Three Patterns of Lost Opportunities
Blair identifies three recurring categories of lost sales in creative firms and offers solutions to each. Fixing two of these patterns can reap the dividends immediately, and adjusting your sales approach for all three will pay off for years.
Links
“Three Patterns of Lost Opportunities” article by Blair Enns for winwithoutpitching.com
“Slapping Down Your Childlike Glee” 2Bobs episode
“Debriefing After a New Business Call” 2Bobs episode
“Assume an Advantaged Player” 2Bobs episode
“The Rungs You Can Reach on the Ladder of Lead Generation” 2Bobs episode
Transcript
David C. Baker: All right, Blair. We saw each other yesterday, right? That was fun.
Blair Enns: How have you been? [chuckles]
David: Since yesterday, I've been good.
Blair: Since like 12 hours ago.
David: You and I were just in Sundance, Utah, at an event. It was really fun, really great.
Blair: Should we say what the event is, or is it supposed to continue to be a secret?
David: I think we should say, yes. Brigadoon.
Blair: Brigadoon.
David: Tell people about it because it was such a great idea, and it gathered so many interesting people from different perspectives.
Blair: Our friend, Marc Ross, who's a global geopolitical strategist from DC, fascinating guy, writes a daily post. His business is called Caracal, where he writes a daily post of what's going on in the world. He ingests all of the world's news every morning-
David: Poor guy.
Blair: -and then spits it out. Then companies and politicians hire him to get advice on, "Hey, we're thinking of doing this in this country. What's going on? What do we need to know? Who do we need to know?" He's been running this event for 13 years, I think, in Sundance, Utah. He brings together about 50 people from different walks of life. You and I were there. I don't know what you would call us. Consultants, I guess.
David: [chuckles]
Blair: Robotics people, AI people, a doctor, cardiologist.
David: Fashion people.
Blair: Fashion, academics.
David: Two agencies.
Blair: Two agencies. No name tags, no PowerPoint presentations. Really cool environment. Lots of small talks. Great conversations over meals. Really interesting. If you like being exposed to smart people from outside of your industry and like these collisions where you have lots of interesting conversations about you don't know what you're going to talk about going in, man, it is super cool.
David: What's unique about the event is the people that come. The content's going to be good because of the people that are presenting it, but that's not the core theme. You go to it because the quality of the people. I think that's going to be the future of really great events. It comes down to what people want to hang around you. What kind of people are they? How do they think? How open are they?
Blair: It's Brigadoon. I think there's a website. It's not exactly a secret. I think you can sign up if you're not invited, but you might have to be invited. Anyway, if you're interested, reach out to David or me for next year. I assume it's happening next year. I think Marc also does dinners in various cities around the world. We just recorded a commercial for Brigadoon. Marc, expect the invoice in the mail. That's Marc Ross. If you're interested, let us know, and if you're interesting enough, we'll introduce you to Marc Ross.
David: [chuckles]
Blair: Maybe you'll get an invite to Brigadoon.
David: It has nothing to do with what we're recording today.
Blair: I don't even remember what we're recording today now. We got off on a tangent.
David: Yes. Today, I'm interviewing you on three patterns of lost opportunities, so now you have about 10 seconds to go review that topic-
Blair: [laughs]
David: -while I ask you. The three are poor fit, someone else was the advantaged player, and mistaking interest for intent. Let's dive into the first one. Really, what we're talking about is if you looked back over the opportunities that you were pursuing in some way and you didn't get them, and if you grouped the reasons, what are those three things? You're saying that in most cases, it probably fits into one of these buckets. The first one is it wasn't a good fit in the first place, right?
Blair: Yes, you pursued a poor fit. I think especially in creative firms, the thing about being a creative is you're so excited about the thing you've never done before, so you're prone to maybe a little bit of self-delusion about whether or not this opportunity really is a good fit for you. It's going to seem interesting and therefore good for you because you've never done it before. I think that might be the most common. Maybe not even the most common, but it is a common pattern when I'm debriefing with a client on, "Oh, this didn't go well. Didn't win that deal."
David: You're saying they did it because it sounded interesting, and then you lost it because it wasn't a fit. I was thinking, if somebody said, "Hey, gun to your head, David, what's the primary reason why it's not a fit?" I would say that it wasn't the interesting opportunity that made them do it. It was like, "I need the money."
Blair: Oh, that's why they pursued it to the end.
David: Yes. It wasn't that it was interesting. It was like, "Oh, I need the money."
[chuckling]
Blair: I don't know why that didn't even occur to me, but yes, that's a thing.
David: [laughs] It's a thing, yes. Money is interesting. Here's a question for you. If this ends up being the reason why it didn't work, it just wasn't a fit, I presume you're saying that the prospect thinks it wasn't a fit. How early in the process do you think the agency, if they're being honest with themselves, would say, "You know what? This isn't a fit."? When does that occur to them?
Blair: It should occur to them in the qualifying conversation. In hindsight, it's almost always perfectly clear, but sometimes it takes an objective third-party person to ask the question, looking back now, can you see, were there any signs early on in the first conversation, the qualifying conversation, where you thought, "Ah, I don't know about this," or you discerned that the client was thinking, "Ah, I don't know about this."? The answer is almost always yes.
It's not specific to creative people either. It's salespeople in general. Anybody who's got an opportunity in front of them, they're excited about it, and they overweigh the excitement, the pros over the cons, and it's really hard to be discerning. That's the key to the qualifying conversation. You should be in discernment mode. I say in the post you really do need to slap down that childlike glee. There, I'm referencing a podcast episode you and I did on that subject.
David: Yes, that was a great one. This is where I like the idea of a regular new business meeting with other people at the firm. It's maybe the only reason I like it, but you as the person who's leading this charge, you should be faced with an interrogation from your coworkers who should not let up on you. If you're starting to talk them into why we should do this, then that's probably a sign that maybe you need to think more carefully about fit. This is where your coworkers can help you be more objective about it, right?
Blair: Yes, and get the most discerning, most cynical person to drive that review.
David: [laughs]
Blair: We did a post called Debriefing After a New Business Call. You should get systematic about that. If it's not every conversation, it's certainly every lost deal you should debrief on. You'll see the patterns. It's not that everybody has this pattern, but if it comes up once or twice, it's probably coming up a lot. The bottom line is it's poor qualifying, and you need to just remind yourself going into a qualifying conversation, which in my model is the second conversation, but it's the first person-to-person conversation because the probative conversation before it is the one you have without you being present. Topic for another day.
You need to go into that qualifying conversation like a discerning clinical professional who is-- When I say discerning, you're trying on, "Is that really your situation? Is that really what you need? Are you really a good fit for me? Do you really have the money to spend with us? Is this really in our sweet spot? Are we going to be better off for having worked with you? Are we really going to create value for you? Are we really going to be able to work together?" All of those questions, those are the questions you want to ask and you want the answers early on.
David: Right, you're not afraid of the truth.
Blair: The common mistake is you go into those meetings excited. Don't be excited in a qualifying conversation.
David: [laughs]
Blair: Once you qualify them in, then you can let your natural enthusiasm bubble up a little bit, but not in that first person-to-person interaction. You should be in discernment mode.
David: They will take advantage of you if you're excited, and you will drop your standards if you're excited. [chuckles]
Blair: You will take advantage of you if you're excited.
David: Yes. To me, this is such a powerful argument for running a firm that has enough cash on hand, that has a good new business plan that's constantly dropping opportunity into the top of the funnel because you want to remove that pressure you feel of having to close this thing. That's the way you can be so much more honest about whether this is a fit, if it really honestly doesn't matter if you get it or not. You're just thinking of fit and not filling some desperate financial need. It's just such a powerful argument for running a good firm.
Blair: Yes. I've said five or six times on this podcast, not this episode, but over the years, you want to get better at selling? Three words. No sunk costs. The biggest sunk cost is your emotions.
David: Yes. Not just money, but time, too. That's the first one, poor fit. We're talking about the three patterns of lost opportunities where something doesn't happen, and you look back and you try to categorize them, and you can frequently throw those into three buckets. One of them is, oh, it was a poor fit. That's why you probably should never have pursued it in the first place. The second one is this notion that somebody else, not you, was the advantaged player. If you wanted to dive into this more, we did an episode just on this called Assume an Advantaged Player. It was in November 2024, if you want to dive deeper, but summarize that for people first.
Blair: This is where the flip doesn't happen. What's the flip? I alluded to the probative conversation, the first conversation that happens without you present, it happens through your agents of thought leadership and referrers. The objective of the probative conversation is to move in the mind of the client from this relatively powerless position of just another vendor to the more powerful position of the expert. The moment in time when the probative conversation objective is reached, we call it the flip. You flip in their mind from being just another option, maybe even another commoditized option, to the one that they see is meaningfully different, the one whose expertise they really recognize and value. That's the flip.
Ideally, through the probative conversation, which is you building a reputation in the marketplace by proving your expertise in public domains, you drive the flip, you obtain this expert position in the mind of the prospect, and you drive an inbound inquiry where they already see you as meaningfully different. Even in a competitive sale with multiple other experts under consideration, you have the inside track. You are the advantaged player.
Now, in that podcast episode you alluded to, I said there's basically two games that you play, and the mistake is to combine the outcomes of those two different games. You need to separate them. The ones that you play where the flip has happened, you are the advantaged player, you win more often than not. The ones where the flip has not happened, you are not the advantaged player, your odds of winning are about 1/2N, with N being the number of firms under consideration. Four firms under consideration, your odds of winning are about one in eight.
They're really two different games, and one of the things you're trying to do in the qualifying conversation is to determine whether or not the flip has happened. If the flip has happened, you're seen as the expert, you're seen as meaningfully different, and you can get them to prove that by asking for concessions and seeing if those concessions are granted. Those are the games you play, because you're highly likely to win those games. All these other ones, you're highly unlikely to not win those games.
Is there a pattern in your losses where the flip hasn't happened? You're always a long shot and you're telling yourself, "It's just a numbers game. On average, four firms under consideration, we're going to win one in four." That's true if the flip is happening some of the time, but if the flip is never happening, you're not winning one in four. Your win rate is closer to one in eight.
David: The short-term goal would be think carefully about whether you want to even-- You definitely don't want to sink a whole lot of costs into a scenario where, after all these questions you've asked, it's pretty clear the flip hasn't occurred, you're not the advantaged player. The long-term goal is to create a scenario where you are the advantaged player more frequently, whether that's your thought leadership, maybe it's a book.
In the future, if you come up in an AI search, I would think that would help you be more likely in that category of the advantaged player if AI thinks that you are an advantaged player, like you come up in the search. There's all kinds of other ways to think about that. There's a short-term and a long-term way to think about this.
Blair: Yes, and it's mostly long-term. Of these three patterns of lost opportunities, the first one that we talked about, you pursued a poor fit, you can fix that tomorrow by being more discerning in a qualifying conversation. The last one, where you mistake interest for intent, you can do the same. You can fix that one fairly quickly. We'll talk about that next. This middle one of someone else was the advantaged player, that's a problem you solve over the long term by building reputation, by having a probative conversation.
It starts with having a look at your positioning, and then it moves to, how are you generating leads? You do need to climb the ladder of lead generation over time, so you need a plan to help you do that. We've done an episode on the ladder of lead generation. We'll link to it in the show notes. That's basically going from outreach and maybe even some marketing-based activities to more reputation-building activities that still drive inbound inquiries. That doesn't get fixed overnight.
As you pointed out, asking the right questions the way you show up in the sale when somebody isn't the advantaged player at the beginning of the sale, and that high ground is still there to be won, you can get better at occupying that high ground before somebody else does. That's largely a function of how you behave in the sale. You're showing up like a needy vendor, or you're showing up like the expert.
David: That's an important qualifier here that was actually going to my next question. Ideally, you're the advantaged player because of all of your thought leadership activity and so on. If you're not in a particular scenario, you're saying that you could become the advantaged player by how you conduct yourself in the sale, even if you weren't the advantaged player at the outset?
Blair: Yes. You should always assume there's an advantaged player. Now, is there always an advantaged player? No, not at the beginning. I can't prove this, but I know it to be true. Just live with this idea or embody this idea that the winner is almost always decided well before they're declared. You're not the advantaged player. You're asking yourself, "Can I become the advantaged player? Let me be more discerning in the qualifying conversation. Let me put some obstacles in front of the client, and let me ask for some small concessions and see if they grant them, and then maybe I can move--"
We talked more about this in that episode of becoming the advantaged player. If you don't occupy the high ground at the beginning, you are not the advantaged player, you're next trying to determine whether or not you can become the advantaged player. Maybe you can.
David: If the incumbent is part of this pitch, we'll use that word, are they always the advantaged player?
Blair: No. Sometimes they are. I always love a competitive sale where the incumbent is invited to defend. It can be frustrating, but the reason I love it is it just makes for an interesting conversation, but most people don't have the conversation.
David: You love to be the incumbent or you love to participate when the incumbent is there?
Blair: No. Let's say you're invited to a competitive shootout against an incumbent. Somebody says, "Hey, we're talking to three different firms and yourself. We're looking for whatever it is we're looking for." As part of your qualifying conversation framework, you would have questions around who else is involved. Three other firms. "Who are the firms you're talking to?" They give you some names. "Is the incumbent involved?" That should be a question that you ask directly in any competitive sale. "Yes, the incumbent is involved."
Then from here, it gets interesting. "That's interesting. I'm curious, why didn't you just fire them?" Oh, some bullshit reason. "Are you just trying to create some pricing pressure for them?" I'm embodying the win without pitching principle of say what you're thinking. All these thoughts running through your mind, speak them. "Why is the incumbent still involved? If they did such a poor job, why don't you just fire them? Are you just trying to keep them on their toes? If we were your agency, would you do that to us?"
David: [chuckles] Wow.
Blair: "Are you being fully honest with them? What you just said to me about them, have you said that to them?"
David: Would you ask that? Would you really say that?
Blair: Wouldn't you?
David: I would, but I don't have any social skills.
Blair: [laughs]
David: You have them. You just proved that over the last 48 hours.
[laughter]
David: Even I winced at some of those. You would actually say those things?
Blair: Why wouldn't you ask the direct question?
David: [chuckles]
Blair: There are reasons why people wouldn't ask them, because they don't often get asked. It's like, "Oh, I'm afraid I'll blow the opportunity," but if the question is running through your mind, the only thing you have to worry about is framing the question politely. Because we're talking about a hypothetical here and effectively role-playing, maybe I'm modeling something that's a little bit too direct, but the questions themselves are perfectly valid questions.
David: I find myself just sitting up in my chair. It's like, "Oh, damn, I want to listen to this conversation that somebody's having."
Blair: What you just said to me about the agency, have you said that to them?
David: Not really. [chuckles]
Blair: What have you said to them? They don't know that they've done a horrible job?
David: Yes. [chuckles] Keep going, man. You're making your own bed here.
Blair: You sound like a great client.
David: [laughs]
Blair: Whoa, can't wait to work for you.
[laughter]
David: Oh, man, this would be fun, especially if you really didn't care.
Blair: It occurs to me I should not be in the advice-giving business.
[laughter]
Blair: I may have aged out of this job.
David: Oh, that's good.
Blair: I think those are all perfectly legitimate questions in all seriousness. Just obviously take a minute to think about how you frame the question, but these are questions that come to mind, and there are questions you would ask. Then these are examples of questions that maybe the flip happens through these questions.
David: Yes. Like you could soften it and say, "How did they respond when you talked to them about that?" Then they're going to say, "Oh, we didn't tell them." Right?
Blair: Yes.
David: [chuckles] Oh, that's really good. First is poor fit. That's the burst bucket. You shouldn't have done this in the first place. You should have figured that out early. If you're not afraid of the truth, then get the truth as soon as you can. Second, the one we've just been talking about, is someone else was the advantaged player. You at least need to make a guess about how much of a risk you're willing to accept here and then try to figure out if you can become the advantaged player by how you conduct yourself in the sale. That's core to the way you teach sales. The third bucket is mistaking interest for intent. I keep thinking about dating here, but I'll try to stay out of that.
[chuckling]
Blair: The world is waiting for your dating advice. Guy's been married for 75 years.
[laughter]
Blair: This might be the most common-- I can't quantify it, but to me, it's the most common mistake out there, a sales mistake in the selling of expertise is mistaking interest for intent. Again, this comes back to poor qualifying, and it comes back to us taking advantage of ourselves through our excitability. As I like to say, somebody says, "That's interesting, tell me more," and we get so excited. We crank up the pitch machine, and we start applying resources against somebody who just said, "That's interesting, tell me more. Hmm, yes, I've been thinking about that lately." We see that as a buying signal. In the greater sales world, they talk about buying signals.
To me, interest is not a buying signal. A time frame in which to take action, that's a buying signal. Some people might dispute it as a buying signal, but it's very, very early stages. What we have to understand, I don't want to dissuade people from pursuing opportunities where the person is interested, we do pursue them, but we also remain quite practical and remember that interest does not readily translate to intent.
There are things that we can do to help escalate interest to intent and move people along the stages, the buying stages, the stages of change, but what we should not do is assume that this person is ready to buy and we should be writing a proposal and scheduling a closing conversation for somebody who's still contemplating their problem and assessing the pros and cons and thinking about whether or not it actually makes sense to take action.
David: Yes. This is where I think my slightly twisted view of humanity comes up because I see people treating the sales process with such kid gloves. It's like, "Oh, God, I've got to remind myself to follow up with them by a certain date," or like, "Okay, what's the next step before you let them go on the phone," or something, as if this is so fragile. My perspective is, and this is where you should quit listening to me, but it's a little bit more like Whac-A-Mole in my mind. If this isn't meant to happen, if there's real intent and not just interest, there's much less you could do to kill this. It's probably going to keep coming to you.
You throw something in front of the bus, does it keep rolling towards you? You don't need to think about this so carefully. Again, this comes from a desperation that people feel, right? There's a balance there, obviously, which I need to maintain. It needs to be treated with respect and care and proper follow-up, but no, I love some of the questions that you ask. If you're not sure if it's interest or intent, you suggest some very specific questions like money, time frame, how important this is, and so on.
They're all natural questions that somebody on the other end would expect to hear, and it just serves to separate the interest from the intent. Again, you're not afraid of the truth here. You're not afraid of discovering that, oh, they're just interested, they're not really serious. That's not bad information. That's actually information that could save you a lot of time.
Blair: Yes, you're going to want to know that earlier than later. I don't think it's desperation again. I think it's just over-excitement, where we get carried away, we mistake something for buying signals. You're alluding to the questions. Again, this comes back to the qualifying conversation. It's a misqualification, or actually, I think this is a poorly understood idea.
Everybody understands the idea of buying stages, and they might use different models for defining what those stages are. I think it's a poorly understood idea that it starts with interest and then it moves to intent, but it doesn't always move to intent, and there are some roadblocks to moving to intent. There are steps that people have to take to actually move themselves from interest to intent.
One of those steps is anchoring their change in behavior to a date. That's why in your qualifying conversation, you're asking qualifying questions. If we use, as we do at Win Without Pitching, a version of BANT, the T stands for time frame in that acronym. You have your time frame questions. Why do you ask time frame questions? The obvious reason is for resource allocation. When do they need to get this done? Can we actually do it in that timeframe?
The non-obvious reason is timeframe is a surrogate for intent. When somebody has committed to a date, either a start date or an end date, that's a sign that they have moved from interested to intent. They anchor their change in behavior to a date, then they start allocating resources like people and budgets. That's when you start asking budget questions. It's all this logical progression. This is a pattern if you continually mistake interest for intent.
The sign would be you have all of these deals that are closed, lost, where the client didn't buy from you, they didn't buy from anybody. You might conflate this with a larger ghosting problem. I think when we did that episode on being ghosted, I said, "How many of these opportunities are you really being ghosted versus just misqualified?" There was never really intent there.
If you want to get better at this, make sure you ask your timeframe questions. You're hearing all this good news, and then you say, "When do you need to have a solution in place, or when do you need to get started?" You might hear, "I don't know. Sometime in the summer." There's no intent there. I say in this post that my favorite timeframe question actually has nothing to do with timeframe. It's, is this on the wish list or is this on the to-do list? That'll get you the answer of whether this person is interested or intent.
David: If the prospect never hired anybody, you didn't lose this. That was just interest. It wasn't intent. We're thinking about putting a backup generator in. We live in middle Tennessee, outside Nashville. The sales guy for that was pretty smart. Maybe he'd read your book. He asked that timeframe question, and my answer was clear. We'd just gotten out of the ice storm, and I said, "Ideally, we'd have this in place by the tornado season, where we always lose power a couple of times." He may not have been asking it for that reason, but that was the time thing, like, "Oh, they're serious about that because they have in mind when they'd like to have this done by, tornado season."
Blair: That's a great example. You could have cited the triggering event, the ice storm. A lot of salespeople would take that on face value. Let's say the person asks you the question, "Why now?" "We just had this ice storm." That doesn't tell me anything about intent. Then the follow-up question, "When do you need to have it in place?" "I think before tornado season would be a good idea." "I think you're right. It's really smart of you to get this in place before tornado season. Now, we can work backward from there." Now he knows you have intent. Now we can move on to budget.
David: He's got me. Now he needs to find out who the advantaged player is.
[laughter]
David: I'm going to ask him if he read your book. Three, poor fit. Someone else was the advantaged player, or you mistook interest for intent. If you categorize why you didn't close something between these three, it's going to cover most of them, is what you're saying?
Blair: Yes.
David: Again, review your lost opportunities and see if you can spot the patterns. These are the three common patterns. You have this pattern of pursuing poor fits, of going too far into a sale where you should qualify out early. Someone else was the advantaged player. You haven't built a reputation in the marketplace. There's no probative conversation that's happening, or you're routinely mistaking interest for intent, writing proposals for people who not only don't buy your proposals, they don't buy from anybody because their interest never translated to intent, or they just weren't ready to buy.
These are the three common patterns. Have a look, see what pattern you find in your firm, and then if you want to read the post for a little bit more detailed guidance on what to do if these patterns emerge, we talked about it, but they're in the post. The post is called Three Patterns of Lost Opportunities on winwithoutpitching.com. We'll post the link in the show notes. Thank you, Blair.
Blair: Thanks, David.
