There Is No Credentials Meeting

Instead of beginning the relationship with a prospective client by presenting a deck on why your agency is so amazing and why you should be invited to pitch, Blair encourages us to have the “Probative Conversation” from his Four Conversations sales model.

Links

"There Is No Credentials Meeting" article by Blair Enns for WinWithoutPitching.com

"The Four Conversations: A New Model for Selling Expertise" 2Bobs episode

The Four Conversations: A New Model for Selling Expertise book by Blair Enns

Transcript

It's probably going to be a little more free-flowing than normal. Before we do that, I'm still on a high from London. Yes, wasn't that fun? We had what? 70 people there and a whole bunch of people that we couldn't slide in because we just didn't have the space, but there was nothing planned. We just met a lot of people.

[laughs]

You've probably got some stories, too. One guy came up to me and said-- no, it was a woman. She said, "I listen to your stuff while I'm running every day, and then before I go to bed, I put it on again and I fall asleep to it."

Blair: Yes, I heard that, too.

David: [laughs] I don't know, you could take that several ways, but just meeting people was so fun. Then the Q&A was-- I loved that, just free-flowing. I just had such a great time, and it just reminded me-- it reinvigorated me about having an international audience of people that are drawn to just honesty, transparency, and fun discussions. I'm also recommitted to the whole idea of this is audience-focused. There's no advertising. I don't know, I'm just still on a high from London.

Blair Enns: Yes, it makes you want to quit your job and just go hang out with our listeners around the world, doesn't it?

David: We're going to have to take advertising if I do that.

[laughter]

Blair: A whole lot of advertising.

David: Yes, a whole lot of advertising. You titled this "There Are No More Credentials Meetings," right?

Blair: No, "There Is No Credentials Meeting."

David: Oh, so, "There Is No"?

Blair: "There Is No."

David: What's the difference between those two? Why'd you correct me there?

Blair: My favorite poem in the world is--

David: Is this related to what we're talking about today?

Blair: Yes, it is. It's called The Road Through the Woods, and I've thought about it when I was writing this post. It's a poem of walking through the woods. "There once was a road through the woods before they planted the trees." It goes on and on, and the last line is, "There is no road through the woods."

Every time I'm hiking, and I come across an old road, I start reciting that poem to myself. I was thinking about it. I hear a lot about the credentials meeting. People talk to me about how they should handle a credentials meeting, and I just hear that last line in my head, "There is no credentials meeting." You're thinking about this wrong.

David: When people hear that phrase, too, there's this immediate response. It's like, "Yes, because I don't like them," and then their second thought is, "Oh, wait. How are we going to get business done?" Initial exhilaration because they don't like them. I don't know that either side likes credentials meetings that much, do they?

Blair: Oh, I think agencies absolutely love credentials meetings.

David: Really?

Blair: Yes, I think that's part of the problem. Especially young agency people, they love it. It's everybody in the room is looking at you. It's all about you. You get to talk about you and the agency, your favorite subject. At some point, if you're in this business long enough, I think it gets a little bit old, but maybe it doesn't. I think it's just a really self-interested moment where it's like, "I get to talk about me."

David: I get that, but when I've watched these or listened to a playback of the video, it's there's so little engagement on the client side. Personally, that would just discourage me.

Blair: I don't think you notice, though, because you're in transmission mode. I've had a chance to sit in on a few of these and a lot of rehearsals of them, and I just think, "Oh, your poor clients who have to sit through this." All agencies sound the same in these things. They don't just sound the same, they show up the same. They show up with this smile and energy and love the fact that they get to talk about themselves, and the client sits there--

There's mixed reactions from the client. Some nod vigorously. Some of the junior client people are just as into this as the agency people are because it gives them a feeling of power and control. They're sitting there watching the agency hand all the power in the buy-sell relationship over to them, and they absolutely love it. Yes, I think both parties really like this.

David: Wow, okay. First thing I've learned here. Can you just explain the role that the credentials meeting usually plays in this weird system we have? When does it happen? What happens next? And so on.

Blair: Yes. Let's pretend that our audience is an audience of non-creative professionals. It's the friends of the listener, the friends who do other things for a living.

David: Your spouses when you go home.

Blair: Yes, maybe they're used to selling in a more conventional way. What's the purpose of the credentials meeting? Typically, a client decides they need to hire an agency, so they do a bit of a casting call. They've got a long list, and if you're on the long list, you might be invited to submit some documents. Maybe after you submit some documents, some credentials documents, maybe it's before, maybe the step is a meeting and not the submission of documents, it's like, "All right. Well, let's just get to know each other a little bit more. You tell us about yourself-"-- and I think both parties are inferring this, "-You tell us more about yourself, and then, why should we hire you?" I think, at the end of the day, that's the question, why should we hire you? That's the question the agency is trying to answer.

David: The desired outcome of one of these meetings is to be invited to the pitch, and sometimes that doesn't happen. Sometimes the client listens to this and says, "Oh, I'm not inviting them to the pitch," or is it they always come to the pitch afterwards?

Blair: If we think of how this happens traditionally-- let me back up. The credentials meeting can take place for different reasons, but in a typical creative agency, especially a typical "win more pitches" agency, the credentials meeting is simply the name that they give to the first meeting. In my selling model called "The Four Conversations," we don't reference meetings. They're conversations that can happen via face-to-face meetings or Zoom meetings, or telephone calls, but every exchange that happens, we can place it into one of these four buckets of four conversations.

I consider this to be the first person-to-person or first meaningful person-to-person conversation that is a qualifying conversation. The qualifying conversation has its own objective, which is to vet the lead to see if an opportunity exists and determine the next step, and that is the agency trying to qualify the client, decide whether or not there's a fit here suitable enough to apply some resources in a sale.

The tone of a qualifying conversation is one of discernment, and I advocate that agencies should show up with a framework for qualifying the client. They don't think of it that way, though. They think of it as the objective is not to qualify the client to see if there's a fit here worth pursuing or not. Their objective is to present their credentials and prove to the client that they actually qualify, to prove to the client that they are a good fit, so there's no discernment going on their part. They think their job is to convince.

David: I remember when we were doing an earlier episode about The Four Conversations book. By the way, that was never called The Four Meetings book. That was always The Four Conversations book. [laughs]

Blair: Yes, or The Four Presentations.

David: Yes, but I remember realizing for the first time that the first "conversation" sometimes never even happens. That was news to me when I first heard that.

Blair: That's the probative conversation. Listeners can go back and listen to that episode, but in this model, there are four conversations. All models are wrong. Some are useful, so there aren't necessarily four conversations, but we think of the sale as a series of four linear and discrete conversations. Now, the first one, the probative conversation, is the one that's so different from every other conversation because it's the conversation that happens via your prospective clients and your agents. It happens without you present. The objective of the probative conversation is what we call the "flip." It's to move, in the mind of the client, from this position of powerless vendor to the position of more powerful expert, where you have some power that you can exercise in the buy-sell relationship.

When the probative conversation happens, how it happens typically is the client or the prospect is engaging with your content and they're building an idea of you in their mind and they're building your reputation in their mind to the point where they see you as the expert, meaningfully different, and they reach out to you and they want to have a person-to-person conversation with you to explore whether or not it makes sense to work together. In that moment, they're reaching out saying, "Hey, can we have what I call a qualifying conversation, where we can vet each other to see if there's a fit here?"

Now, when the flip has happened via the probative conversation, so they've gone from thinking of you as just another vendor to a meaningfully different provider and expert, the expert-- as I said, both parties qualify each other in the qualifying conversation, but when there is a probative conversation and the flip does happen, it happens because the client has essentially pre-qualified you for the most part. They've pre-qualified you by engaging in your content, learning about you or the firm on your website, et cetera.

They've largely cleared most of the hurdles, and they can check the box that says, "Yes, this is a pretty good fit here between what we need and what you do." In the subsequent qualifying conversation, most of what's left is for you to qualify the client.

David: Yes. If that flip has occurred, they're not coming to you with this inherent skepticism, hoping that you'll talk them out of it, but they're not sure you will. They're coming to you already with an expectation that you're going to be what they need, and now it's just more clarifying that. You contrast that with what happens with other experts. I always find it funny to think about this, like doctors or lawyers or whatever. I've never looked around too carefully in an operating room, but I've never seen a surgeon with a framed copy of their graduation certificate in an operating room.

[laughter]

Blair: There are authority cues in the doctor's office, the framed "MD" and et cetera, these other achievements, but not in the surgery, right?

David: Yes, you're in. You're already committed. You're wearing a gown that's a certain color. You're ordering people around. I'm making some assumptions. Now, there's some doctor right now pretending to be a doctor, but I think the odds are pretty-- like the pilot pretending to be a pilot, right? That movie.

Blair: Yes, that might be my doctor.

[laughter]

David: Generally, it's pretty safe to assume that, but give us a little bit more about this illustration about how if doctors did it the way we did. It's so funny to listen to.

Blair: Imagine you're shopping for a new doctor, you go into the meeting, and you're trying to qualify the doctor. It's like, "Is there a good fit here?" You probably have a few questions, "Have you done this before? How long have you been doing this? I have specialized needs, do anything about my case?"

David: How many times you've been sued? [laughs]

Blair: Yes, right, but imagine the doctor treats it like a credentials meeting. You go in with your questions, and the doctor's got this smile plastered on their face. They've got this energy and enthusiasm behind the smile. You think, "Oh, this is weird. What's going on here?" They sit down and they pull out a keynote presentation and start going into all of their background, where they went to medical school, and then a slide that says, "Why me? Why you should hire me."

Then the doctor says, "Oh, and I've taken some time to just review your situation, so here's a slide on everything I know about your body and health based on what I got online."

[laughter]

David: They go, "I got the TSA scans. I can see there's a problem right here with your kidney."

Blair: The doctor's very excited and says to you, "Listen, I've been a big fan of yours for a while. I think you're in amazing shape. I've just admired your body shape or whatever. I just want you to know I'm really, really passionate about your health. My team and I, we're super excited to bring you just the best medical care that there is." You would run. You would run from that meeting. You would not hire this doctor, right?

David: Yes.

Blair: That's how you show up in what should be a qualifying conversation, and you see it as a credentials meeting. There is no credentials meeting.

David: You know what? One of the reasons why we are obsessed with that credentials thing is because we aren't credentialed. There's not a body that does that for us. Yesterday, I was making lattes at Starbucks. Today, I'm a digital marketing expert.

[laughter]

There's this inverse relationship between the fact that there really aren't any external markers that qualify us, so to speak, and so we're always bringing all this stuff to the table. It's like, "No, really, I am different than the other 55,000 people." It's just an inverse relationship. We don't have the qualifications. You can see architects are lower than, say, doctors. They do more of this than doctors-

Blair: -but they're higher than designers.

David: Everybody's higher than designers. Not everybody. In Tennessee, you need 2,000 hours to be a massage expert. I don't need any to be a consultant.

Blair: You're saying there's no barrier to entry. We're not credentialed, we show up trying to be. I think it's more fundamental than that. I think it's an example of the power dynamics. It's just a complete giveaway of who is the prize in this relationship and who feels like they're trying to win the other side over. I think it's really that simple. If you see it as a credentials docket, it's your chance to talk about you.

I'm not saying you shouldn't talk about you, but I think the way I would have you, the listener, think about these initial meetings, I would have you think of them as a qualifying conversation, where instead of being armed with things that you want to say about yourself, you should be armed with the questions that you want to pose to the client, the answers to which will let you know whether or not you think there is a good, healthy, mutually-beneficial relationship here.

You should bring your framework to bear to get the questions answered that you need answered. Now, at the same time, the client is going to have questions that they need answered, and you should be prepared, but not overly prepared to answer those questions. Here's how I think about it. I'm showing up to a qualifying conversation, what the listener thinks of as a credentials meeting, "Hey, great to meet you. We exchanged some email. The purpose of this conversation is I have some questions for you, I'm sure you have some questions for me. At the end of this conversation, ideally, we can agree on whether or not there's a fit here suitable enough to take the next step. If you don't mind, do you mind if I start with my questions?"

Then I'll go through my questions. I use a version of BANT; budget, authority, need, time frame, and I have a list of questions within those areas. I want to know if you're the right type of client. I want to know if you have a budget assigned, who the decision makers are, what the timing is, et cetera. I ask these questions, and I get the information that I need to determine that, let's say, in this example, there's a very good fit here. I would say, "I think on the surface of it, there's a pretty good fit. You're the type of organization we like to work with. The challenge is right in our sweet spot. I might have some issues around budget, and I might push you to think about expanding that budget, but on the surface, I think there's a pretty good fit here."

Basically saying, "I'm qualifying you in." Now I turn it over to you and say, "Now, you must have some questions for me. Go ahead. What do you need to know on your end to determine if, from your point of view, this is a good fit?" Then the client will start asking their questions. The last thing you want to do is to go into presentation mode, is to pull out a big deck, and start at the beginning, "About us," et cetera. Now, if you think of the information the client wants to get from you, "Well, how long have you been in business? How big are you in headcount, revenue, et cetera?" The answers to a lot of these questions are on your website.

Those that aren't there, like revenue, you would just let them ask the question, and then you would pose the answer. Just give them the answer, "Revenue is 20 million. We've grown this much over the last few years." This way, you're keeping it conversational. I've said before on numerous episodes, you can present to people, or you can be present to them. This is you being present, letting the client ask their questions, and you simply responding with the answers.

David: I would also say that when you're asking questions, you're not just looking for information. You're actually giving them information in the questions themselves. You are communicating your expertise through your questions. You do care how they answer them. That's important, but it's not as if you're totally in a one-way mode at that point. The questions you ask can send the right signals to confirm to the prospective client that you are an expert in what you do, just because of the way you've asked the questions, and that's going to be different than maybe some of the other conversations they've had.

I wonder about all this sales process, how sometimes you just get these reflexive sorts of requests from a client, like references. "Can I speak with some references?" It's like, well, if you stop and think about it, I don't know how useful references are. You know what they're going to say and so on. They're already primed. I think in some cases, maybe clients are just asking for credentials presentations because it's like, "Oh, I guess that's the next step."

It's not really deeply thought of. Then when I was thinking more about this topic last night, because you sent this note to me a few days ago about what you wanted to talk about, I was thinking, "Okay, is this another example of the zero-sum game that I talk about sometimes where there's a zero-sum game between marketing and sales?" The better the job you do at marketing, then the easier sales are, and I thought, "Well, could I safely reframe that and say there's a zero-sum game between the probative and the qualifying?"

The better job you do at giving people the information they need, which might have to come in an actual probative conversation because you haven't done a good job-- the better job you do there, then the easier, the more you can just slide right into qualifying conversations. Does that comparison make you itch, or is that fair?

Blair: No, I think it's generally true except for the decision-maker issue. You might have somebody on the client-side team who's basically where the flip has happened. They see you as the expert, they know all the information, and they show up with some team members who don't know anything about you.

You do need to be prepared to deal with that. When you get questions, there are some questions like, "How long have you been in business? What's the revenue?" Et cetera. There's some of these just basic context questions or basic background questions that you should just be able to answer, have the information, and speak to it. There are questions where it does make sense for you to show something in response, particularly when the flip has not happened.

You're still seen as a vendor. They're a little bit suspect of you or standoffish. As I've talked about before, if you want to show something-- I'll talk about the two things that you should be prepared to show, you need to make sure that you do not go into presentation mode when you're doing this. I like to have a deck. Let's assume this is a Zoom meeting, I have a deck, and I've been asked a question to which I have some visual support, one of these two areas, and I want to share something with the client. I will ask the client, I will say, "I have a couple of slides from a deck that speak to this, do you mind if I share it with you?"

Ask permission to share something visually, number one. Number two, keep it in the slide-sorter view. Don't press play and go to full screen because that will trigger you to go into presentation mode. Treat it more like, "I've got this deck, there are a few relevant slides in here. Let me just pull out some of these slides." If the client can see what some of the other slides are, if they want to see more, they can ask you, but that will keep you from going into presentation mode.

Now, two things, one is a function of the other. Your working model, your codified approach to how you do what you do. In the simplest form, it's a four-step process where every step starts with the same letter, usually D, and we've made fun of that before. That's the simple form, that's better than nothing, but the more expert you are and the more you have a novel perspective on your area of expertise, the more likely you are to have something that's more towards the unique end of the spectrum in terms of how you work.

It's valuable. I've seen bad versions of this, too, and I'm sure that there's a lot of client eye-rolling at some of these models, but if you do have a working model, if you have mapped out and visualized what the engagement looks like, it's really helpful because, in this moment, this is the moment when you begin to take control of the sales process and the engagement to follow. Our mutual friend, Mark O'Brien, has this great line. I've been repeating it every week for the last few weeks.

This is near the top of the list of things I wish I'd written, "The prospect's mind is malleable; the client's mind is fixed." I've been telling people to carve that in stone. That is so important. The prospect's mind is malleable; the client's mind is fixed. You're in a qualifying conversation, the client is asking you questions about how this will work. You've asked permission to share a visual representation of the model of how this will work, and in that moment, when you're walking the client through the model, you are taking control.

You can make a list of all of the things that tend to go wrong in your engagements, all of the things that frustrate you after you're hired. The client comes to you and says, "Oh, now we need you to present three different things every time you present, create--," or whatever stupid things that get imposed on you, you front run those issues now as you're walking through the model because you're walking through this visual three, four, five-step model that's usually some version of, "Here's how we diagnose, here's how we prescribe, here's how we apply, here's how we reapply on an ongoing basis."

As you're walking through it, you're essentially communicating, "Listen, the reason we're having this conversation, the reason you're considering working with us is the quality of our outcomes. I'm showing you how we get to a high consistency of high-quality outcomes. It's from following this process. In this step, this is what happens. Here's an example." You might be frustrated with the senior people on the client side disappearing at some point after the engagement begins.

You would say, "At this point, when we present the strategic recommendations or the findings of the audit and the recommendations, it's really important that everybody who's on this call today and everybody we've identified earlier in my qualifying conversation framework is involved in that meeting. We don't proceed with that meeting without everybody present." You just make that point, and you move on. You just make the point, "This is how it's done. If we're going to work together, if you want the outcomes, we're going to follow the process. This is how the process works. This is an important step in the process."

David: Yes, so I have an anecdote, and then I want to get you in trouble. The anecdote. Years ago, I wanted to experiment with the engagement level of prospects, and so I asked-- I think it was three, maybe four clients-- I asked them to do this, and they all complied. I said, "Turn the slide advancer over to the prospect and let them control the pacing of the deck that you're presenting."

Of course, you would say, don't even present in a deck like that in the first place. That wasn't the point. The point was, how interested are they in it? How much time do they want to spend? Consistently, they were flipping through things twice as fast as the agency would have, which is a clue for us, but just tacking on something that you mentioned; in slide-sorter view or whatever, that would even be a better test. It's, which slides do you even want to look at?

Blair: Yes, I've heard you talk about this before. I think it's a fantastic idea. That'll keep you from going into presentation mode. That'll give you feedback on what's really resonating. That's the first thing that you would have a visual for, is your working model, how we work together. You're sharing it. You're not in presentation mode, you're walking the client through it, and you're taking control of the engagement. You're saying, "This is how this is going to work."

The second thing you would have, and you might have multiple versions of this, is case studies. This is where we've talked about process-framed case studies before. This is where you would show examples of the work that you've done for other clients, like the client that you're speaking to. The real power in process-framed case studies is you frame the case studies so that they follow the codified working model, your process that you shared initially. You walk through this abstract, visual model of, "Here's what happens in these steps," and then you show case studies, and they're not just the typical before-and-after case studies.

It's like, "Here's what we learned at the end of the diagnostic phase. Here's the strategy we shared and suggested at the prescription phase. Here is the initial work we did, and here's the ongoing work," et cetera. The more unique your working model is, the more powerful it is when you show case studies that are framed by the model. Some people, some listeners, almost certainly heard me talk about the power of that first element, the visual model, and they thought, "Oh, I've done this before. Clients don't like this." They don't like it because they think it's bullshit.

As soon as you start to package up your case studies to prove that you actually follow this model, that's when the light goes on. That delivers a high level of reassurance, sophistication, et cetera. Those are the two things that you should be showing visually without going into presentation mode in the second half of a qualifying conversation, which is not a credentials meeting. There is no credentials meeting.

David: If you're really good, your four-step process that starts with D will now start with E, and then, several years later, maybe F if you're really good. All right, one last thing for you. This is a little bit unfair. We both have friends in the appointment-setting business, so they do outreach for you, and they find people that you then make a credentials presentation to.

Those firms do some good work, but one of the things that you end up with is a lot of meetings, and many of those meetings are sort of credentials meetings before there's ever much of a need, right? Is that fair?

Blair: Yes, before need is established. There might be a need, there might not be. If the clients agree to a meeting, there's probably some need, whether they've been direct with the appointment setter or not. There's probably an opportunity there.

David: That's an example, right? Where you would really want to stay away from a presentation, where you would want to ask lots of questions, and not just view this as another time to fire up the presentation deck. That's the point I'm making.

Blair: I would hope the appointment setter is actually having the qualifying conversation. They're reaching out. They get a first conversation. I wouldn't trust-- In theory, they could do this, but I think anybody in that role, they're moving pretty quickly. They're going to walk through it like it's a demo. That's probably another area where, if a firm's services are productized-- You think about how SaaS is sold, a demo is a logical part of the sales process, and our credentials meeting is a lot like a SaaS demo.

When we start to go from customized services to productized services, we're getting closer to that SaaS territory, demos start to make more sense, so we have to be really careful there. I think even if you have fully productized your services, you still want to approach the sale through this lens of The Four Conversations because the mistake that you want to avoid making, and it's going to be harder to make the more productized you are, is you are going to slip into-- I guess I would call it demo mode.

Now you have a product, you want to demonstrate the product, so you go into show-and-tell mode, whereas it's a lot easier to stay in consultative-sale mode when you have no productized service to sell. Does that make sense?

David: It does. I have worked for two really good salespeople, and my cue that my boss was going into presentation mode-- in both cases, it was a he, it was when he pulled out the same stories that he told everywhere. We worked out this little thing where I would just tap him or kick him under the table and drag him back to, "Okay, you're sliding into your comfortable presentation mode. I can tell that because you're telling the story you always start with. No, let's ask questions instead."

You can help each other with this, right? It's a slow process. You have to retrain yourself, but I think it's such an interesting concept. Plus, in a day when people are so sick of meetings, you've just said you don't have to have these meetings, right?

Blair: Yes, have a conversation instead. Conversations are fun, meetings are not.

David: Thank you, Blair.

Blair: Thanks, David.