1. {The Second Proclamation} - We Will Replace Presentations With Conversations

{The Second Proclamation}

We Will Replace Presentations With Conversations

We will break free of our addiction to the big reveal and the adrenaline rush that comes from putting ourselves in the win-or-lose situation of the presentation.

When we pitch, we are in part satisfying our craving for this adrenaline rush, and we understand that until we break ourselves of this addiction we will never be free of the pitch.

Presentation, like pitch, is a word that we will leave behind as we seek conversation and collaboration in their place.

To wean ourselves of our addiction **we must take the first step of changing our behaviour with our existing clients. **

Once we have accomplished this, the second step – changing the way we behave with prospective clients in the buying cycle – becomes possible. We will explore how to take these two steps, but first let us examine the hidden costs of pitching.

Practitioner or Performer?

Even when we pitch and win, we lose. We devalue what should be our most valuable offering and set up the wrong dynamics between the client and us.

We must move away from the place where the client sits with arms crossed in the role of judge, and we take to the stage with song and dance in the role of auditioning talent.

While both parties find the showmanship of our craft titillating, the practitioner’s is a stronger place than that of the performer.

It is this practitioner’s position from which we must strive to operate. Practitioners do not present. Stars do not audition.

A successful presentation requires surprise. It depends on a big reveal in the form of a key diagnostic finding, a dramatic strategic recommendation or a novel creative concept that is at odds with expectations or set against a backdrop of uncertainty.

Preserving the surprise requires us to keep the client at arm’s length and let our knowledge pool up behind a dam that will only be opened at the presentation. While we protest against the client’s selection process that keeps us at bay and asks us to begin to solve his problem without proper collaboration or compensation, we often acquiesce, in part, because his process allows us to meet our need to present.

In this manner, we allow – or even deliberately create – an environment that leads to a higher likelihood of failure in order to preserve the dynamics of the presentation.

At a time when we should be conversing, we are instead cloistered away preparing for the one-way conversation called the presentation. We behave this way in our engagements with existing clients, so when prospective clients ask us to bridge massive communication gaps by presenting to them instead of talking with them, it is only natural for us to agree.

Step One: Improving Collaboration with Existing Clients

Making the big reveals small and reducing our dependency on the presentation requires us to work more closely with the client.

This creates a challenge: how to invite him in without allowing him to drive? This delicate balancing act of bringing him closer without conceding control can only be achieved when we establish and communicate the rules of the engagement. Alas, another challenge: we’ve never been fond of rules.

When we do not clearly spell out how we will work together we leave a void that the client is quick to fill.

Thus begins the erosion of the power we worked so hard to obtain by following the first proclamation. Nature abhors a vacuum. If we do not drive the engagement, of course the client will.

When we establish the rules of collaboration – to use first with our clients and then with our prospective clients – we ensure that all engagements begin with both parties understanding how we will work together.

The Rules of Collaboration

In our firm we will adopt the following policies that will allow us to bring the client closer without sacrificing control.

If we are to replace presentations with conversation and collaboration, this combined act of bringing the client closer while continuing to lead the engagement is vital.

Strategy First →

• We will agree with the client on the strategy before any creative development begins.

• By including the client in our strategic development processes, we will help ensure we never find ourselves presenting creative rooted in ambiguous strategies.

• We will not develop, nor share with the client, creative of any kind before the challenge has been diagnosed and the strategy prescribed and agreed to.

Continuous Reference to Strategy →

• Immediately prior to presenting any creative, we will review the agreed upon strategy with the client.

• In this way we keep the discussion around the creative focused and measured against the strategy.

• Any time we come back to the client to share new ideas or concepts we will set the stage first by reviewing, once again, the strategy that guides us.

Freedom of Execution →

• We welcome the client’s input on the strategy and in exchange we ask him to grant us the freedom to explore various ways of executing it.

• This means we invite him to say, “That blue isn’t bold enough to deliver on our core value of strength.” But we explain that he is not invited to say, “Make it darker.” Suggestions on this front are always welcome, but dictates are not. We value our clients’ insight into marketing strategy, but we need the creative freedom to explore the destinations implied by the strategy.

• The client must ultimately approve of our recommendations, and be satisfied with the outcome, but he must also let us explore along the way.

Fewer Options of Better Quality →

• When we present creative options we will strive to limit them to as few as practical.

• There is an inverse correlation between the quantity of creative options we present to the client and the confidence we have in their quality.When we present options we will recognize our obligation to recommend one over the others. We will be careful not to cede our expertise by asking, “Which one do you like?”

• We will direct all discussions around the creative back to the strategy and ask if we are accomplishing our goals. It is an abdication of our responsibility and our expert position in the relationship to share all of our endeavors with the client and then ask him to choose.

Only We Present Our Work →

• Whenever our diagnostic findings, strategic recommendations or creative solutions are presented to anyone in our client companies, it will be personnel from our firm that does so.

• Our key client contacts may assist us, but our work does not get presented without our involvement. One of the benefits we bring to our clients is the advantage of an outside perspective, one that is not saddled with perceptions of bias or a hidden agenda.

• We will not allow proper guidance to be sacrificed at the altar of company politics.

Our Misplaced Fear of Policies, Rules and Routine

While we dislike routine, the client – and ultimately, any consistency of success – demands it. We must, therefore, reconcile ourselves with the fact that routine will be imposed.

Once we accept this we can face the question,

“Would we prefer to have routine imposed on us, or would we prefer to be the ones who take the lead and define the rules of the engagement?”

Some of us will enforce the above rules of collaboration as policies and others will view them merely as helpful guidelines.

For many of us, considering adopting policies is akin to a claustrophobic person considering entering a coal mine. One of the costs of creativity is the abhorrence of routine – the dislike of systematic ways of thinking and behaving.

This characteristic of our hardwiring that contributes to our creative problem-solving abilities keeps us from establishing policies on how we work. It causes us to perpetuate the process void, that by implication, we invite the client to fill.

There will come a day when we are happy to hear from the client, “Ahhh, of course!” instead of the previously desired, “Oh – I love it!”

On that day we will know that we have been working collaboratively and we will know that our addiction is behind us.

Then we can work on removing the presentation from the buying cycle, taking us one step closer to eliminating the pitch.

Eliminating Big Reveals in the Buying Cycle

At first, it’s hard to contemplate the client hiring us without a presentation.

The presentation seems like a natural and necessary step, until we ponder the question:

“How would we conduct ourselves in the meeting if we were not allowed to present?”

Without a presentation, all that is left is conversation – intermingled talking and listening un-separated by one party performing for the other.

Once we decide we will no longer pitch our ideas for free, what is left for us to present?

Credentials? The most basic information about our firm already listed on our website? Surely we can convey these points in a conversation, without the need of a podium, projector or props.

Once we have eliminated our own need to present, the only reasons left to do so are the client’s.

But on this, the client shall not have his way. He may not recognize it yet, but the presentation serves neither our interests nor his.

Presenting is a tool of swaying, while conversing is a tool of weighing.

Through the former we try to convince people to hire us. Through the latter we try to determine if both parties would be well served by working together.

The tone of a conversation, in which both parties endeavor to make an honest assessment of the fit between one’s need and the other’s expertise, is entirely different from the tone of a presentation, in which one party tries to convince the other to hire her.

Presentations build buying resistance; Conversations lower it.

Framed by Our Mission, We Pursue Our Objective

Let’s consider for a minute what we are trying to accomplish in the buying cycle, in this meeting with the prospect in which we once played the role of presenter.

Mission: Position →

First, let us focus on our business development mission – our highest calling and purpose.

Our mission is to position ourselves as the expert practitioner in the mind of the prospective client.

We must resist the temptation to sacrifice our mission for money or other short-term gains.

This mission should guide everything we do in the buy-sell relationship. It is a contravention of such a mission to try to sway someone to hire us through a presentation. This simple idea is radically at odds with what most of us have been taught. It is not our job to convince the client to hire us via presentation or any other means. As we will see in the fourth proclamation, convincing has no place in selling.

If we have failed in the first proclamation and we have not set ourselves apart from the competition, then we may never see the truth in the second. Obtaining the expert position and replacing presentations with conversations will remain an unachievable ideal.

Objective: Determine Fit →

While our mission is to position, our objective at each and every interaction in the buying cycle is simply to see if there is a fit between the client’s need and our expertise suitable enough to take a next step.

That’s it. It is not our objective to sell, convince or persuade. It is simply to determine if there exists a fit suitable enough to merit a next step.

Our mission is to position;

our objective is to determine a fit.

In accepting any invitation to present in the buying cycle, we sacrifice our mission and reduce the likelihood of arriving at our objective.

Once we have obtained power through the sacrifice and hard work of following the first proclamation, why, for reasons other than our own personal needs and the profession’s long ingrained habits, would we voluntarily give up that power through the sales pitch of the presentation?

The Roles That We Play

The dynamics of the relationship with the client are shaped early, before he hires us. Here we establish the role that each will play throughout the engagement.

Most selection processes set up an audition atmosphere where one party commands and the other complies.

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We must never allow ourselves to be placed in this presenter/complier role where the terms and next steps of the relationship are dictated to us.

If we assume this lowly role that is offered to us early, we will never be able to exchange it for the loftier expert practitioner role that is required for us to do our best work.

In this manner, how we sell shapes what we sell.

It impacts our likelihood of delivering a high-quality outcome and it affects the remuneration we are able to command for our work.

Now, the Truth About Presenting

Alas, you may have guessed that we will never be completely free of the presentation. That is not the goal of this, the second proclamation.

The goal is to be free of our own need to present.

To be truly free of the pitch we must change the tone of these meetings with our prospective clients and move from the presenter/complier role to that of the expert practitioner.

This we do as a doctor or lawyer would, through conversation and collaboration and not through presentation.