248. The Anti-Pitch: How to Sell Consulting Without Selling

Welcome to the Grow Your Independent Consulting Business Podcast. I'm Melissa Lieberman, a fellow IC and business coach. On this podcast, I teach you to become a consistently booked independent consultant without becoming a pushy salesperson or working 24/7. If I can do it, you can too. Listen on to Find Out How. Welcome to Episode 248 of the Grow Your Independent Consulting Business Podcast. This is Melissa Lieberman, and today we're talking about how to sell consulting without selling. Isn't that great? It's kind of the Nirvana really. At the end of the day, we want to be able to sell consulting work, land consulting work, have amazing clients, feel fulfilled, generate revenue, and not have to sell. That's the Nirvana. I cannot wait to share this with you today. It's called the Anti-Pitch. Let's dive into the episode. Interestingly enough, I was looking back through my archives. I never liked or repeats exact topics. Of course, there are so many themes that are repetitive on this podcast because they're the themes that are for success in a consulting business. I was looking back, making sure I didn't have recorded anything about pitching. I have recorded something about pitching. It's a different take on this topic today, but it is episode 149. Almost 100 episodes ago, 99 episodes ago, we talked about how not to pitch your consulting services. If you want to go back and listen to that one, you can't hear after this. You finish this one. But I just thought it was really exciting and how quickly almost two years goes, right? It's so crazy. Okay. Anyway, let's talk about this idea of how to sell consulting without selling. It's not even an idea. It is a strategy and it's one that's proven. I'll say it in a different way. This is a proven strategy to sell consulting without selling. That's what I want to help you with here today. First we're going to talk about the agenda. First we'll touch on the sales mistake that I see many consultants making. It's a very blatant mistake and sometimes it shows up much more subtly, but I really want to help you to identify whether or not you're making this mistake. Then we'll talk about the solution to this mistake, which is the anti-pitch. We'll talk about what is the anti-pitch process for selling and then what are the four parts of that anti-pitch. We'll just really drill into a lot of detail. You can put this concept to use in your business and we'll wrap up the episode with a couple of steps you can take to put this episode into action and these concepts into action. I'm so excited for you to hear all of this. The companion resource that goes with today's episode is the consultant's pricing assessment. You can find it at icpricing.com. I see the two letters I and C for independent consultant pricing.com. That will walk you through. You may have taken it in the past. I would go take it again and see how much you've progressed. Really go through this and identify and understand where your opportunities lie as it relates to pricing your services, having a repeatable process for pricing, having a solid process for raising your prices and mindset that aligns and fuels your ability to price at the level that you want to price at that fits into your revenue goals. Go take that as a complement to today's episode and now let's dive into pitching. Pitching and the anti-pitch concept, how to lay in clients without selling your services. When I talk with consultants about their sales process, what's working, what's not working, invariably I hear the word pitch come out. Not on purpose, but it's just part of the vernacular. As we start digging into, why aren't you landing more clients? Why aren't you closing more deals? Why aren't you landing advisory type work instead of execution type work? Those kinds of questions, oftentimes some form of the response that I get from consultants is they think they have a problem with their pitch, with the way that they're framing their solution, that there's something lacking in the pitch part of the process. And what I find is that when we think that we have a problem with our pitch, that it often or almost always sends us in an unhelpful direction. When we think the problem with our sales process is that we need to refine our pitch, we need to reposition our pitch, we need to reframe our pitch, we need to strengthen our pitch. That's the diagnosis in part or in full that we come up with, then that will send us in an unhelpful direction. So if you're noticing that where you're thinking, "Oh, I need to improve my pitch, I need to improve the way I'm describing what I do, I need to improve the way that I'm framing what I do." If that's what you're believing is the diagnosis of your problems or your opportunities are other with your sales process, then it most likely will end up sending you in an unhelpful direction. Because when you think you have a pitching problem, oftentimes the solution to that means that you end up feeling more pressured, more convincing, and really at the point of striving to nail the "right answer" or the right way to do this. What I find is that the most effective, I'll call them converters, people who are really good at selling, consulting, and the type of consulting they want to be doing at the pricing they want to be charging, and the fee structures they want to be charging is that they are not pitching at all. They're guiding. This is what I call anti-pitching, where you're inviting, you're clarifying, you're codeciding, and we'll talk more about what this means. But before we get into this anti-pitch formula, if you will, let's talk a little bit more about why this traditional pitching fails. And really it fails on two fronts. It fails when it comes to your potential client and the way they receive it and the way it lands with them, and then also it fails you. So let's talk about the potential client first, and you could probably relate to some of this. If you go in this with a mindset, whether it's something you say out loud, I need to go pitch or I need a better pitch or part of my sales process is the pitch, what I do. If you say that out loud or think that, that falls into this bucket, or you might not even be realizing it, that this is the way that you framed it in your mind as to what happens in order to land consulting clients. It could be much more subtle. But either way, let's talk about how this traditional quote unquote pitching fails you. And it fails you on two fronts. The potential clients, when you come at this process in the sales process, whatever step of your sales process it is, when you come at that from a mindset as pitching, what ends up happening is that you create pressure for yourself. And so you end up almost over correcting, right? From a point of pressure, you may be over correcting, over explaining and creating confusion, or just talking so much and not asking questions as much as you could really understand what is going on with the client versus trying to prove that you know what's going on. Also, when you come at this from a place of feeling like you're pitching or having an undertone of, you think you're having to pitch something, you end up blending in with every other service provider or other consultants that they're evaluating. You're not there to pitch. And if you can shift this with the anti-pitch formula, I'm going to share with you in a moment, then you're going to stand out because it's a much more valuable process that you will be running. The other thing that pitching does, and this is the one I want to highlight the most from a potential client perspective, is that when you go into this pitching, explaining what you do, explaining how you do it, walking them through case studies without truly understanding their challenges, why they care about those challenges, and you're spending most of your time explaining all the things about your business, how you offer things, how much experience you have, all of those paths, which fall into the umbrella of pitching, you are putting the work on the client to connect the dots. I'll say it again, when you come at it this way from a pitching perspective, you're putting the work on the client to connect the dots for you. That's a heavy lift. That can be a really heavy lift for them. Instead of, we'll talk about the anti-pitch here in a moment, but putting that work on them and expecting them to figure it out for themselves, because you've explained what you do and just expect them to figure out how it would work for them, that's not what we're looking for here in a valuable process. That's the impact of traditional quote unquote pitching, and what even traditional quote unquote pitching looks like, and why that's detrimental for a client. It's also detrimental to you. It impacts you because it erodes your confidence. When you think you have to go out there and put on a performance, every time you're in a quote unquote sales process, and you don't perform the way you thought you would, or you don't convince them to engage you. course is going to erode your confidence. It's also going to create this perceived need to perform, right? We were just talking about that perform. And when you've got this idea that you've got to perform in some way, it's going to backfire and create fear for you and create a situation where either you're shrinking back from the perceived need to pitch and what that performance might look like in your mind, or either shrinking back, or you're overcorrecting like we were just talking about a moment ago and damaging your reputation because you're coming across in a way that's not as valuable to the client as you can be. That's why this traditional quote unquote, pitching approach is one that is damaging to both you and the client. And we don't want that for you. Of course, from all of this, of course, when you think that you've got this pressure, you've got to perform, you end up over explaining and creating confusion and putting all this pressure on the client to connect the dots or putting the onus on the client to connect the dots. And you've got this erosion of your confidence and fear that you're going to do it wrong or not good enough. And ultimately, no wonder your business doesn't feel sustainable. And when we talk about a pitch, I just want to be clear and paint the picture a little bit more. What we're talking about here is not you and a board room necessarily presenting slides. This isn't even you in a coffee shop presenting what you do, you're one page or a capability deck to a potential client. What this is is in your mind, wherever the forum is, it's pitching is where in your mind, you believe that you have to explain what you do in such a way that it convinces the client that they need to work with you. Do you see the difference there? It's not about the mechanism so much as it is about the way you're thinking about this concept of pitching and what sales really entails that gets you into this zone that you don't want to be on. Why do you think we do this? Why do you think we create this mental construct for ourselves? We need a pitch. And the answer is that first and foremost, we think it's the right way. It's what we're told that we need should do. We hear this, right? Oh, you need to go pitch that, pitch your services or whatever. So sometimes it's more about just lack of knowledge, really, or lack of awareness that there's a different way, or even lack of awareness that we think this that we need to go do this. Like I was saying earlier, not all of us go around thinking, I need to go pitch this. It's much more subtle in our minds, almost subconsciously. And because we've heard it over and over again, sometimes another reason why we do this, why we get into this pitch mode, is that we believe that the client asks us for it in some form or fashion. They say, come and explain your services and your background and how you work. So they ask for it. And then instead of us saying, oh, that's not as valuable for you as this other approach that we'll talk about here in a moment, we just say, OK, you ask for it. I'll give you what you ask for versus thinking about, OK, I'm not going to give them what they ask for. I'm going to give them what they need. Let me say that again. When a potential client asks you for a pitch or some form of that, that's not because they have to have it. It's because they probably don't even know what to ask for. So that seems like a logical next thing to ask for. Or they may even turn it into, it looks kind of like an interview. But just because the client asks us or something, doesn't mean that we give them that. Instead, we turn it and say, listen, I hear what you're asking for. This is the way I usually provide that. And I'll tell you what that is here in a moment, whether that will work with this overall process. Instead of just reacting to what they're asking for, don't give them what they ask for, give them what they need. And then finally, one of the other reasons why it's common for consultants to fall into this pitch zone, again, to repeat. It might be very literally you're falling into the pitch zone, or it might be that you're falling more into the pitch mindset. Either way, one of the reasons we do this is it feels more controllable than other approaches. It feels more controllable that we can go in, go through our deck, go through our one-pager, go through our capability deck, whatever you want to call it. It feels more controllable than if we went in there and approached it in this way that I'm about to show you here in a second. So it's always helpful to know why are we doing this, because at the end of the day, that allows us to figure out the alternative so that we don't continue getting the results that we don't want, right? So what is the alternative? The alternative is what I will call for you, especially for this episode, the anti-pitch process. We're doing the anti-pitch process, which is amazing, right? If you can come in and do the anti-pitch process and not have to quote unquote sell anything or pitch anything and land clients, think your business is almost perfect. One of the drawbacks of running a business is having to sell things, but if you can reframe it and reposition the process in a way that it doesn't feel so salesy, so pitchy, then you end up taking the temperature down on it and it can become enjoyable. I've told you before I used to be called sales repellent when I was in corporate. I would go on the sales calls. I actually love going on the sales calls with the sales reps. And the reason why I was called sales repellent, you've heard this story, if you've been on the podcast for any period of time. But reason wise, because I would just be really honest with the prospect when they would ask a question in a demo, for example, or about our implementation capabilities. If the answer was no, I would say the answer, I would give them a valid thorough answer. I wouldn't just say no, but it would be honest. I wouldn't just say yes and hope we could figure out how to do it and cover our tracks. And that's how I got this label of sales repellent. But turning it into something beneficial, which I've done for my business, and what you can do for your business too, you can be the sales repellent version of this and be so successful because we don't have to sell. Instead, we want to take an anti-pitch approach, which I will tell you what that looks like now. And I'll get, walk you through what the four pieces of it are, and then we'll talk about each one of them in more detail. So first, the four components of the anti-pitch process, the first of them is diagnosis over description. The second portion of the anti-pitch process is co-developing the solution. The third is options over offers, and the fourth is decision enablement. So we're going to dive into each one of these individually. So first, diagnosis over description. You do not start by explaining what you do. This is not a job interview. Your role in the process to help a client decide if they want to work with you or not, and for you to decide if you want to work with that client or not, your role is to help the buyer understand what's really happening, to give them a diagnosis. So what this looks like, it's you really diving in, right? To give someone a diagnosis, you've got to ask them a lot of questions. You've got to validate their perspective and what makes sense, and then help them fill in the blind spots or help point out areas that they've overlooked. It involves you walking them through a process so that they can understand the patterns or the root causes, that they can understand the symptoms of the problem that they have in their organization. And ultimately to understand what's going to happen if they don't address it, for you to help them diagnose their situation, has nothing to do with describing to them or getting your deck out to walk them through what you do. What it has to do with is you asking high quality questions based on your expertise that open up the door to understand fully what's going on in their organization, what do they want to be going on instead in their organization, and how can they get what they want, and how where are their blind spots? What's going to happen if they keep going down the path they're going on right now, and truly turning into an advisor for them, giving them diagnosis over description, right? One of the phrases you might use in this first phase is after you've asked all of these questions and uncovered the information, here's what I'm hearing, here's how this typically shows up. What I find happens when this is left on address, or you continue down this road, really giving them the insights that you have to share with them. You're not asking them if they want to work with you, you're giving them insights into the situation that they're in. That's step one. Okay, step two is co-developing the solution. Oftentimes we think we're the expert, or we should know all the answers because we're the expert. We end up falling into this trap of collecting information about the scope, and again, coming at it as I need to pitch to them, or describe to them, or explain to them what the solution is, what the answer is, because we put this pressure on ourselves that we're the expert, so we should know the answer. But instead of presenting that type of a solution, the antipitch process is when you're running a process where you do the diagnosis first, the discovery and diagnosis, and then you build out the solution together, together meaning with your primary stakeholder and even other stakeholders or influencers in the organization. So instead of presenting a pre-baked solution, where you understood from phase one what the challenge was, what the diagnostic was, instead of just coming at them and saying, "Here's the answer," instead of that, you're building it together. That's the antipitch framework, step number two. What does this look like? It looks like you exploring and even further detail their desired outcomes and constraints. You understanding what success means internally. You walking them through, we could do it this way or that way, what do you think will work best in the organization? What have you tried before? So it's taking that high level diagnostic that we did in step one and drilling into a lot of detail, going through solutions with the client to get their feedback on what's going to work and resonate in this organization. What's not going to work in this organization and why? Why hasn't that worked in the past? And does it make sense to try it that way this time in order to be successful or does it make sense to take a bit of a different path in order to get the same results? This is where you're taking in more detail and figuring out what the plan might look like. What are the options look like based on resources and timelines and priorities and even the internal politics that are going on? You're also pulling in other stakeholders and influencers, right? You're creating a more holistic picture here that's building upon what you learned in step one, which is diagnosis over description. And ultimately you're turning your stakeholder, you're turning your decision maker into a co-author of the solution or set of solutions and that increases their adoption, right? That increases their ownership, that reduces their resistance. So it's pulling back the layers and helping them to even if they don't realize what you're doing, that you're running a process that where the client is helping you to co-develop the solution. And then the third component of a non-sales process to self consulting is that you're reviewing with that client the options instead of making offers. So at the point where you really understand their scope, you really understand from steps one and two, right? You understand the scope, you understand the internal blockers, you understand what motivates your decision maker, you understand what doesn't motivate your decision maker, you understand where the challenges are internally with their internal politics, you understand what the options might make sense for a particular client. I mean, I remember building these out in just simple, excelled templates with like super high level Gantt charts and saying, okay, we have option one and option two and we've got the pros and cons for each one of them and what the trade-offs are and really understanding what these paths forward could look like based on the diagnosis and the co-development and ultimately framing these options instead of offers, framing them around their goals, not your methodology. Of course, your methodology helps add credence to it, right? Because they can understand you've done this before, you've got a proven way of doing whatever it is that you're doing, but it's framed around their goals, not that you've got a cookie cutter and you're working through this with them, presenting these options that help them to see that you've got their best interest at heart, that you're driving clarity with each one of these steps of the process and helping them to have control over what it looks like, not just something where you're pitching to them. Here's a solution that I've built, do you want it? The tool that I love using in this step is what I call an approach document. This is the approach document approach, if you will. This is where you're working out these options, like I was just describing to you where we've got a gant chart perhaps, we've got trade-offs and pros and cons and measurements of success and really using that as a dialogue to drive the conversation with the potential clients, not as a take-it-or-leave-it type of a pitch. One of the easiest ways to describe this as you're kicking off this phase of the process is something as simple as based on what you shared and what we've been meeting through the last couple of meetings. We've got two waves forward. Let's talk through those and talk about the trade-offs and the pros and cons and I really want to get your thoughts on how this will work within this organization and of course, I'll share with you mine what I see from an external point of view having worked with so many different clients on this particular topic. I can share a broader perspective and experience on what works and what doesn't across other organizations. We can blend it together and come up with a really solid solution working on this process that I just described to you. That's something you would say, maybe with a few fewer words, but you'd get the drift. That's step number three, options instead of offers and then finally step number four is decision enablement. Your role is to help them make a decision inside their organization and to obtain final buy-in whether they're the sole decision maker or they've got to get other people on board, maybe there are other signatories or maybe they just need to get their peers on board even though they don't really have a final say in the decision. Whatever that looks like, you're able to help them enable the decision with those first three steps where you truly understand the situation and haven't just described to them what you do and expecting them to connect the dots. Instead, you've understood what is going on their organization. You've helped co-develop and worked with them and facilitated with them a co-development process of all the different options. Then you've presented those options to them in a way that helps them to see what the trade-offs are and what the considerations are in a way that they probably haven't thought about on their own even through those first couple of conversations. And finally, your job is to help them get to a decision one way or the other. You're able through this last step of the process to say, okay, based on what we've worked through which of these options makes the most sense. And what's the budget look like? What's the timing we go look like? What are their competing priorities do we need to consider? Just to be clear, this is not the first time you would be talking about the budget. You would be talking about it at each of these prior steps. But this is where you really is winnowing it down. You're winnowing down the approval path and who's signing off. You're clarifying their decision criteria, helping them to clarify their decision criteria. This isn't for you. Let me be clear, this is not for you. Of course, you benefit by them making a decision and hopefully one to work with you. But at the end of the day, if you think about it as I am helping them navigate through this process, then it helps you to approach it in a much more clean, anti-pitching way, anti-pitching mindset. And then finally, figuring out what's good enough, should we have an MVP approach, a minimum viable product, should we phase this out? What does it make sense to ultimately get them to a decision one way or the other? Your job is to reduce friction so they can decide and feel good about the decision that they've made. And quite frankly, now you've already got a jumpstart on the delivery process, right? Because you've done all of this understanding and do diligence. And ultimately, one of the things I'll say before we move on from this four part framework of anti-pitching is I often hear, well, I don't want to waste my time on a client who's not going to sign an engagement or I don't want to do free work for them. And I just want to be clear, we're not talking today about you doing free work. Although this is very valuable work. So you certainly could be charging for it. It depends, of course, on the phase of your business. But I wouldn't be worrying so much about protecting yourself from free work, especially when you're working to master this type of process as compared to investing in yourself, investing in your process, investing some time and cycles to get really good at this. So that ultimately, what you're able to do is do it much in a much more accelerated way, in a much more streamlined way. You're going to be a little bit shaky at first. You're going to be a little awkward at first. That's not a problem. But you want to have as many at-bats as possible so you can get really good at this. Again, I'm not telling you to go do free consulting to land clients. But what I am telling you is I would advise you to not err on the side of avoiding this four-part step because you're worried about giving too much away for free. I would go do these at-bats as many of them as you can so you can get better and faster and more effective at it. And ultimately, some of this you can ultimately charge for when you start getting really good at this, charging basically a plan for a plan, pricing out a plan for a plan. But for right now, we're working on this. You're getting really good at this anti-pitch non-sales process. Okay, so those are the four steps of the anti-pitch framework. And now as we're wrapping up the episode, I want to share with you a few things that are really important. And let's reinforce why does this work? Because again, sometimes it's contrary to what we think is in our mind or we think it's going to take too much time or we think it's going to take too long or we think it's going to be too involved. But at the end of the day, this anti-pitch approach, this four steps, help position you as a trusted advisor and an advisor, not a vendor, not a supplier. That's why it works. It works ultimately, even though it feels like you're going through a lot of cycles sometimes to get to the place of a decision. Ultimately, what I find is that the sales cycle shrinks. You might be able to rush through the sales process to get yourself to the place where they have a proposal in hand and are deciding on the proposal. But you've been there. You've seen it more so many times where you've sent a proposal and it takes that months to make a decision. So think about this in a different way where it could be that if you're investing some more time and energy up front to truly understand what's going on in their organization and what they think they want and what they really want, your sales cycle will end up shrinking most of the time. This sets you up to differentiate yourself. And the worst case happens that they decide not to work with you or they don't even make a decision. And at the end of the day, you're taking so much away from it in terms of what you've learned about an organization that's your ideal client and your own sales process. So as we wrap up today's episode, I want to encourage you to refine your new non-sales process where you don't think about your process as a pitch where you don't even think about your process as a sales process. But instead where you're walking the clients through this framework where you're diagnosing and not describing where you're co-developing with the client, where you're replacing offers with options and you're evaluating after each step of the process so that you can continuously improve and build upon what you're learning. And then I would remind you to go take the IC pricing assessment to help you look at that piece of your sales process. That's one where I so often find consultants getting stuck is on their pricing and how to handle that. You can go take that at icpricing.com and then finally get help. There's no reason you should be suffering in silence. There's no reason that you should be even relying fully on chat to be tea to help you run your business. You know this and I know this it most of the time tells you what your thinking is right. It might not in the very beginning, but ultimately it ends up skewing in that direction. And so getting help to implement, refine, optimize your sales process so that you can attract those fulfilling and rewarding and financially lucrative consulting engagements. You can go to consultmelissa.com and apply for one-on-one coaching. As we're wrapping up I'll just end it with this. There's a slight shift in my sales process now my own process, which I've modeled after this. We're really wanting to understand what's going on for you and your business and then figuring out if coaching would be a good fit for what it is that you're wanting to accomplish. And so I've switched it over to all applications. You'll come in, you'll apply for one-on-one coaching and then we'll review the coaching requests and then send you the link to schedule a call if it feels like it could be a good fit for what you're looking for and really help you to get to the point where you are feeling so much more confident and in control and capable of landing this fulfilling lucrative consulting work for yourself. Alright? Thanks for tuning in for this week's episode and I'll see you again next week. Take care. Thanks for joining me this week on the grow your independent consulting business podcast. If you like today's episode I have three quick next steps for you. First, click subscribe on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to make sure you don't miss future episodes. Next, leave me a review in your podcast app so other independent consultants can find and benefit too. And finally, to put the ideas from today's episode into action, head over to MelissaLieberman.com for the show notes and more resources to help you grow your consulting practice from your first few projects into a full-fledged business. See you next week.