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Pitching, may seem the proven way to attract and convince customers, but is it another way possible? Yes! If you are ready to change your mindset read this empowering business book, written by Blair Enns The Win Without Pitching Manifesto.
The What, Why, and When of the Pitch?
A pitch is a quick, concise way to communicate the value of your product, service, or idea, either in person or in writing. The well-known elevator pitch that can help get a business off the ground! Whether you're meeting potential investors or pitching your idea to potential partners, an elevator pitch can help you make a great first impression.
Enns defines the pitch as an “attempt to sell or win approval for one’s ideas by giving them away for free, usually within a competitive, buyer-driven process.” To which he adds:
“Speak softly and people lean toward you; speak loudly and they lean away.” (By the way, have you ever listened to his interventions on Clubhouse or other platforms?)
In other words, Enns's advice is to step out from the aggressive and loud attempt to win over your prospect and start a conversation. Because at this point, you engage and share without that pressure to offer a free consultation or a free trial of your services by preparing a pitch. Which by the way, as Enns says, by giving away for free your services and, wasting your valuable time, you are at the same time lowering your value.
The Win Without Pitching Manifesto
The book is composed of 12 proclamations that serve as recommendations and challenges for agencies that are willing to switch to a more successful strategy.
Here are some of Enns’s Proclamations:
We Will Specialize
“We must simply choose to take control, first by specializing and shifting power back from the client toward us, and then we begin to shape our future.”
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.[...] Presentation, like pitch, is a word that we will leave behind as we seek conversation and collaboration in their place.”
We Will Diagnose Before We Prescribe
“We [...] will never put our clients or ourselves in the position where we are prescribing solutions without first fully diagnosing the client’s challenge.”
We Will Rethink What it Means to Sell
“We will acknowledge that our fear and misunderstanding of selling has contributed to our preference for the pitch. We will embrace sales as a basic business function that cannot be avoided and so we will learn to do it properly, as respectful facilitators.”
We Will Do With Words What We Used to Do With Paper
[...] we are not in the proposal writing business.
I won't enumerate all of them, because I would like to let you the pleasure to discover them on your own.
Buy the book, Read It, Read It Again, and Apply What You've Learned
About the author:
Blair Enns is the CEO of Win Without Pitching, the sales training and coaching program for creative professionals, and a 25-year veteran of the business side of the advertising and design professions.
He is also the author of Pricing Creativity: A Guide to Profit Beyond the Billable Hour and the co-host of 2Bobs a podcast on Conversations on the art of creative entrepreneurship