Winning Is Better With Bob Wiesner

Posted by John Livesay in podcast0 comments

 

“Winning is better” has got to be the slogan of many companies and businesses. The question is, how do you start winning? We tackle this question and more as John Livesay and Bob Wiesner of The Artemis Partnership grapple with the mechanics of persuasion. We take a deep dive into Bob’s book, Winning Is Better, to look at building trust, leveraging the non-technical aspects, and positioning yourself for success. Tune in to learn more from the masters in pitching.

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Winning Is Better With Bob Wiesner

In this episode, Bob Wiesner talks about his new book, Winning is Better, and how to stop coming in second place. We talk about how important it is to build trust and how to do it fast. Finally, he talks about making a win room instead of a war room. Find out what he means. Enjoy the episode.

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Our guest is Bob Wiesner, who has always been fascinated with how people make decisions. Even as a kid and a huge baseball fan, he was more interested in the operations of the front office than in action on the field. He studied Psychology as an undergrad and graduate student and went into advertising, where his focus on decision making shifted to the advertiser.

After several years where some of the biggest ad agencies like BBDO and McCann Erickson, he shifted focus again from the mass persuasion of advertisers to the individual persuasion of a seller relative to a buyer. He is all about this practice. People know him as the Pitch Doctor. As the Pitch Whisperer, I would like to welcome the Pitch Doctor to the show.

Thank you, and thank you for not whispering as well. We can talk out loud. I appreciate it, John. I’m glad to be here.

This premise of a whisper of anything, we horse whispers, dog whispers, we also go to the doctor for them. We trust them and ask a bunch of questions to figure out what is going on specifically. Before we get into how you came up with being known as the Pitch Doctor, take us back to what inspired you to be interested in how people get persuaded, I know for myself. I watched a TV show called Bewitched, where there was a character that worked for an ad agency. I thought, “That looks like a cool job.” What was the initial thing that pulled you into? I want to learn how people get motivated to change their minds.

It was not a lot unlike yours, John. I stumbled my way into advertising by accident. I graduated college, and before I decided to go to grad school, I was looking for a job, and I did not know what to do. I had a buddy who worked for a large ad agency. I asked him, “What did you do? It sounded interesting. Do you need special training or education for that?” He said, “Anybody could do it.” I said, “Sign me up.” I did find a job in agency life and enjoyed it.

What I liked about it was a combination of a couple of things. First of all, it was about persuasion. I found that getting an undergraduate degree in Psychology, there is nothing remarkable about that but the whole idea about how people think about things and how they perceive things, they perceived the impact of those things on themselves was something that I had studied, and it was interesting. I loved the creative aspect of it.

[bctt tweet=”Show you have a deeper understanding to build trust.” username=”John_Livesay”]

Here we were creating things for a reason. We were creating them to be different yet to be purposeful, to have an objective at the end of the day, which was to sell and soak. That was something I wanted to know more about. I stayed in the agency business in total for eighteen years with some graduate school mixed in there and focused entirely on mass persuasion, how advertisers who spend tens of millions of dollars persuaded millions of people. Later, I realized, I wanted to get a little bit more personal about it and turn my attention to how individuals are persuaded by other individuals.

What were you doing at the agency? Were you media account services selling the agency to win new business, or were you the creative team?

Yes and no. I started in media planning and buying. I moved over into account management. I spent some time in a new business. I forget what the 4th one was but not creative but I touched on all different facets of the agency. To this day, I feel like I do understand how agencies do their thing and how they persuade people.

You now are morphing into instead of trying to convince the masses to prefer one brand over another. Let’s get into helping one person persuade another person to pick a client, to hire them, whether it is a speaker or an architecture firm, you have several clients in several different industries. I love what you say in your book, Winning is Better: The Journey to New Business Success. Can people look at the roster of clients that you are now working with and say, “That does not seem to have a lot in common?” Yet, at the end of the day, there is one thing that is in common with all of them, and you say, “We are all people, and people are wired pretty much the same.”

Before I started Artemis, which is only two years old in 2022, I was doing this for other firms and doing this on my own since the mid-’90s. What fascinated me was that a decision-maker is a person. They are not a role or a job description. They are human beings. As human beings, while there are obvious differences from person to person, they are also predictable aspects about how they think. It does not matter whether they are thinking about advertising, accounting or management strategy. They are still a human, and they still have needs, desires, and mechanisms for processing information.

I don’t think that as a rule, a lot of professional services firms like advertising, architecture, and accounting understand that aspect of the person that they are pitching to. My goal since I’ve got into this part of the business is to help my clients get a deeper understanding about how decision-makers perceive their offers and use that understanding to differentiate their offers from their competitors.

One of the things you talk about in the book that is counterintuitive for many people is, “Don’t pitch everything.” Especially for me, coming from a sales background, we were told the old way of selling is to throw as much as you can up on the wall and hope some of it sticks, which is a nightmare. It is not targeted and strategic. You have a much more strategic approach to let’s define who your ideal client is and the work you love to do. In the book Winning is Better, you talk about how sometimes you can take a bid to get something, and you even win it. If it is not something you love, the win is a chore. It is not a joyful experience. I thought, “What a great distinction.”

That is something that is easily overlooked by sales organizations and by business development professionals. It is the price of winning or the cost of winning. It is one thing to rack up numbers to get your percentages up. It is one thing even to get your revenue up but what is the impact of that win on my organization both short-term and long-term?

We define a chore as something that we are capable of doing that people will pay us to do but that nobody gets any leisure from doing. We are competent at it but that is far as it goes. You start layering a lot of that stuff into an organization, and people start turning off to it. Your workers start to shrug their shoulders and say, “Not again. Do I have to do another bathroom design? Do I have to design another landing page on a website? I would like to do something more exciting, interesting, meaningful, purposeful.”

John, everyone now knows about the Great Resignation. Is that even contributing to the Great Resignation? The fact that you are. “We are a successful company. We are growing and winning new business left and right,” your people have to do stuff they do not enjoy doing. Now, maybe they do not even want to stick around to do it.

Without people sticking around, the cost of turnover, and consistency, you are selling the team’s ability to work well together. If all that goes out the window, you are a commodity.

You have got this short-term impact of, do people want to be doing this work, and you get the long-term impact, which is if it is the work I do not love to do if people are not sticking around to do it, and if it is a commodity exactly as you say it, where is the growth opportunity going to come later on? How is this client going to turn into a bigger client down the road if the initial work that I won is one where I’m churning out a product without any passion, excitement or cultural lift from it?

Let’s double click on that word, that phrase without any excitement. I have a belief that people buy your energy. I know for myself, as a sales keynote speaker, I often have to compete. I get interviewed like big companies when they are in the final 2 or 3. I remember getting an email from the speaking bureau saying, “Congrats, they picked you. They liked your energy.” Rarely, it’s that specifically called out. I then talked to the person and they said, “You made us feel good. We figured you could make the whole ballroom full of people feel the same way.”

That energy you bring to the 45-hour however over your timeframe is presentation or interview, whatever you want to call it is important that people are going, “How do we feel? Can we see ourselves enjoying this journey if we are going to hire you to work with us?” In the case of an architect, sometimes 4 to 6 years on renovating an airport or something. People forget that that is a key part of you can’t give away anything you do not have. If you are burnt out from doing all these bathroom jobs of designing bathrooms, and you want to be designing a whole airport, you are not bringing your best energy to the room.

[bctt tweet=”Listening and empathy create chemistry.” username=”John_Livesay”]

What people lose sight of is not only that, and I’m not diminishing the importance of it but from a decision-maker standpoint, that is our thing. It is about the buyer. They are comparing you as the potential speaker to seven other people they are interviewing to be potential speaker. It is not your energy level in the absolute sense that they are looking at. It is you relative to everybody else.

How do you differentiate yourself from other people? Your content may be awesome but their content may be pretty good too. They might not be able to tell the difference between the topic you are going to speak about and the topic someone else is going to speak about. If it comes to your energy, passion, commitment, drive or what you might more broadly call the cultural fit, that could be the differentiator that wins you the business way more important than any topic or content that you might be proposing to them. That is what competing firms lose sight of is the importance of the non-technical aspects of their pursuit.

We talk about the importance of trust, and most people will go, “Yes, I know trust is important.” You have a formula for how people can be better at building trust that you reference here. I thought it was clever that trust is not just, “You are safe to be within the room. You’ve got a good referral. That is maybe 1/3 of it.” Can you walk us through what companies can do if they are walking into a room cold and have to present to build some trust?

The trust will worthiness equation was first identified by David Maister, Charles Green, and Robert Galford in a book called The Trusted Advisor, which alongside Winning is Better: The journey to New Business Success should be on everybody’s bookshelf. What they articulated was that trust has four components. It has credibility, reliability, transparency, and self-orientation.

One area that every sales organization blows consistently when it comes to building trust is this area of self-orientation. In other words, they always seem to be selling something. They seem as if the relationship that they are attempting to build with the buyer, again, buyer perception maybe not be a reality but it seems like all they want to do is talk about themselves, products, and price and try to extract money from the buyer.

All that torpedoes trust faster than anything you can possibly do. You layer onto that, whether they are credible in the space, deliver on their promises or are open and honest. All those factors together influence whether you are viewed as being tried trustworthy. Our point of view is that when initiating a conversation with a prospect, regardless of what stage you are in the sales journey, think about how are they perceiving your trustworthiness and what are you doing to build it up or diminish it?

Sometimes, part of it is being a little bit vulnerable and not pretending that you have all the answers all the time.

 

That is what Maister, Green, and Galford called intimacy, which I don’t think is a 2022 word. I prefer the word transparency but being honest with people about, “Here is what I’m capable of doing. I’m good at it, and here is what I’m not so capable of doing. I’m not going to take on the project if it is not directly in my area of expertise and brilliance.” A lot of buyers appreciate that.

Let’s close that open-loop I did at the opening. How did you become known as the Pitch Doctor?

In the firm that I was working for at that time, the part of our practice that focused on helping our clients as you are doing now, John, is helping them be more effective with pitching. Not everybody in my firm back then liked doing that work. It was high-pressure work. Unlike the usual training and development stuff that the firm was doing back in the ‘90s and early 2000s, this one had results attached to it, either you win the pitch or you do not.

I loved that. That fits my personality and my motivation for working perfectly, so I raised my hand. I said, “I want to learn more about how to do this. I want to take our principles that we were training and apply them in real-time to actual new business pitches.” I did that. I worked on dozens of them for ad agencies, IPOs, and management consulting firms for an Olympic bid. I became the go-to person within the US operation when there was a client who wanted help on a specific pitch, so I became known as the Pitch Doctor.

When I talk to people who say, “We are so tired of coming in second place.” I know on The Artemis Partnership, that is one of the things that you are solving because, unlike in the Olympics, there is no medal for second place that will say, “Did you ask why you came in second place?” Oftentimes, they will say, “We were too salesy.” It goes back to what you were saying earlier, “You are too self-absorbed about bragging about how big your company is, and it has nothing to do with them.” Those kinds of things. Are you seeing a current consistent reason why people do come in second place that you are able to fix?

If someone tells you that you came in second because you are too salesy, that is great feedback, and it is better feedback than most organizations are either seeking or able to get. There are a couple of factors here. First of all, a lot of companies do not get accurate feedback at all, which makes it difficult for them to understand why they come in second.

That is a whole separate chapter of the book because it is important to get that good feedback. We hear this more from the buyers than we do from the sellers. Buyers will tell us that they did not select a firm because they did not trust them, did not connect with them, and did not provide any additional reason for why they should be hired. They followed the RFP. They met the minimum standards.

[bctt tweet=”What competing firms lose sight of is the importance of the non-technical aspects of their pursuit. ” username=”John_Livesay”]

The firms that win always have gone beyond what was initially accepted. Now the beyond could be defined emotionally. I knew you used the word energy before. We hear the word passion a lot, commitment, drive, and dedication. We also hear buyers say, “I selected that firm because they showed a deeper understanding of what I was looking for. They answered the questions in the RFP but they went beyond that to show that they understood what we looked for and they cared about it.” What is interesting is that a lot of losing firms wind up losing because they did what was asked of them but whereas the winning firms did what was asked of them and did more.

This is so insightful and valuable. For everyone reading, take that in, that it is not enough to answer the questions. You need to show the person making the decision that this is not another client or checklist for us to do. I have a philosophy. It sounds like you agree with this. The better you can describe someone’s problem and put it into words that they have not even used before, they think, “You get us that feeling of you understand us, the fact that you can express our challenges and what keeps us up in the middle of the night. Therefore, I trust you to have our solution because you understand our problem well, even if it is beyond what we described in a proposal.”

We see that manifested in a few different ways but the firm that stands out from others is a firm that shows a better understanding of the challenges of the problem. It could be the upside, a better articulation of the opportunity. That absolutely matters. That takes us back because everything is connected to a point you made earlier in our conversation, John, which is about the importance of pitching less or chasing fewer opportunities.

I cannot get the depth and the information that will help me win if I’m chasing everything. I do not have the time, bandwidth or energy for it. Whereas if I’m more selective about what I chase, I can get more depth and more understanding. I can have that diagnostic that you mentioned that deeper understanding of the problem because I took more time to do it. Everything goes hand in hand. The buyer gets that right away. They can distinguish the 6, 10 or 16 firms they are talking to. They can tell the 1 or 2 of them that took the time to get to know them from the other fourteen that did an autopilot and submitted a proforma response even if it answered all the questions.

You and I, as authors and being on a show, it is evidently clear within the first five minutes if the host has read your book or not, versus reading through some provided questions from the publicist. Going back to this concept that if you can go beyond the expectations and show a deeper caring than the come-up competition. I want to give people an example of what that looks and sounds like.

When I was working with an architecture firm on the presentation, we were having dinner the night before the practice. One of the guys said, “As an architect working in airports, I travel over the world and gets to move wherever the job is but this is my hometown. If we win this, this is a hometown game for me. The whole point of this airport is to reflect the new version of this city.” I go, “That is what we are going to be saying on the team slide. This isn’t another job for you.” That personal connection to the city for the people making the decision of what firm is going to redesign the city’s airport came through time and again. That is what you were talking about as an example.

I want to get into your wonderful pie chart on the truth about decision-makers here. You are helping people have empathy for what they are thinking about. The first part of this is people go, “You win or lose business based on what your solution is, and you say no.” That is only 28% of the decision. Let’s talk about what the other three quadrants are.

 

The next one up, which ranks higher than the solution, is the understanding me. We have touched on that. I want to get people the full fork pieces of the pie. If you have your solution, we can see that it would work. Now 31% of my decision is going to be based on how well you show me you understand me. That goes above and beyond my problems.

I’m glad that you emphasized the word me because decisions are made by individual people. They are not made by anonymous groups using groupthink. Each decision-maker is going to judge the options in front of them based on, “Did this team or organization understands what I personally was looking for, what my concerns were, what my fears were, what my hopes and dreams were, and what my own personal decision criteria are,” which might be completely different than anything published in an RFQ or RFP.

Each decision-maker, person, and influencer needs to know that the pitching team was addressing their individual needs. Sometimes, you have to be nuanced or careful about how you articulate them but you still have to make it clear that you heard them and that you’ve got it. Now that is distinguished from understanding my company or the project, which is important. They are both necessary but they are not sufficient to win. You have to go deeper, get to know the people, and show you understand the individuals.

The other part of it is chemistry. We know chemistry is with dating, and we know whether we have chemistry when we watch a movie. Although, those actors did not have the chemistry that does not work. The script is great. The chemistry in the business scenario is, “Do I want to work with you? Is this somebody I want to go have a drink with after work? Is this somebody who would have my back or would they throw me under the bus?” All those things come into play.

It is all of those but it does not necessarily have to go that deep. It depends, frankly, on whether or not I have spent enough time with you to even know that you have my back. In the first meeting that you will have with people, long before they reach the conclusions that you accurately pointed out, they are going to be able to perceive, “Do we communicate on the same wavelength? Do we use the same language? Do we waste each other’s time with irrelevant facts? Do we cut to the chase? Do we seem to care about each other as people? Are we listening well? Are we showing empathy?”

These are all factors that go into this idea of chemistry. They are easily represented even in a Zoom meeting, and they set you up for then getting to know the person even better. By the end of the process, I will believe that you and I are simpatico, we will look out for each other, I will enjoy having you around my job site for the next five years or having you auditing my books for the next three months. I would not say I would enjoy having you auditing my books but I will enjoy having you around my office. Those things will look eventually get there. I want people to understand that the chemistry is evident from the first conversation that you have with people, and it carries on from there.

Finally, chemistry is 25%. That leads a remaining 16% to the category of politics, which most people feel uncomfortable and hazy about, “Do I want to get involved with the company’s politics? Is it being aware that there is politics involved? If 16% of the decisions are based on politics, help me, Bob, how do I navigate that?”

[bctt tweet=”Competing firms lose sight of the importance of the non-technical aspects of their pursuit. ” username=”John_Livesay”]

You may not be able to but you at least have to be aware of what it is now. Internal politics are about, “What do decision-makers care about internally? Who evaluates them? Who needs to approve their decision? How will they look to these other stakeholders, that could be their bosses or colleagues? If you are selling into a marketing department, how will the marketing people feel when they go to the sales department and say to the sales guys, ‘We hired this firm to do our social media?’ Are they going to like it, or are they going to hate it?”

If you are a large organization, maybe you are publicly traded. You’ve got to worry about the shareholders. How will they feel about things? This information is not easily discovered but it is findoutable. If you can at least know what it is, you can anticipate how important it is. If you are going to be a politically unsafe choice, you can compensate for that by pumping up some of the other parts of your sales initiative. If you are going to be politically sound or even advisable, leverage the heck out of it.

If you say we have picked this social media company or we picked John as a speaker, we are going to have the Pitch Whisperer come to speak to us, give them some ammo to present why you are the good choice to get somebody excited with, especially if they are not involved in the choice. If you are an architecture firm pitching to redo an airport renovation, realize all the taxpayers and city officials that are involved in giving opinions on this as it goes along that is way more than the eight people in the room listening to the presentation. Before I let you go, I want to talk about your wonderful book at the end here, the pursuit field manual, where you have a win room. You are all about winning is better, focused on the winning more than the selling. What is a win room and how can people start to create their own?

Many people in sales and business development are familiar with the term war room. We prefer to call it a win room because we want to be more optimistic about what the purpose of the room is. The typical war room that I have seen, and John, you have probably seen it as well, is oftentimes constructed around what our offering is going to be. It is like, “What is our strategy? What is our weaponry out? How flank the other guy is? Where are we going to put our battalions? What about us?”

The win room is about the buyers. Not surprisingly, as we have been talking about. The win room is built around how much information you have about decision-makers and influencers. You probably do not have enough. How do you get more? It becomes a formula for how do I convert these inputs, which is the information you have about decision-makers and influencers, and convert that into outputs, which is your messaging.

Messaging that differentiates you from your competition persuades the buyer that you are not just viable but you are an optimal choice for them and seals the deal in your final proposals and your pitches. The win room differs from the war room, not in name or attitude but while war rooms are much more product and firm centric, the win room is entirely prospected centric and builds all of its efforts around that.

Before the show started, you and I had a little chat, and we talked about how you need to keep your flexibility at the moment. If you get feedback right before you are about to go present that a client checked your references, find out what the reference was asked, and possibly use that as part of their criteria that might not have been in the proposal to open up your messaging, you are playing at optimizing things in the win room.

[bctt tweet=”Pitching and winning isn’t about having the best product and solution, but how you position and offer it up.” username=”John_Livesay”]

One of the interesting things about the win room is that you never close your win room. It has never been done. You continually input right up until the last minute because every little nugget of information you get could make the difference.

The book again is called Winning is Better. You can get it on Amazon. People can also find you at TheArtemisPartnership.com.

Connect with me directly on LinkedIn. They are both effective.

Any last thought or quote, you want to leave us with Bob?

This has been a great conversation. I loved it. We are like-minded because we both believe that pitching and winning are not about having the best product and solution. It is about how you position it and how you offer it up. Your readers will do well to follow your advice on selling and storytelling. They would also want to read some that we have to say about the overall strategic approach to pitching, and you put these combinations together. You will be a powerful force in the market, and your competitors will be trying to figure out what the heck you are doing. That is driving them crazy.

Thanks again, Bob.

John, it was a pleasure. Thank you.

 

Important Links

• Bob Wiesner
• Winning is Better
• BBDO
• McCann Erickson
• The Trusted Advisor
• LinkedIn – Bob Wiesner
• Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course

 

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Tags: decision making, Marketing, Persuasion, Sales, Trust, Winning