Recommended in this post:
- The Win Without Pitching Manifesto by Blair Enns →
- The Four Conversations by Blair Enns →
- Blair Enns’ articles & newsletter at Win Without Pitching → (look for the newsletter signup on the page)
If you run a marketing agency (or any other kind of agency that “pitches” clients) you need to read Blair Enns. Right now.
These two books changed how I think about selling, pricing, and positioning my agency more than anything else I’ve read. And if you’ve been following me for very long, you know I read a lot of business books.
The first is The Win Without Pitching Manifesto. It’s short. You can finish it in a day. But the ideas will stick with you. The core argument is that agencies have been trained to give away their best thinking for free in order to “win” new business. We pitch. We create spec work. We write proposals that are basically free strategy documents. And we do it because everyone else does, so it feels normal.
It’s not normal. It’s insane. But it’s soooo hard to resist doing it.
Blair lays out twelve proclamations for how to break free from this cycle. Specialize. Replace presentations with conversations. Diagnose before you prescribe. Don’t solve problems before you’re paid. It reads like a manifesto because it is one. It’s a call to stop treating your expertise like a commodity and start acting like the expert you are.
The second book is The Four Conversations, which came out in 2024. If the Manifesto is the “why,” this is the “how.” It gives you a practical framework for the entire sales process, broken into four distinct conversations you have with a prospective client. It takes everything from the Manifesto and makes it actionable. Where the first book changed my mindset, this one changed my behavior.
Here’s what I’d suggest: read the Manifesto first. Let it mess with your head for a week. Then read The Four Conversations and start applying it to your next prospect.
And while you’re at it, head over to the Win Without Pitching insights page and sign up for Blair’s newsletter. His articles are consistently some of the best thinking on selling expertise that I’ve come across. He also co-hosts a podcast called 2Bobs with David C. Baker that’s worth your time.
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One of the things Blair hammers on is that agencies need to specialize and position themselves as experts. Hard to do that when your team is buried in WordPress maintenance and custom dev work that isn’t your core offering. That’s exactly why my lead dev at MWI and I got together to launch BUILT. BUILT offers senior-level, US-based WordPress developers who work as an extension of your team on a flexible retainer (we also do project-based pricing). No overhead, no offshoring. You focus on your clients and your expertise, we handle the dev. Take a look if that sounds like something your agency could use: builtwebdev.com
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