390 A New Book with a Fresh Approach To Selling

Gang, new book just dropped. It's a really, really good one. The Four Conversations. There's maybe like two or three books we get a year that are super relevant to the work that we do. Otherwise, we're reading more general stuff and kind of trying to apply it to our domain. Right. This one is just jam packed with juicies. I want to run through my notes from reading the book. Hopefully ultimately motivate you to read this book. But today I'm sharing some of my favorite takeaways. Let's get into. Okay, the Four Conversations, A New Model for Selling Expertise by Blair Enns. If you recognize that name, he runs a pretty big podcast, or at least he did. I don't know if he still does. He was also one of the authors on the Win Without Pitching Manifesto, which is another excellent, excellent book on sales. Most accountants we could probably do with a little bit of sales literature in our life because it's something that we've kind of just stumbled into or inherited from whatever whoever your daddy figure was as you came evasion this profession, I generalize, obviously, but most of like that process for most of us, whether we recognize it or not, is probably just largely whatever someone ahead of us showed us, which if you look at the other aspects of how we work, like how you get work done and the systems we use and stuff like that, you are probably flabbergasted by what those past practitioners did and you have a very different approach. But then why does sales feel the same? So some notes I had from this book, why I really liked it. We'll have a link to the book down in the show. Notes. Don't, don't let me do your reading for you. The book isn't just about accounting firm stuff, but it's about selling expertise in general. His background, I think, is more in working with creative agencies, but all the books he's written have been very, very relevant to what we do, maybe even increasingly so in an in an era of AI, because AI is obviously really disrupting all things creative and audio video. But ultimately the job of the best designers and creatives isn't to do the thing, isn't always to make the thing, but decide what that thing ought to be. And the accounting profession is really trending the same way, where we're not feeling a huge amount of disruption right now, but how our work gets done. I think most of us can agree over the next couple few years, that's going to evolve quite a bit. And it's a really nice thing and it sounds great to Be able to say, well, our job isn't to do the thing, it's to ensure and decide what that thing ought to be. The reality remains a lot of people are still doing the thing. There's a lot of people making logos, people doing tax prep, classifying transactions. And over time, what we do, it has to kind of evolve to that next level above as it has honestly, many, many times in the past where you had people who's. I mean, one of the guys I bought out, his first job was running 10 key tapes, just literally running the adding machine the entire day. And so sometimes it's hard to visualize what that next thing is, but there will be almost certainly, like, almost certainly a next thing. So similar to creatives, like, they're having to have some really serious conversations about what does it look like to sell your expertise and present yourself as an expert rather than a vendor. And that's a big sort of through line in this book. And it was actually maybe my biggest takeaway from this book is that framing and how to be more aware of it. Because once you are a vendor, you're getting pulled in to do a specific job. Usually they have a specific price in mind, and all the upside to you kind of goes out the window. Like, at that point, if you're a vendor, some, if they want you to run, you know, payroll for them, they're probably just shopping you against everybody else. And that's a really tough spot to find yourself in. So the four questions or the four conversations, the framing of the book, it's organized into. Into four sections. As a sort of OCD person, I super appreciate the structure of the book. There are these four conversations, and then within each of those conversations you have what is the objective of that conversation? What are the principles? What are the frameworks you use to kind of deploy it? And then a summary. And it's this like a tremendous amount of very clear thinking that's gone into this Blaze written a number of books. He's like myself, like, he's produced content on this stuff for decades. And I. What I appreciate this is like, how it's very obviously the condensing of all of those years of talking about it and that expertise into something that is super dense and incredibly practical. So first conversation, by the way, these don't all have to be like distinct conversations. Oftentimes they're sort of combined, or some of them may, may never even happen. Like this first one is an example of something that in some cases doesn't actually need to explicitly happen. But the Goals of sort of these four conversations, like those boxes need to be ticked in the process of selling what you do and bringing somebody on board. So the first conversation, the probative conversation. And if I have a complaint about this book, it's just the word probative. Both that it's hard to say and it just makes me uncomfortable. But the goal of this conversation is to prove your expertise and move from the position of vendor to expertise. And they refer to this moment called, quote, the flip. And it's the moment that someone realizes you are an expert. Sometimes this will happen before that person comes to you, before you even ever talk with them. Oftentimes it doesn't. And this flip we've seen happen in the wild a lot of times where a client will come to you with some sort of expectation of what they think they need. And in the course of talking with that client, they realize, like, oh, there's a whole nother level to the matrix here that I don't understand. And in the way that this person does. And what I need to do is just like, tell them, like, what I need to do moving forward. And that gets them to the place where they are willing to defer to the expert rather than trying to control the process. So they call that the flip. And kind of the goal of this whole conversation is to ensure that that flip happens. Now, scenarios where that flip may have already happened is, for example, if you put thought leadership out there and that person comes in the door and they already perceive you to be the expert. And so that box has kind of already been ticked before they come in because they see you as being one, like one of one. They've already kind of had that proven to them before having to have a conversation with you. One other takeaway I liked from this section, because this section more than any of the others, gets into, like, lead acquisition and how you find people. And what does it look like to put information out into the world that will make that flip happen so that it's not a battle that you necessarily have to have with every single new client that comes in the door. Right? Like, we're not all in the position where we are out there and perceived as thought leaders yet. And so there's definitely ways you can ensure that flip happens as you're having an initial conversations with the client. But getting to a place where they already know you before they come in, like, that's a. That's a really big advantage. So this section talks about that a bit. And one of the talking points around how you do outreach as they describe what they call the battering ram approach to outreach versus the armor piercing approach to outreach. The battering ram says we do everything for you and so you try to dazzle them by the volume and the breadth of services that you offer. And in some ways this is like the lazier approach. And we can fall into this sometimes by thinking like, oh, if we just started doing bookkeeping or if we just started doing payroll or if we just started doing wealth management or tax, then everybody would come flocking to us because everybody wants that stuff done under one roof, right? And in some ways that's true. But when it comes to getting people in the door, like that's not probably going to be the only strategy that works for you. The alternative they discuss here is the armor piercing strategy. And that is to be able to come to people and say that we do this one thing very, very well that oftentimes your current provider doesn't do. And the reality is the very best clients out there in the world, they already have professional help. They may already have pretty good professional help like the, the S tier clients, the A tier clients, they're not common Google reviews for recommendations like they're asking their friends, they're not rocking up in March without having a tax prepare. Like oftentimes those people that don't have any other solutions or contacts, like they're just not high quality clients. And so if our outreach is going to attract folks that already have a provider, which is most of the good clients out there, and I would even say oftentimes the quote unquote loyal clients will be slow to leave those providers until they can see a very obviously better solution. And I do want some of that loyalty in my client base. But the way to get their attention is with this armor piercing outreach where you do something that the current provider does, or maybe you do it to a level where they don't do it so that the notion of them beginning to work with you, that's an easier mental hurdle than, than having to divorce the current provider and all the things that provider does for them in order to even start with you. We talk about this a lot where like, I mean there's entire swaths of the year where it's not even an option for the client to change providers. Cause they may have projects in progress with this other provider, but if you do something different, those two things aren't necessarily in conflict. We've actually seen this when we've talked with Brandon hall who does tax planning or at least he used to do tax planning, even for non clients. A landing page that's kind of like, here's all the stuff that your accountant doesn't do for you right now that we will do for you. And it was mainly around proactive tax planning. When I first heard that, that just kind of blew my mind. The notion that you're going to market against other professionals and say, we'll do this thing for you that your current accountant probably isn't very good at and we don't even have to do the tax prep, we'll just do the planning. That's an example of that sort of armor piercing approach where you can hang your hat on that one thing. When the client has a really good experience, will you do all the other stuff for them? For sure. But the foot in the door is kind of the most important part, right? It's the fact that you got to do anything with them. And if the only way to start working with you is to divorce everybody that you got and make this big dramatic switch to a new thing when they have very little information to know, like, are you actually any better than my current provider or not, that's a spooky thing. And 95% of the time it just won't happen. As opposed to being able to do something very specific the current provider doesn't do. There's another big argument for serving a more specific type of entrepreneur and offering something that is off kind of the beaten path of services. Even if it is trivial to you. I mean, even if it's some just very basic vanilla compliance requirement that is not scary to you at all. It doesn't mean that it isn't scary to the entrepreneur. It probably is. And to be able to show like, yeah, we do these for people and it's, it's like we do it for a hundred people just like you. That's, that's a way in. Like, that's a foot in the door. And when they have a good experience, it's much more likely. Likely you can get the rest of the stuff. And arguably these people are the better clients because they have providers. They're not, they haven't been left out in the cold. They're not looking for options last minute. So that is the probative conversation. The idea that you want to get them to the flip side. The idea that they see you as the expert rather than just a vendor. This episode is sponsored in part by liflow. It is. It's the time of the year where we make resolutions for what we want to do better in 2025. And one of those resolutions might just be upgrading those client touch points, improving the client experience. Because at the end of the day, everything kind of boils down to that and how premium your clients perceive your service to be in one of the most automated ways to create really valuable touch points that are like actually connected back to the accounting ledger. But it's, it's life. It's life flow. Guys, gang gals, squad, live flow. Originally the secret sauce was, was they were a connector for your spreadsheets. They would connect QBO and zero files to your Google sheets or your Excel and they still do that very well. But they now also have like an online dashboard or through all those same connections you can create like super quick and easy, not overwhelming, if you don't want them to be dashboards that actually feed in live data from the accounting ledger, either on a continuous basis or just a snapshot. So I could like send a roundup to my client over text every single morning. It opens up all sorts of possibilities. But the tool itself isn't a bunch of work. That's what I never liked about reporting systems, is you log into that thing and it's, it's just a lot. Customizability is a big thing here. Lifelords has really nice templates you can swipe. You can also build it into whatever you want it to be because ultimately how clients value our service, it really boils down to those touch points, what we put in front of them and what they get out of it. To learn more about LifeLoad, check out the link down in the show notes. This episode is sponsored in part by Maker's Help. If you're thinking about getting into some new, more profitable services in 2025, one that I cannot recommend enough is advising your clients on their kind of short term cash flow outlook. Oftentimes it's a prerequisite to be able to do more long term planning, which we want to jump into. And then we realize, oh, they're not going to make payroll on two days. So that's kind of what they're focused on. That was the story of like my evolution. We tried to do long term planning. That didn't work. Then we started doing short term planning and then we're like, I kind of got to have a better understanding of your AP setup. So then we started doing bill pay and that kind of created the loop and opened up a huge advisory opportunity. And AP right now, funny enough, is being like completely reinvented by AI. It truly is because we can actually do much, much more automated extraction than we've ever been able to do before. Makers Hub, they're pushing it farther than anybody else that I've seen today. We did a demo day on them a while back about how AI is kind of revamping ap. I think it's now the most revamped watched accounts payable related video on YouTube anywhere because it's like really compelling. It's really impressive if it's something you're looking at for 2025. Take a look at Makers Hub. They recently rolled out a bunch of stuff around purchase orders too. Really impressive Deck link down in the show notes. The second conversation is the qualifying conversation. This is where you vet the lead to determine if an opportunity exists while maintaining the expert position. This section was incredibly dense. A few things I pulled out, he referenced kind of a mantra. Uh, it says, I am the expert, I am the prize. I'm on a mission to help. I can only do that if you let me lead and I accept that not all will follow. So you maintain the ability to detach yourself from the outcome, recognizing that not every client, not every entrepreneur is going to be excited about this approach. And that's not my fault. If we are so attached to getting those people, then you end up making compromises and before you know it, you've walked into an engagement that's not going to be good for both parties long term. You have to have a willing willingness and readiness to say no. I don't know about you. I'm really bad about projecting onto other people what I want them to be. I'm really bad at this. When it comes to hiring. When we would pick up new clients, I was awful at this. I'd see like, oh, here's the firm that came from. Or I would see a few things about them. I'm like, yes, they're going to be this specific thing. And it would take a tremendous amount to like talk me out of that. Like, for whatever reason, I would kind of visualize them to be what we needed and what would get me excited. But the reality is like, that's just, that's not how that stuff works. There's always skeletons in the closet. And if you do that too too much, you ignore a bunch of red flags. I think it was Rebecca Driscoll that tweeted something like, you know, there's never been a situation where some sort of red flag or a little thing that you just tried to ignore that you saw when doing discovery with a client didn't becoming a big thing, like, stop tricking yourself into Thinking that, like, no, it'll be fine. I'm sure. It's not a big thing when all you have is a tiny bit of data about someone and there's something big in there. Oh, I'm just thinking of so many scenarios, hiring scenarios, where this was an issue when all you have is a teeny bit of that information. You can't just pretend that that thing didn't happen. Like, in all likelihood. There's more to it than that. Important here is determining, like, what are the qualifiers of a good client and what questions you need to ask to understand if they will be. And it takes something a little more than like, how much money do they make? What industry are they in? So some, some considerations here. Who is the client and what is their current situation? What is their desired future state? Can you actually help them get there? What are the decision makers and what is their. What is their process? When do they need to make a decision and why? And has a budget been allocated and if so, how much? The book frames basically those five boxes as any questions that you ask need to fall into one of those five boxes. Like, those are the things we're kind of trying to resolve in the qualification process. And the last point that super resonated with me, try to beat the client to objections. So in the qualification process, almost certainly there's going to be objections. And if you can get to what that objection might be before the client does, then it feels like you're kind of not kind of glossing over things that might be issues. It feels like you're actually proactively trying to see into the future to see like, hey, let's work this thing out before we get hitched and it becomes a bigger issue. Stuff like, you know, being cost sensitive, maybe being outside their budget. Like, you gotta work through that and at least address that as soon as possible. We've all made the rookie mistake of going through this big, long courtship process and then not talking price until the end. And then you realize you're in totally different universes. Whatever those objections are, the sooner that you can get to them, the better. And if you get to them before the client, that's kind of a double win because it's showing that, like, you know what you're doing, you know, the issues to look out for that your client may not be aware of. Third conversation and a reminder, these, these don't need to be like distinct meetings where you cover all these things. They could be. It's just more or less four things that need to be covered in Kind of the, the discovery and sales process. Third conversation is the value conversation. Oh, that grown. Don't talk to me about value pricing. I would say the veracity of this conversation needs to come back to like, what is the potential upside? Because a lot of the, like the, you know, your Ron Baker kind of traditional value pricing literature, it comes from large scale projects where if I can unlock $5 million of upside for somebody, yeah, I would like we need to be value pricing experts, right? And how do we get a million of that back in our pockets? I need to have some understanding of value pricing and what the value of that I bring to that other side is. Like, I need kind of an understanding of that to a degree. But let's just be real. That is different than large scale projects, like with, you know, really astronomical dollar figures. That being said, I think the underlying sort of mechanics of value pricing and all that, I think that's still worth understanding not just in what we do, but in any type of business. Like when we talk about sponsorships and brand deals with my content, what should drive the price? Like, should my content be like a bulletin board and everything has a fixed price and people just select from a menu? Or if a really big company came along where they could get potentially phenomenal upside from advertising with me much more than anybody else, shouldn't they pay more? Like, shouldn't what I then try to charge them be tied a bit to the value of what they can do on my platform that they can't do anywhere else? Like, I think that's totally reasonable. So some takeaways from the, the value conversation. This was an interesting thing that they kind of kicked off with on the subject of standardization. They said any sort of customization of delivery I.e. customization in the work that you're doing requires a value conversation. And any standardization of delivery distracts from the value conversation. So if you're trying to get back to like, here's what I do XYZ and here's kind of our fixed price for doing this, that or the other thing. It takes away from the opportunity to have a conversation to see if there's actually something you're unlocking for this business with a tremendous amount of upside that you could potentially charge more for. I don't see this being super in vogue right now. I think what most people are settling into is like, oh, we have a notion of what the market will pay for this type of service. And we come in somewhere in there and there's, I think there's a lot of things wrapped up in that I think oftentimes the framing is you're a vendor, you're there to do a job and that's all people want. You know, just the framing of here's what the market will pay like with that is sort of built in this notion that we're doing what the market does. If you do what the market does, like you're competing with everybody else on price. And that's what we're kind of trying to avoid to begin with. Right. What is your unique solution, your unique expertise where you can execute on something better than anybody else can. And for us, and what we do, that's usually how can the services we provide impact a profit leverage for the business? So the, the upside is not just I'm gonna replace your accounting staff or you won't have to hire somebody, like that's fine. And you can actually get to really good fees by framing what you do relative to FTEs. To say like, well, if we didn't pick this up for you, you're gonna have to, that's gonna be like half of a controller level person's time, which is pick a number, 70 grand a year. Like that's, that's not cheap. But the kind of uncapped opportunity is, is how can what you do impact a real profit lever for the business where it's not just we need numbers, we need reliable bookkeeping and it's not like what you see over the next six months. It is, what could this business be in five years if this core thing was solved? That's more the, the value pricing, framing. And honestly, oftentimes all it takes is like one more conversation to understand what those profit drivers are for a business to be able to reframe what you do in a more valuable way. We did, we did very bespoke engagements for our clients. While the underlying services, like our quote unquote service library, which was our internal vernacular for the things we did, those things were largely the same, but how we would present them externally were very tailored to like what the needs of the entrepreneur was and what the long term upside was for the business. And I do think if you're not having this conversation to a degree, you're probably leaving money on the table. There's like absurd versions of this, like the notion where you have two similar entrepreneurs sitting in the lobby in your office and they tell each other what they pay for the work that they get and one is like 10 times the other and you just, you can't look that person like dead in the eye. What we did. Never got to that extreme, but for sure, different businesses are going to assign a different value to the things that you can do for them. This episode is sponsored in part by Ignition. Come, come, come, come, come. Here's the thing. Here's the thing about client billing. You can't bill for the time you spend billing. You can't. You can't. It is pure waste. And we're bad at billing because it's. It's icky. You let things slide. You don't get paid. You waste time. Waste time chasing people for money. That's not what I did. I would just. I didn't want to waste time chasing them, and so I would just. I just eat it. Don't do that. This is where Ignition comes in. The leading revenue generation platform for accounts and professional services. When I was running my firm, Ignition wiped out our air. It's true. And significantly reduced the time spent billing clients, saving our partners over a thousand hours in the first year because they didn't have to build all that stuff manually. Man. With Ignition, we want more business with impressive online proposals. No more hustle and hustle and PDFs and Word docs. We automatically pulled payment upfront or at the end of a job when it was done. No more dialing for dollars. We transitioned our firm to more recurring revenue and better managed scope creep. No more leaving money on the table. Ignition is making thousands of firms more money and genuinely made us more profitable. Check out why over 7,000 of the smartest businesses run on ignition@ignition app.com. put a link in the show notes. This episode is sponsored in part by cloud accountant staffing. Hey, scenario. What if. What if you had this buddy that was running another accounting firm and they stumbled into this thing and they like, they start hiring these really good offshore accountants in the Philippines, and you're talking with them one day and your buddy's like, hey, I got some really good people here. You want me to hook you up? You want me to find you a few. Find you a few accountants? What would you say? Would you be like, nah, I'm good. I can find accountants all day long. I don't need more accountants in my firm. Poppycock. You'd be like, tell me more. That's what working with cloud accountant staffing is. Because the team behind cloud account staffing, they were literally just an accounting firm that started hiring people in the Philippines, had really good luck, like I did, with the quality of who they picked up, and then they just started doing it for other firms. It's kind of as simple as that. If you're looking for somebody who understands you, who just works with accounting firms, not some rando sending you cold DMs on LinkedIn, a group that actually does this stuff just with accountants, check out cloud accountant staffing link down in the show notes kind of four steps that the book outlined for doing this. Number one, confirm their desired future state. So understand what they're trying to get to. Number two, identify the metrics of success. How do you actually measure if you're progressing closer to that desired state? Number three, determine the value to be created. Ron Baker in his stuff, he's always pushed like you really have to confirm this with the client and ensure that everybody's on the same page of exactly what that value is. And once they agree with you on what that value is, it becomes much easier to then with a straight face say kind of here's what that then ought to cost. So step four then is just that, a set pricing guideline. What would you pay for a solution to get you to that desired future state? Couple other considerations here. Not everyone that you talk to may be interested in value creation. So if a member of the person's team has been tasked with going out and, you know, sourcing a provider for this thing, but the member of that team is not on board for the value creation that you can provide, then they're not going to be excited about that value upside, right? So consider the stakeholders involved in whether they're actually on board for value upside. The degree to which they are will impact obviously their excitement about whether you can solve that problem for them. It's interesting for like three tiered proposal options, they actually recommend that the cheapest option is the client's budget. What they said, here's kind of what we've set aside for this service. You use the top option to anchor. So it's a big old, way more expensive option. And they're, I mean in their examples the top option was like 6 to 7x the bottom option and then the middle option is somewhere between those two and the goal with those kind of upper options is you are showing them how what you do is going to lead to their business making more money. So at the bottom end of the spectrum, the minimum option, that is the client's budget, at that price point you're probably being perceived as the vendor, whereas at those higher price points you are being perceived as the expert who's kind of along for the growth of their business and unlocking something of meaning for the entrepreneur. Number four, last one, the Closing conversation. This one was more concise. In the book, basically at this point you kind of just become the facilitator. You help the client with all the information that's in front of them. You just kind of help them reason through what makes sense for them. It's. And this came up a number of times in the book, think of it as a conversation, not a performance. You're not pitching, you're not doing a show for them. It is, it's a conversation. You're trying to maintain your position as the expert. And at this closing stage, your job is to facilitate and assure. So what are the nuts and bolts that need to happen in order for this engagement to move forward? And how can you assure them that of all the things you, you learned prior to this, in the process, you're actually going to be able to execute on it? This I thought was like a really prescient sort of point. Your job is to escalate their commitment from spoken interest to signed contract to first payment. That's the last conversation, the closing conversation. I can tell you I was really bad at that one. Oftentimes we chuck the proposal over the fence and if anything happened, great. Otherwise, that was kind of it. Once we sent that proposal over the fence, we didn't do a whole lot of even facilitating to make their life easier to navigate that transition. It was like, well, we've done our work. You tell us when you decided we probably didn't engage with that side of it as much as we could. Which I honestly think has a pretty big impact on your closing percentage with like, if you can break that sort of communication barrier down a little more so that they're more willing to bring up maybe objections or just very practical considerations of here's why, you know, we may not be able to start on this timeline that you are providing because we've got these other projects going on or something like that. The more transparency there is in that, in those sort of lines of communication, the more likely you will be able to navigate them through that and as they say, escalate their level of commitment until you got them on board. Gang, I can't recommend this one enough. Really good stuff. Also, the previous book, Win Without Pitching Manifesto is really good with four conversations, very no nonsense. There were very few points in this book where I was like, eh, is that super relevant to. To accounting? Probably came up most around the value pricing conversation and just how nuanced that is in our space and kind of the nature of our work where this, a book like this, I think is really, really helpful is when you're at that turning point and being like, man, how do I get my team selling? Oftentimes this is the scariest and last thing for you to delegate. Because, I mean, nothing impacts the bottom line quite like selling. And you're worried about, you know, somebody else not being able to close as well as you. I find oftentimes third party literature or an outside expert is the best way to get a group of people aligned on what your organizational approach is to a process. Because if you're just the guru and you're just the unicorn and somebody sits in with you 100 times to just learn how you do it, I wouldn't argue that that's a very intentional approach. This is the beginnings of a system to selling that not only you can do, but the rest of your team can do. And it's man, it's once you can get out of the way and get to that point where it's like, okay, I'm now the owner of this process and the, the mentality and the voice and finding the right people that can come into that process. That's my job now. That's where like running a business gets very exciting because you've removed yourself as the secret sauce. And man, for small firm running it is so much about. You have this capability and your clients want, want you to dance. But how do you ever get out from under that? The most exciting aspect of running a business is building the machine. Oftentimes not for everybody, but to design the machine that can print money. That's really, really exciting and particularly around the sales process, stuff like this. And I went through the win without pitching manifesto with my team and it was so valuable. Stuff like this gets everybody thinking along the same lines in a way that's really powerful and vastly better than just, I don't know, somebody sitting in on your meetings and trying to just absorb what you do. Curious. If you've read this one, let me know what you think. I super enjoyed it. I think you will too. That's it for today. Thanks for coming and hanging.