Notes on Blair Enns on Art of Value
Blair talks about the importance of specialization for creatives.
Diagnose Before You Prescribe, Then Price with Blair Enns – 011
- Specializing differentiates your firm.
- Creatives desire generalism on a personal level but their business demands focus.
- Get power back in the buy/sell relationship buy reducing the number of viable alternatives in the mind of the buyer. Specializing is the quickest/easiest way to do this.
- Narrow your focus and build a deeper firm.
- You want to wield the power/control that comes with a practitioner/patient relationship. The alternative is a vendor/client relationship where the client dominates.
- If you see yourself as a professional, you need to hold yourself to a standard that when violated is tantamount to malpractice.
- How the practitioner behaves says so much about his neediness which has so many implications about the quality of his offering.
- Neediness is a stench. If you lean too heavily on passion on enthusiasm it starts to smell like neediness. People are repulsed by neediness.
- You need to ask diagnostic questions in the sales cycle.
- Silver bullet question: “How do you make money?”
- To prevent himself from seeing everything as a nail he asks, “Now, how do you think I might be able to help you?”
- In a B2B relationship, when someone knowingly pays more for something they could clearly get cheaper elsewhere, they are paying a premium for reduced risk.
- It’s presumptuous for a practitioner to make all the assumptions about a buyer’s risk profile and make the decisions for him. Thats why it’s important to offer options.
- There are times you can offer hourly as the cheapest option to make the fixed bids make look more attractive. It really lays bare what the client gets and doesn’t get for the cheapest option.
- The “minimum level of engagement” idea is genius. It’s a mandatory sales tool. Invoke a money conversation without having to have a value conversation.
- You’re in a race to object. Make the client overcome YOUR objections. Don’t let the client present objections for you to overcome. Make them do it first.
- Explicitly call out risk in your proposal options, where the cheapest options are the most risky for the client.