word book, and I ended up at 50,000, and I really didn't want to write a 50,000-word book, but by the time I was done, I got it as short as I felt I could, given the book that I wanted to write. This is our training in a book. I actually feel like if you're a real self-starter, you could read this book and then know not everything that I know, but if you can act on this book, I'm going to say it, "You don't need to hire training." [laughs]
David: This is quite an ad for your training service.
Blair: Yes. No, it is really the training program in a book.
David: Right. It's not just a manual, a compilation, the training, but it's, as I understand it, not just for the industry you've traditionally served as well?
Blair: Yes, it's not just for the creative services, marketplace, creative businesses. I intentionally wrote this book to a broader audience of anybody who is an expert advisor or practitioner of any kind, but who also has to sell as their second job. They don't, for the most part, see themselves as natural salespeople. Some do and some are quite happy and comfortable with both jobs.
Really when I was writing it, I was thinking of the person whose job is being a creative, or a marketer, or a financial planner, or even an accountant. All these people who I've never targeted over the years, but have read the Manifesto or Pricing Creativity and sought us out, it was always my intent to write a book for them, for the broader audience that doesn't walk away from my core audience of creative people, but is much broader.
David: Yes. Professional services and anybody in that space, all of this is adaptable enough to their particular-- Like how somebody sells professional accounting isn't far enough away from how somebody sells professional consulting that this book will be equally applicable to them. Is that fair? I don't want to put words in your mouth.
Blair: That's my intent, but there's always a danger in writing a book that's so broad. There are broader sales books. One of my beefs and it's one of the core premises of the book is that selling is not universal. There are aspects of the selling or sales function that are universal and that do apply regardless of whether you're selling Timeshare condominiums, or SaaS, or marketing or financial services.
Equally, there are aspects of selling that don't apply. Certain goods and services need to be sold differently than other goods and services. It's my premise and listeners to this podcast will know that I believe that if you sell expertise, the sale is the sample of the engagement to follow, so you have an obligation to sell somewhat differently.
David: Let me read the title again in the subtitle, The Four Conversations: A New Model for Selling Expertise. Let me pull that title apart and tell me if you would change any of these statements or are uncomfortable with them. Selling is not a dirty word. I can assume that. Expertise requires a different way of selling. A model is an important guide. It's a useful way to apply this. It really is a series of distinct conversations. Of those four things I said, probably expertise requires a different way of selling might be the most important.
Blair: Yes, I think you nailed all of them. Those are all the variables in the title that I speak to and they're all important to me and I think important to the reader. I think there's a broad assumption out there among many, certainly not every salesperson, but a lot of people that sales is universal and the way you sell one product or service is the way you would sell another-- Even I have been guilty because I'm so focused on, historically, creative services firms, but you can broaden that out into professional services firms and you can broaden that out into, still, into expert advisors and practitioners.
I'm sometimes guilty of thinking that this is the only way to sell. Then we've been approached by product companies over the years and we've even taken some engagements where we've done training and I get into it and realize, "Oh, SaaS is completely different. These high volume transactional sales, how they're sold has to be different than a deep and probably longer relationship." Even I'm guilty of taking the domain that I know and extrapolating to other domains and think, "Well, the way you sell in this domain almost certainly has to work in these other domains." It's just not true and I've been guilty of that.
David: I was surprised at how many things were stirred up in my thinking, reading through this book, even though you and I have been friends for decades and we do [chuckles] a podcast together. Our minds are melded in some ways, but I don't know that I fully understood the difference between selling expertise and selling a product. I started thinking about that a little bit. I said, "Okay. One of the things that you say early in the book is the salesperson's behavior communicates untold information to the client about what they are buying." That's what you said. "The salesperson's behavior communicates untold information to the client about what they are buying." What struck me about this is the difference between selling, say, a $7 million yacht and a $7 million consulting engagement. The salesperson for the yacht, you're dealing with this person, and when you're done with it, you've got a yacht. You don't have the salesperson, right? If you're buying a $7 million consulting package, you've got these same people doing it. That's where it hit me. I've known intellectually what you've said all these years about the difference between how we should operate and then how we sell that stuff is so different. This just really brought it home for me.
Blair: Yes. I love the yacht analogy. I don't use that one in the book, but I do talk about other domains. Selling is an interesting thing to write about because we all know quite a bit about selling from our experience, not necessarily as salespeople, but as buyers. We can think of numerous examples of us holding our nose through a sales experience to get to the other end, and that is enjoying the product or the service.
In those examples where we're holding our nose and we're thinking, "Oh, this is really uncomfortable. I don't like the way this person is behaving," et cetera. In every example, we don't have a relationship with that person afterwards. If we do have a relationship with that person, we're not going to put up with an unpalatable sales experience from them. It just says too much about the relationship that we'd be getting into.
David: Yes. Like, "Okay. I'll buy a roof from you, buddy, but I'm not buying anything else because you're gone. I'm dealing with other people." Now, at this point, listeners are saying, "Ah, can you just tell me what the book is about?" Right?
[laughter]
David: Title again, The Four Conversations: A New Model for Selling Expertise. The four conversations are in order, probative, qualifying, value, and closing. Can you just, in a few sentences, summarize each of those four and then I've got two questions for you.
Blair: Yes. Four conversations, three of them are quite similar to each other. The first one is quite different from the other three. The first conversation, the probative conversation, where your objective is to prove your expertise to the client and move in their mind from a position of a vendor, a needy vendor to the expert. We can unpack that. We have in a previous episode, but that's the probative conversation.
The key to the probative conversation and why it's so different from the other three conversations is the probative conversation happens without you present. It's really a function of your reputation preceding you and how you build that reputation through word of mouth or thought leadership or those who refer you. The probative conversation sets the stage for how the first human-to-human conversation is going to happen, or at least begin.
The first human-to-human conversation is the qualifying conversation. That's where you vet the lead to see if there's an opportunity here and then determine the next step. You might think of that as a prototypical sales conversation. It's the first interaction where both parties are vetting each other. Now, typically most salespeople feel like they are being vetted and they are letting the client vet them. We offer a framework for vetting the client.
It's more than just a framework. The third conversation is the value conversation. Once they're vetted and you determine there is indeed an opportunity here worth spending time on, you now move to the value to be created. The objective is to determine the value to be created and then to determine the share of that value you might command in the form of fees or compensation. Then the fourth conversation is the closing conversation. It's like it sounds, it's where you close the deal. You transition from the sale to the engagement.
David: Two questions then. In order, probative, qualifying, value, and closing. I think I know the answer to this first one. I'm not sure about the second one. You are saying that the better your marketing is, the less likely you have to have any conversation in that probative stage. Let's say that a firm hasn't done any of their own marketing, so they're starting from scratch. Might that probative conversation actually be a conversation?
Blair: No. It's a good question and I think it's the one place in the model where people are most likely to get tripped up, and that's all on the author. The probative conversation either happens or it doesn't. Skip ahead to the second conversation, the first person-to-person conversation, a qualifying conversation. An opportunity comes in, a lead comes in, somebody says, "Hey, I want to talk to you about engaging you."
You get on the phone or Zoom with them and you have a conversation, and it's pretty clear that they're talking to three others. They don't see you as meaningfully different. You're a name on a list. They Googled X service provider, Y geography, and you came up 14th, and you're just a name on the list. From that first moment of the sale and the first person-to-person interaction, you are in the vendor position. The goal of the probative conversation, which again happens without you present, through your thought leadership, your marketing, the reputation that you build in the marketplace, is for that interaction, that outreach to come to you with you already positioned as the expert, where they've done some vetting, jumping ahead a little bit, but they've realized, "Oh, this one's different." They see you as meaningfully different, they do not see you as having numerous direct competitors.
The conversation is a little bit different. It starts with, "Hey, I've read your book," or, "I've been reading your blog or following your YouTube channel for a while. I've always wanted to work with you. Now's the opportunity, here's what we need." Those two conversations, those qualifying conversations, again, the first person-to-person conversation, they sound markedly different depending on whether or not the probative conversation has happened.
David: Yes. Okay. That clarifies that. The second question, again, we're talking about the four conversations, probative, qualifying, value, and closing. Second question is, the fourth stage where it's particularly tempting to abandon that expert position you talk about because you're looking for a decision, like you're closer than ever to crossing the finish line or not crossing it. Where do the temptations crop up the most in these four conversations?
Blair: Oh, that's a great question. They pop up everywhere, but mostly in the beginning. In the second conversation, the qualifying conversation, the first time you speak to a client, if you have a pattern of general behavior where you have behaved like a needy vendor, you've leaned on passion and enthusiasm throughout the sale, and that's the way I was taught to sell when I was a young buck in the advertising business, if that's been your pattern, it's really hard to unlearn that.
The mistakes happen early where you start proving that you deserve to be vetted. You deserve to be on the inside rather than using your own vetting framework, or they happen late to your point in the closing conversation when all the chips are down and you think, "Oh my God, it's all coming down at this moment. I'm going to push harder, smile brighter."
David: [chuckles]
Blair: All of these things. Yes, so it happens earlier or late.
David: It's June 29th. I know we're going to have an all-hand sales team meeting on the 30th when the quarter closes.
Blair: I had that happen to me recently. I think I talked about it where the salesperson is coming up to the end of the month of the quarter. He didn't need to cut price, but he immediately cut price. I thought, "Oh, you'll cut that much without me asking. How low will you go?"
David: Then the game began, right? [chuckles]
Blair: Yes. Well, the game's still going on. I'm waiting him out.
[laughter]
Blair: I know I've already won because of the price he's given me, and I'm convinced I can get a better price.
David: That brings up a question for me that I was going to ask. As the guy who writes sales books, do you feel particular pressure to not veer off of the stuff you write when you're on the buying or selling side, like more on the selling side? Do you feel that unique pressure? I don't see it as pressure.
Blair: I actually really enjoy the fact that I am a meta salesperson, that I sell selling. Then when I am in a conversation selling our training, people are keenly tuned into what it is that I'm saying and doing and how I'm doing it. I'm keenly aware of the fact that they are trying on, "Can I do to my clients what he's doing to me right now?" I get a lot of joy from that.
David: Yes, the reverse of joy is when somebody that you want to hire has read your book.
Blair: That's actually an ongoing. It's one of my biggest frustrations is I think I'm going to hire somebody, they read my material, and then they make me eat my own dog food.
David: Yes. It's like, "I've heard this before, right?" All right. Pretend somebody who's never heard of your book, this is a woman who's head of revenue somewhere, let's say a big law firm. She'd never heard of you, but somebody gave her the book and she got lost in it on a week-long vacation and she's catching up with a colleague of hers after work at a bar. What's the big message that she says? Like, "This is what changed my entire thinking about sales in this book." How does she summarize the book?
Blair: No, that's a great question. I don't know if I can do this justice because there are a few different key points that people could take away. I think one and it's not just specific to this book, it's also a core message of the Win Without Pitching Manifesto. It might be something like, what, I just finally got the freedom or the backbone to say no. We just don't do that anymore. Whatever, cave on this, cut price, get drawn into unnecessary, lengthy and onerous sales processes. It's probably a sense of freedom that comes from a stiffer spine and a realization that it's okay to say no.
David: Maybe she had some instincts about what should happen and the book just confirmed him. It's like, "Yes, now I see that. I've been thinking about that." All right. Let's say somebody, again, a different person, but who has had no exposure to you except for this book, they immediately begin applying it. When do they really start to see some different ways of interacting in a sales setting? How long does this book, is this something that could still be having an impact on them 10 years later?
Blair: As you pointed out off the top, I purposefully try to write timeless books, so it's my intent that this book, like the Manifesto, I expect it to outlast me. Some things might need to change about it down the road, but I purposely try to keep it timeless. Is it still relevant 10 years from now? Where do the results first start to show up? I guess I'm talking more broadly about all of the work we do at Win Without Pitching. That work is poured and delicately arranged into this book.
David: [laughs]
Blair: Two things. The first one is closing ratios go up, and that sounds like such a sales thing. We've done many episodes on pricing. If you read my book, Pricing Creativity: A Guide to Profit Beyond the Billable Hour, and you're using the three option pricing approach, just that alone, your closing ratio goes up. We've talked about why that is. You just increase the odds by putting three options in front of the client. That's not the biggest reason why your closing ratio goes up. There's more, but the listeners are going to have to dive into that and probably read the new book.
David: Yes. There's an idea.
Blair: Your closing ratio is going to go up through some adjustments to your pricing. Your closing ratio is going to go up by you being more discerning and quit wasting your time writing proposals for people who were never going to buy from you. You always knew they were never going to buy from you. Then you just get better at selling. For those three reasons, your closing ratios just start going up right away.
The second area of improvement is average proposal value. Now, in some businesses and I talk quite a bit about this in the book, where in some businesses it makes sense to productize the services and productize the prices to price the actual service rather than the client, whereas in a lot of businesses, it doesn't make sense to do that. I talk about the decisions around that.
If you put aside the businesses where the prices for the services are set and the salesperson has no impact over them, every other business, the average proposal value, the average effective fee should go up. It goes up for a variety of reasons and some of them are the pricing reasons that are also explained in the book, Pricing Creativity. Through the combination of the four conversations, of understanding the four conversations, using the frameworks to guide you through the four conversations, those are the two levers that should move. Closing ratios, average proposal values.
David: Those are even more measurable than I was expecting. I thought you were going to give me an answer around confidence or navigating a conversation by or with silence or something, but I like the fact that you went straight to something very measurable. If you'd written this book before the pandemic, would it be different? Because there's something about how that pandemic impacted. I don't mean so much the downturn, I mean more how it impacted the way business is done. Would the book be different if it were written four years earlier?
Blair: Yes, it's a good question. I hadn't considered that. I don't think it would. The title would almost certainly be different. I found my first note for this book, and it was in 2014. The working title was called Selling Expertise, and it has been for almost 10 years, and I only changed it in the last, time's all funny now, a year or so. Beyond the title, I don't think anything would have changed. I guess that's my way of saying I'm no smarter today than I was four years ago. [laughs]
David: Why'd you change the title?
Blair: I had a lot of people tell me it should be Selling Expertise because that is a more SEO friendly title, and I just refuse to write for SEO. I actually think The Four Conversations, the title begs a question.
David: That's easier to own than Selling Expertise.
Blair: Yes, it's easier to own. I think anybody could write Selling Expertise. I'm the only one who could write The Four Conversations: A New Model for Selling Expertise.
David: I love that answer. You've talked recently about how you never could have come to some of the conclusions you have because you didn't write a particular article. There was one you wrote recently you talked about. I don't remember which one it was, but where did you gain significant clarity in the writing of this book?
Blair: Oh, that's a good question. There's not a lot in this book that I haven't said multiple times in our training programs, in conversations with clients, even in this podcast, or thought deeply about. Where I grew the most and learned the most was in providing examples. I made a point of including writing to a broader audience and so it made me realize that for a long time I've been locked into still old ideas of the creative firm business model, which haven't really been valid for four, five, six years or so. The business models of our clients, yours and my clients, those who listen to this podcast, assuming that they're owners of creative businesses, they started to fragment within the last decade, but really in the last four or five years, and maybe the pandemic has really accelerated that fragmentation. My thinking didn't keep pace with it. I'm guilty of thinking in terms of a universal agency business model.
When writing for broader audiences, I've gotten to know these other businesses like financial services, accounting, management, consulting, et cetera, et cetera. In writing for these other audiences, I realized there are a lot of creative firms or marketing firms whose business models are a lot like an accounting firm or a financial planning firm, et cetera. When I say models, I mean specifically the productization or customization, think of those two things on an axis, of the service and of the price.
Think of productized versus customized on an axis and think of a two by two, and I spelled this out in the book, where you have the delivery of your expertise on one dimension and the pricing of your expertise on another dimension. In thinking through that for the broader audience and coming up with that framework to organize the various business models of anybody who sells and delivers expertise, it made me see that, "Oh, yes. I've made too many generalizations about what a creative firm looks like."
David: One of the things I was looking for when I was reading the book is like, "What took him so long?"
Blair: [laughs]
David: Then I realized, "Oh my goodness." I kept reading there's compact meaning, like sentence after sentence after sentence where you could actually write a whole nother chapter about that one sentence.
Blair: Yes. What took me so long? I'm a horrible writer of books. It takes me forever to do it. There are parts of it I enjoy, but most of it, as I've said in earlier episodes, it's just pain, pain, pain, pain, pain, pain, euphoria.
David: [chuckles]
Blair: I'm still waiting for the euphoria.
[laughter]
Blair: Even when you ask me, "What did you learn while writing it?" I haven't been writing it for a couple of months now, so I don't remember. Once I'm through the pain part of it, I purposefully forget a lot of what I went through.
David: [chuckles]
Blair: I am not a good advertisement for authorship. If you listen to me talk about writing a book, I would just say, "Don't do it. It's hell."
David: [laughs] I heard you say one time, an interesting way to sort of think about positioning is pretend that you are invited to do a TED Talk, not one of those TEDx things, but a TED Talk. The person introducing you says, "Now I'd like you to hear Blair Enns. Over his life, he has," and then you fill in the rest of that sentence. What's the big thing that you did in the industry? I used to hear you say sort of like, "Change how professional services are bought and sold," or something like that.
Blair: Creative services.
David: Creative services. Right. Is anything different from that?
Blair: Yes. I feel like I've had 20 some years of focusing on the creative services space and I'm not abandoning that space, but I am ready to broaden out and to see that if I cannot also change the way expertise is bought and sold around the world. I would take that initial vision of where I'm introduced as somebody who's changed the way creative services are bought and sold around the world, maybe not so much bought on the buying side. I would hope that in 5 to 10 years, I can be seen as the person who has changed the way expertise is sold around the world.
David: I think that's quite doable, honestly. I think you're really well on the way to that. I just love this book. I should ask you if there's something that you were just dying for me to ask, but I also want to know like when's this going to be available and what formats will it be available in?
Blair: You'll be able to pre-order it on Amazon. By the time you listen to this, it will be available in all the usual formats.
David: Anything I forgot to ask you?
Blair: I don't think so. I'm in the gap in between being finished and being done with it behind me and the excitement of the launch in front of me. If I'm sounding a little bit flat about what I think is easily the best book I've ever written, that's why. I'm still in this gap between recovering from the pain, [laughs] not yet feeling the euphoria that will come from launch. I see this book as a marathon, not a sprint. I'm not trying to game any bestseller list. I'm not trying to do anything in the first week. There will be a little bit of a launch. I'll make a little bit of noise. The day that it's finally available for purchase, as you know yourself, that's an exciting day.
David: Oh, it is. Folks, again, the title is The Four Conversations: A New Model for Selling Expertise. Thank you, Blair.
Blair: Thanks, David.