The Win Without Pitching Manifesto

The psychology of buying is the psychology of changing. Selling, therefore, is change management. The very best salespeople are respectful, selective facilitators of change. They help people move forward to solve their problems and capitalize on their opportunities.

Any time someone hires an outside expert, the ultimate outcome he seeks is to move forward with confidence. What is the value of good advice not acted upon? Yes, it is our job to tell him what to do, but that is often the easy part. We are equally obliged to give him the strength to do it.

For us to do our best work we need to leverage our outside perspective. We need to be allowed to lead the engagement. We need to take control.

He must put his passion in its place and walk away from those opportunities where he is not viewed as the expert.

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

The fastest way to efficiencies in our business development approach is to unabashedly uncover important information early and use that information to make an honest and practical assessment of a fit. The answer to the question, “Can and will the client afford us?” is vital information that we must resolve to uncover as soon as possible.

The lesson is that the most successful clients, whether owners or executives, have achieved their success in part because of their ability to take control – their ability to rise above and orchestrate others. This is their strength; and even though it is not always in their best interest, it is in their nature.

the Win Without Pitching rule of money: Those who cannot talk about it, do not make it.

our goal with such a prospect is to inspire him to form the intent to solve his problem; it is not to inspire him to hire us. At this stage, hiring us is but a possible future consequence of his deciding to take action.

Our public claim of expertise must describe who we help and how, and in this description those that would be better served by others should be able to select out. The client should be able to determine from a sentence or two whether our expertise is likely to meet his needs.