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