A Simple Sales Model For Experts

What if the relentless pursuit of growth is actually making your business more complex and less profitable? This week, Michael is joined by Blair Enns, founder of Win Without Pitching and author of The Four Conversations, who returns to the podcast to share how his business has evolved since 2018. Blair reveals how a forced pivot to online training during the pandemic led to significant growth, but also to a profound realization: bigger isn’t always better. He explains his counterintuitive decision to stop chasing scale and instead re-engineer his business for simplicity, profitability, and personal fulfillment, a process that involved reducing complexity and empowering a team of coaches to take over training delivery.

Blair gets into the nuts and bolts of his powerful sales philosophy, which is built on the idea that experts should stop acting like salespeople and start showing up as the discerning, in-demand advisors they truly are. He walks through his “Four Conversations” model, a framework designed to move prospects from vendor to expert, qualify opportunities, establish value, and close deals without resorting to traditional pitching. Blair also shares his strong opinion on the common trap of “moving down market” by creating lower-priced offerings, explaining why this strategy almost always fails for consultants. Finally, he offers a grounded, practical perspective on AI, detailing how he’s building a “Blair Bot” to support his business while being brutally honest about the technology’s current limitations.

In this episode you will learn:

• The single biggest mistake experts make in sales conversations.

• Why the most important “conversation” happens before you ever speak to a prospect.

• How to scale a service business with a team of coaches without sacrificing quality.

• The philosophical shift from chasing revenue to embracing “continuous growth.”

• The Four Conversations model for a more authentic and effective sales process.

• The common trap of “moving down market” and why it rarely works.

• How to leverage AI as a powerful tool while understanding its limitations.

Welcome to the Consulting Success podcast. I’m your host Michael Zipursky, and in this podcast, we’re going to dive deep into the world of elite consultants where you’re going to learn the strategies, tactics and mindset to grow a highly profitable and successful consulting business.

Before we dive into today’s episode. Are you ready to grow and take your consulting business to the next level? Many of the clients that we work with started as podcast listeners just like you, and a consistent theme they have shared with us is that they wished they had reached out sooner about our Clarity Coaching Program rather than waiting for that perfect time. If you’re interested in learning more about how we help consultants just like you, we’re offering a free, no pressure growth session call. On this call, we’re going to dive deep into your goals, challenges and situation and outline a plan that is tailor made just for you. We will also help you identify where you may be making costly and time consuming mistakes to ensure you’re benefiting from the proven methods and strategies to grow your consulting business. 

So don’t wait years to find clarity. If you’re committed and serious about reaching a new level of success in your consulting business, go ahead and schedule your free growth session. Get in touch today. Just visit Consulting Success – Grow to book your free call today.

Blair Enns is the founder of Win Without Pitching, a sales training program that teaches expert advisors how to sell and price their services like the experts they are. A leading advocate for value-based pricing, he helps consultants and creative professionals worldwide win more business without giving away their thinking for free. He is the author of three books, including The Win Without Pitching Manifesto and The Four Conversations, and co-hosts the popular podcast 2Bobs: Conversations on the Art of Creative Entrepreneurship.

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Hey, Blair. Welcome.

Thanks, Michael. My pleasure to be here.

Yeah. Great to catch up with you in this format again. I was just taking a look before we spoke back- or you were on the Consulting Success podcast in 2018.

Oh, that long?

Episode 22.

That long. Wow!

What has changed in your business since then?

Nothing. Not a thing. Eighteen. 2018. So pre, pre-COVID.

Seven years or so, give or take. I mean, but yeah, like what is- just fast forward. I think when we talked at that point, the episode was you had built your business to $400,000 per year, so you realized you wanted to do kind of less consulting and more building training and kind of running a training company. And you are really, you are growing multiples of that or growing significantly beyond that. But yeah. What has kind of changed or where are you at today?

[01:02] – From In-Person Workshops to Online Training

So what is the first thing that changed? Back in 2018, I forget what the number is now, but I used to know it to the percentage point. Something like 60 percent of our revenue was tied to me getting on a plane. And then by March of 2020, it was zero because of COVID. So we had started in 2018 or 2019. We had started offering some training programs online, but our flagship Win Without Pitching workshop was always in person. And the team, we were running these various specialized boot camps that were online and the team was lobbying me to move the workshop online. And I was adamant, was not going to do it. I did not think the product would be nearly as good.

Our hand was forced. My hand was forced. Put it online and immediately saw that in many ways the product is actually much better. Now the flip side of that in 2025 is, I think, you know, we are deep into some Zoom backlash. So we deliver this training product over four days and twelve hours, three hours a day. And not everybody wants to sign up for that. So we are running some in-real-life workshops. We had one in Buenos Aires this week. That is the second one we have done in Buenos Aires. We have a coach in Buenos Aires. We did one in London a few weeks back, and we are looking at doing one in Spain. But we will not get back to what we used to do, which is every couple of months we would have a workshop in a new, typically North American city and keep moving it around.

What gives you the confidence, or what have you done so that you do not necessarily have to be, let’s say, in Argentina for this to be delivered? It is delivered by one of your coaches or, you know, a team member. How have you, how did you kind of get to that place? Because obviously a lot of experts, consultants are very attached to their involvement in delivery, maintaining high quality product, right? The experience, the client wants them, so on and so forth. Just walk us through how did you get to that level of comfort?

[03:19] – Scaling Through Coaches and Regional Teams

Yeah, you know, I have suffered from all that too. Letting other people deliver my material. Took me forever to get over it. I finally largely got over it and now I am almost entirely over it. Not entirely. I still do public workshops online, three or four a year. It has been four a year for a while. We are thinking of going down to three a year because we just launched another product that I will talk to you about shortly. So I do the public workshops, but I do not do private training anymore. So our team of contractor coaches who all do other things as their main job, all deliver private training. And I am just in the early stages of actually farming out the closing of those private training deals to those coaches too. So extricating myself from the sale for most of them.

And then I get to focus on- I want to deliver the material a few times a year. I want to stay in contact with the content, the curriculum and with the clients. But I am increasingly, you know, I will be 59 next month. I do not have any plans to stop, but I do want to increase a little bit more of my ‘me time’. I want the business to be less dependent on me. So I am pushing more and more of the- pushing all the private training and pretty soon all of the sales of private training out to the coaching team.

Is there any one specific thing or maybe a few things that you feel were kind of instrumental in, like we established this system or was it just multiple training sessions? Like, what did you actually do to get your coaches to a place where you feel confident that they can deliver at the level that you want, you know, that essentially represents the brand?

We have always been really picky about our coaches. So we have seven contractor coaches, if I am counting right. If I am counting, we are onboarding one in Asia Pacific right now. So maybe it is eight, maybe it is seven. I have to do the math. And one, two, three, soon, four of them will be area coaches. So already in EMEA, in the UK, and broader Europe, we have got somebody who is effectively, what is the title, Training Director or EMEA Training Director. We have got a training director for North America. We have got one for LATAM and Spanish language in Buenos Aires and soon we will have one in Asia Pacific. So we will have all of the regions covered.

What has caused me to have the confidence in these people to sell? Well, they are teaching selling, right? They are teaching our way of selling. So all of these coaches of ours have been clients of mine, have demonstrated a proficiency with this model, have proven that they know how to use it, how to apply it. They know it inside out. Most of them, maybe all of them, are better coaches than I am. Some of them know the material almost as much as I do. They all have a depth of it and they all kind of, they all model it slightly differently because we all have different personalities. So, I mean, if they have my confidence to be able to teach selling, then they should have my confidence in being able to sell selling. So that one is actually pretty easy.

Talk to me a little bit about what is going on in your business, because if we contrast to 2018, the decision was to really grow the business, you know, find a model that is more scalable and just, you know, before we hit record, you were sharing about some shifts that have been kind of happening inside of the business. And you are speaking to them now as well in terms of finding ways to remove yourself from a lot of the day-to-day or from even doing the coaching and so forth. Can you talk a little bit more about kind of what has gone into that thinking in terms of the growth of the business or just how you think about growth today or scaling and maybe how it is a little bit different from how you thought about it before?

[07:34] – Redefining Growth Beyond Revenue Metrics

Yeah, I am a big fan of always growing. My most recent post was on- it is called “The Chief Growth Officer.” But it is about, it is a really philosophical post on how we all need to embrace constant growth, continuous growth, and how I grappled with this for forty years where, in my first economics class I was taught that growth is a constant, it is a requirement of the economy. And I have always thought, well, that is impossible. So I spent forty years grappling with this. Thirty years I made no progress. In the last ten years, I have come to see that we all need to strive to grow all the time. Now, the mistake that we make- so in a business, what are the metrics of growth? Well, revenue, profit, sometimes headcount. Those are pretty good surrogates for measurements of growth. But the map is not the territory. And very often we start keep chasing the metrics without actually growing. So growing to me is basically learning yourself and expanding yourself, creating a better version of yourself. And I get into this in the piece around, it is in the nature of a human being. It might be a force, it is a fundamental force in the universe. It might be more powerful than physics itself. Anyway, it is just like you look around you, everything is striving. We must continue to strive.

So you are not talking about growth of revenue or profits necessarily. It is the growth of you as an individual and constantly finding ways to make progress, even if that progress does not necessarily mean that you are adding more, you know, more digits to your bank account.

[09:08] – Simplifying Business by Reducing Complexity

Yeah, and it should add more digits to my bank account. But I no longer focus on those digits, the metrics of growth. I focus on growing, on doing better for our clients, you know, and reaching more clients certainly. But whenever, and I said this in the post, whenever I had set specific revenue or profit targets, I was always uncomfortable with those targets. I know they are important, but the focusing on the target itself, and I am not saying this is wrong or anybody else should adopt this philosophy, but it just felt like I was focusing on the wrong thing. So I have effectively freed myself just to create a better product, to keep pushing the bounds of our knowledge, to find better ways to deliver to our current clients.

So in 2020, business grew by 21 percent. Sorry, in 2021, business grew by 21 percent, top line. And we had grown the year before slightly, even though 2020 started off with- at some point, you probably, most of us were thinking, at about February or March of 2020, “Do we even still have a business? Are we going to go out of business?” It picked- there was like a six week stop in the economy where everything, there was just economic gridlock. And then things started to happen again. 2020 ended up being a year where we grew slightly. 2021 was more. 2022 started to plateau. ‘23 and ‘24 dropped a little bit. So I had always been trying to break through a certain revenue plateau. We got past it and then we settled back down to the revenue plateau. If you average out the revenue over the last six years, it is basically the same number. But there was this two year blip.

So we were retrenching, thinking, “Okay, well how do we push past this barrier?” And then at some point I thought, “You know what? There is enough money here, the revenue is good enough that if we just reorient around lower costs, if we quit reinvesting the operating profit into more growth and we create a business that runs, that is smaller and is simpler.” And simpler is the key here. My theme for the year is “reduce complexity”. When you are constantly pursuing scale, it is crazy how you complexify so many elements of the business because you are trying to build for ahead of where you are. The moment you say, “I kind of like this revenue level, I am going to reoptimize to deliver the very best product at this revenue level,” you can start getting rid of stuff. That is a healthy cathartic exercise. And that is what I have been doing for the last year and a half or so and really enjoying it.

I have been having a lot of conversations on this topic with clients, so this definitely resonates. Have you read the book The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek? Does that ring a bell?

No. I am familiar with the idea of an infinite game, yeah.

It aligns in some ways with what you are sharing here. So many people have this quest, I think just because, in my observation, when you look at media and what people talk about, it is growth, it is big numbers. And so that kind of seems like that is success. But I have also witnessed many people and experienced it myself where you are focused so much on growth that all of a sudden the game does not become as fun anymore or, yeah, as you said, you tend to add a lot of complexity.

I think over the last decade or so, maybe decade and a half or even two decades in the ZIRP environment, ‘zero interest rate environment’, where Silicon Valley had such a big hold on all of us in business, regardless of, you know, even if we are just into tech a little bit. And the model in a zero interest rate environment was screw profitability. Like what was Reid Hoffman’s book, Blitzscaling? It is all about scale. It is all about escape velocity. So like profitability is going to be the buyer’s problem or somebody else’s problem. I think we were all, tainted is not the right word, but I think we were all influenced by that a little bit.

And so everywhere I looked it was scale, scale, scale. And I am not saying do not scale or scale is wrong. I have been in business over twenty years. I have learned how to do a certain amount of revenue through different product mixes, different delivery mechanisms. This business with Blair at the helm seems to like to operate at a certain revenue level, and that is with lower costs. It is actually a really nice business. So, you know, at 59 years old, I am trying to reduce complexity, get rid of the things that are busying up my calendar where other people can do them better, things that do not give me energy, etc. So I learn. I am just a slow learner.

No, no. I think it is interesting because a lot of, I find, you know, people talk a lot about big numbers and growth and all this, but the studies that I have done on these businesses and business models, you often see that even though, you know, somebody is running a company doing 30 million a year, 50 million a year, whatever it might be, the founders of those companies in many cases are not taking much money in the business. They are building with the hope of a successful exit. And the majority of the time they do not exit successfully. And even if they do have a quote unquote, “successful exit”, they have often diluted the business so much or they have so little ownership that it really has not paid out for them. But the media obviously likes to put the spotlight on those that, the small percentage that have been very successful. So let’s shift. I want to talk about sales and conversations, which is really the topic of your most recent book, The Four Conversations. And so we are going to pull up a model shortly from your book and have you explain it. But just to kind of, before we even get into that, I am interested in what you see as kind of the single biggest mistake that people have when it comes to sales conversations that you feel probably cost them the most money. Like what is the inefficiency or the mistake that people make when it comes to sales conversations?

[15:24] – Common Sales Mistakes Experts Make

So we work with people who sell expertise. So they are basically experts first, consultants, other forms of advisors, marketing agency owners, financial planners, etc. So they are advisors first or experts first and they’re salespeople second. And the big fundamental mistake that I am trying to correct with this book, which is basically our training program in a book, is this idea that you think, in these two different jobs that you have, job one being the expert, job two selling your expertise, you think you have to show up differently.

You think that- and I have a slide that I share on a screen in a training workshop that says “Expert You”, “ Salesperson You”. And on the ‘Expert You’ side, there are all these characteristics, like you are discerning, you are present to your clients, you are in demand, you are highly paid. And on the “Salesperson” side, it has got the opposite characteristics. You are enthusiastic, you are pitching. Instead of advising, you are pitching. Instead of being present to your clients, you are presenting. Instead of highly paid, you are working for free in the sale at a high cost of sale, etc. And what I say is, “You know, let’s just drop the salesperson persona. Everything you think you know about how to show up in a sale, you already have. If you have the attributes on the left of “Expert You”, that is in our model, that is a pretty good salesperson. The sale is the sample of the engagement to follow. So be that expert advisor, show up in the sale that way and simply use a model, a set of frameworks and principles that lets that version of you shine.

So if someone was wanting to develop one skill that would help them to be more effective as a salesperson, as an expert, essentially they are an expert, but developing a skill that would help them to be more successful in landing, you know, closing winning deals and so forth, what would that skill set be? Or what would that one skill kind of be in your mind?

[17:33] – Power of Questions Over Answers in Sales

It is questions, not answers. In the sale, you think you have to show up as this brilliant person with all the answers and you need to project information to the client, you need to push information to them. You should just be an expert advisor. You should show up with a set of frameworks, which are- the frameworks are, for each of these four conversations, they are largely frameworks for the questions that you want to ask and get answered. So show up as “Advisor You” with the right questions and navigate through the sale in a conversation by being the person who poses the question.

Is this the opposite of the Oren Klaff Pitch Anything approach?

So my business is called Win Without Pitching. My first book is called The Win Without Pitching Manifesto. I quite love that book and there is so much, I quote it quite a bit. I do not think it is the opposite of Pitch Anything because the context for him, when you are fundraising, it is a little bit different. It is a dog and pony show. You are effectively auditioning and I do not know, I have had clients who have taken these Win Without Pitching principles that are described in The Four Conversations and tried to apply them to fundraising. Some translate, some do not. I think it is a different style, it is a different approach, but I would not put these two as polar opposites.

Makes sense. Okay. I am going to bring up one of these models here from your book, and I would like to have you just walk through this and explain, Blair, what are we looking at? There are the four conversations, but just explain each of these and how they connect. And I would also love to hear, why did you develop this model or where did this come from? Just in terms of your thinking to develop it.

[19:36] – The Four Conversations Sales Model

Yeah. Okay, so the model is, first of all, the book opens with a quote from somebody who is famous for, as far as I can tell, only this quote. It says, “All models are wrong, some are useful.” So my model, which is a view of the world, it is a way of organizing complexity, it consists of frameworks and principles. But the overarching model, the view, is that we see the sale as a series of four linear and discrete conversations. And again, all models are wrong. So is the sale always a series of four conversations? Are they all nicely lined up in that order or are they all discretely self contained? No, the sale is typically a lot messier than that. But it can be helpful for us to think of the sale as these four different conversations.

So the conversations are the ‘probative conversation’. That is where you seek to prove your expertise to the client and then move in their mind from the position of vendor, powerless position of vendor, to the position of the expert.

The second conversation is the ‘qualifying conversation’. That is the vetting conversation, where you are vetting the lead to see if an opportunity exists. And the client is also vetting you too. That is the other part of the qualifying conversation. But you should have a framework that allows you to ask the questions to determine whether or not this is a good fit for you.

The third conversation is the ‘value conversation’. That is where you seek to uncover the value that you might help to create and then the share of that value that you might command in the form of fees. So you are uncovering the possibility of value creation, and then you are beginning the pricing discussion. You are not setting price per se, but you are beginning the pricing discussion based on the value that might be created, not based on the cost of your solutions.

The fourth conversation is the ‘closing conversation’. It is where you seek to help the client select and commit to a path forward. So implied in that is in the closing conversations you will put forward a multi-option proposal. Here are different ways we can work together at different price points. Let’s talk through the different options, discuss the pros and cons. You tell me which of these seems to be the best fit for you.

So a question for you on the first conversation. You mentioned the purpose of this is really to demonstrate your expertise for the buyer to see you as an expert. How do you think about that in terms of the role of marketing and content? Isn’t the role of marketing and content to prove your expertise to make it abundantly clear to the buyer that you in fact are an expert, so that when you have that initial conversation, you do not need to spend as much time proving your expertise? So just how do you kind of think about those?

Yeah, that is exactly right. And for that reason, I am glad you asked this question is the first one in the model because for that reason the probative conversation is the most different from the three that follow. The probative conversation is the conversation that happens without you present through your agents of reputation building, typically your referrers and your thought leadership. So it encompasses your business strategy, your positioning and your marketing. You effectively prove your expertise in the public domain and drive inbound inquiries to you with you already seen as the expert. So in that first person to person conversation, that is the qualifying conversation, the client has largely qualified you. There will still be some questions they have for you, but they have largely done their homework through their exposure to your work. They have already arrived at the conclusion that they think there is a, at least initially, there is a pretty good fit here. And so in the qualifying conversation, you are qualifying them, you are asking them, is there anything else you need to know about me? That is how you would think about it. It is unlike the other conversations, the probative conversation is a construct. It is a “conversation” in air quotes that happens without you present.

How did you come up with this? I mean, it is not a complex model by any means, but can you just walk us through the thinking of how you put this together or why you put it together in this specific way?

I play with models a lot. I write about models. I am constantly exploring other domains for models and bringing other models in. We have some curriculum on model development and I have had various models over the years. I do not remember the moment when I decided that this was the model. It is well over ten years ago now. My first notes on this book are ten years old. It is kind of lost in the fog of my mind, lost to history. I do not remember.

I wanted to ask you as well then, Blair, on this. When you look at a sales process, what is the earliest point in a sales process when you are following through this model where you can tell that a deal will close or where you feel the chances of this moving forward and this person becoming a client and engaging are high? What are the signs or when do you get that feeling?

So I can tell fairly early in the conversation. Sometimes in the inquiry that comes in whether or not the probative conversation has happened. So remember, that is the conversation that happens without you present and where you move in the mind of the client from a vendor to the expert. We have a name for that when the moment in time when that objective is reached. We call it ‘the flip’. So let’s say I get an inbound inquiry. I get on a Zoom call with somebody, I can tell right away whether or not the flip has happened. How did you hear about us? And if the flip has happened, then I think it is highly likely that they will buy something. It is unlikely, it is not impossible, but it is unlikely that they are going to hire somebody else. And the reason is we have a- I do not know if it is a polarizing point of view on selling, but it is not kind of a universally accepted view on selling.

And if somebody says, when I say, “How did you hear about us?” If somebody said, “Well, I have read your books, I have been listening to your podcast for years, etc.,” that is a pretty good sign. More and more I am hearing from people, “I asked [pick your LLM] ‘Who is an expert on [X]?’ And it said you are. So I reached out to you.” And then my follow up question is, “Great. I mean, I love that our robot overlords love me and Win Without Pitching, but great. What do you know about Win Without Pitching?” The answer is always nothing. “I just went to your website, filled out the form, I know nothing.” So there is some authority cue there. The LLM has said this is the person or one of the three people or organizations. But what they have not done is they have not clicked into articles, subscribed, listened to podcast episodes, read the book. So while the first piece of information I get is positive, what I learn is the flip has not happened.

So in that case, is it just a longer sales cycle? They need more time to go through and consume and you are following up or what tends to happen to those types of-

So I am going to tell you what I do and I am not saying this is what other people should do. But I have twenty years of a body of work, three books, over a million words on my website. I think 600 podcasts, mine and others, that if somebody says, “I do not know, I just googled you or asked an LLM,” I give them homework to do. I say- so I will finish qualifying them and then I will say, “The next step is for you to go read the book. You can read The Four Conversations or if 48,000 words is too much, there is a really easy read called The Win Without Pitching Manifesto. It is 24,000 words. At the end of either of those books, you will know if we are ideologically aligned or not.” And so if they do the homework and come back, that is a pretty good opportunity.

Now if I were a better salesperson and if I had more ambition, if I were needier, if I were in more difficult circumstances, I would push harder on those opportunities. I would work those opportunities harder. But I am past the point of- I try to, I just do not have enough shits to give. And I guess I mean, I have survived this long largely on inbound inquiries, especially for the last few many years. So I am not suggesting, you know, those people who are trying to build a practice out there, I am not suggesting that they do what I do but to give them some homework. You know, I have gone to all the work of putting the ideology out. Not just content, how to do this, but like the belief. Here is what I believe about this and if there is not ideological resonance, you are probably going to hire somebody else anyway.

What is the opposite? The sign of the feeling that you know a deal will not move forward or is highly unlikely. What gives you that spidey sense?

Oh. So I had somebody email me two times last week. The first email was- they filled out a form on the website. “I need to find a provider to help with something about proposals by Wednesday. Please submit your information.” So I do not even reply to those. I ignore it and then on Thursday, the day after Wednesday, they send the same email again. I just ignore it. Like, I think you have been around the block enough. Like I have replied to a few emails with, “I am the third bid, aren’t I?” Like it is just clear the way that they have structured the email. It is like we already know who we want to work with, but I need some negotiating leverage to get this other person’s price down. So can you send me some information on X? And my shortest answer to an email like that has been one word, just “No”. And that is me just playing. Again, kids, do not do this at home.

It is kind of like the, you know, the garbage in, garbage out type of mindset of if they are coming at you with something like that, that clearly they have not done any homework, they do not really care. Why should you?

But I mean, you asked the question and it is a legitimate question, Michael. But you know, you have been doing this long enough. You can tell by the inbound inquiry.

Like, oh, of course, but I also know that, you know, one of the reasons that I selfishly do these podcasts is because I love getting different perspectives. And also I want our audience and, you know, whoever is listening, watching to hear maybe even the same thing that I would say but from somebody else because it makes them even more confident.

You look at it and you go, “I have seen this movie, I have seen this movie a hundred times. I know how it ends.” I am not, like, I am so far past the point of building up a false hope about something that has a high likelihood of proceeding.

[30:54] – Why Moving Down Market Fails Consultants

So one thing I do want to get your thoughts on. I am hearing, and I have heard this for a while, but it seems to be coming up even more now. And it might be the environment in the market, but many experts, and so in my world that is all consultants, there is this belief that moving down market can grow the business. So the idea of lowering prices or coming up with an offer because they talk to people and they are premium priced, so a lot of people they talk to cannot necessarily afford them or it is not a fit. So the mindset is “Let’s create something that is going to be lower priced, we become more accessible, we can help more people.” That thought is coming from, you know, a good place, but is it actually good for their business? What are your thoughts on that?

I am so glad you asked this question. I know we are going to be aligned on this like the person. So this comes up a couple times a year, about every six months or so. Somebody in our, a client in our world says, “Hey, I am launching or I am thinking of launching this new lower cost offering,” because they lose a few deals on price and they think, “Okay, well if I look below the market, below where I am now, there is a huge volume of them and I am just going to create this lower priced product going to drop down a bit or at least this tier of offering. And the volume is going to be there.” The volume is not there. The volume never comes. I have- so I have seen if I think of my clients, I think of one who pulled this off. And he pulled it off because he did it the right way. He recognized that technology, this is many years ago now, was threatening his core offering. So he built a scaled, a lower priced, more automated scaled solution and he cannibalized his own business by selling it to his clients first. Now that is commitment.

Now the example that you just gave, I am sure you hear the same stories from your clients as I do from mine, which is, “Yeah, I am going to do this in addition to it is not going to cost me anything.” It is like – and it always dies – it is like people over- when you drop price and you productize more, the idea is it works because the volume is there. But if you are selling consulting services, you are not in the volume game. Your business is not oriented towards volume. You are going to suddenly change the entire culture of the organization and learn how to pursue engagements at volume? Like it is not that easy. That is a fundamental change.

[33:26] – Embracing AI and Building the Blair Bot

Yeah, value over volume in this business, that is for sure. So you talked about technology right now and obviously everyone is, you know, AI is the talk of the town. What are your thoughts on, like just how are you thinking about AI? I want to know also my next question is going to be how are you using AI in your business, whether it is marketing, content, operations, streamlining. I just would love to know kind of what you are doing or what you are definitely not doing. But before we even get to that, Blair, just how do you think about AI? Like just what is your take or what is your stance on AI right now?

I think AI is awesome. It is just the best tool ever. It is so helpful. I am in so many just ongoing conversations about, “Hey, have you done this and you have done this?” And like it is just the most fun in your personal life. Like AI is my doctor. It is my, it is my home maintenance advisor, where I just tell it all the appliances and their serial numbers and their dates, and it is like, “No, this is not working.” And it’s just like-

When you are saying this, I am half believing you and I am half thinking like you are just going to be like that is not at all how things are because it is one of these things that people have oftentimes a very strong opinion on it. But I think that you are saying like this is actually how I am using it.

Oh, it is like, it wrote, I had a blood test the other day, uploaded all of my medical exams, tests since 2014, and I looked at the results and I had ChatGPT look at it, and there was a score for something that was at the upper range of normal. But the velocity, the change since the last one, there is clearly a trajectory here that is troubling. And so I asked ChatGPT a few different ways and it said, “No, you need to get this-” Oh. And I talked to my doctor, he said, “No, it is normal. We do not start treating that until it is twice the value”. And I thought, “Well, the point at which you start treating something and the point at which I start doing something about it are two different things.”

Yeah.

So it wrote a letter to my doctor. It said, “You should get these tests. Do you want me to write the letter to your doctor?” “Yes, please.” It is, I mean, I use it everywhere, everything for like it is- So, I think it is an incredible tool. Let’s stay- are we going, is there going to be such thing as artificial superintelligence? I do not think so. Even so, AGI used to be AGI, artificial general intelligence. And then people started changing the language around it because AGI was supposed to be like the superhuman.

Yeah, I am still hearing AGI on some podcasts and different people, you know, using that.

But the old definition has now been kind of relegated to, it is just really smart at doing- There is no actual good definition of AGI right now. But there is ASI, artificial super intelligence that will be smarter than a person. For phil- it’s not even philosophical reasons, but here is my overarching belief on AI: We are a long way from artificial superintelligence. If I had to make a bet, I would say it never happens, that artificial intelligence will never be smarter than a human being. Because I think to do that we have to solve the consciousness problem, which will require us to resolve the two different branches of physics. And I do not think we are close to doing that.

So let me back up. ASI will require something computers do not have and cannot be programmed in: free will. You have to tell the computer, no matter how smart it is, what problem to go work on. And you can even program some randomness into it, but it is not going to think of the problem that nobody has thought of before. It is not going to think, it cannot think creatively without free will. Randomness is powerful, can be programmed in, but that is randomness within the finite set of possibilities. Something truly new, like fundamentally groundbreakingly new is not going to come out of AI. Plus, we make the mistake of thinking that knowledge comes from inference. Knowledge comes from explanations – observing something and coming up with an explanation.

How is it impacting your business? Like, I mean, have you changed anything in the business because of-

Yeah, I have a full time team member, my youngest son, who is outside of the studio, who is working full time on our AI projects. So we are trying to create what is internally known as a ‘Blair Bot’. We have a live version of it. So we have an academy where once you go through training, you get lifetime access to this platform. It is a white label version of Circle. Circle has an AI agent. So within the community, the AI agent pulls from all of the stuff in the community and then we feed it all my books, all my podcasts, all my blog posts, all our training material, recordings from all the coaching conversations. So it has got access to more of my work than- I know some clients of mine have built their own Blair Bots and they have demoed them to me. They’re garbage, the one that we have built that is better than anybody else’s, is still garbage. The problem is like it is 85 percent really good and 15 percent made up bullshit generalized sales knowledge. The stuff that I am railing against.

That is the challenge I find with AI is you know, you can have it develop all these plans and scenarios, but there is always an element or a portion that is so far off that it really requires a lot of additional work. So I see it being very powerful in, you know, kind of getting beyond what some people would consider like writer’s block. It can get you going, it can help you think in new ways or see some new ideas. But ultimately you need your own expertise and experience and to be able to refine and optimize and really kind of get things dialed in.

Yeah, research and analysis are great uses for AI. It is a pretty decent search engine for the content that I have created. But, so our clients who are using it, they know that I am looking at all the questions because we are trying to improve this. I am looking at all the questions they ask it and I am looking at the answers. And I see if somebody asks, “What does Blair say about X?” It is pretty good at telling it what I think because it is pretty clear. If somebody says, “Do an evaluation of my offering,” or something about a specific sales call, it goes off the reservation, so to speak, and gives really general, confident, generalized knowledge that I look at that and I think, “Oh, I can see why the conversation ended right there, because that is not what you would expect to hear from me or my coaching team.” It is the last mile problem. The first 90 percent of it is pretty good, and then it just fills in the blank on the rest. And I think for us to- I think we would have to actually get into the training business with which is many millions of dollars, like the training of models. So how, we are still building it. I still have a, I think next year we will have something that is pretty good at analyzing your sales conversations through The Four Conversations model, suggesting a draft of a proposal, critiquing your proposal, critiquing your sales conversation, but it is not going to give you final answers for anything.

Exactly. Yeah, it will not replace the human who is experienced and has a lot more context and accuracy. All right, Blair, I know we are a little bit over the time that I initially told you here, so this has been fun. Been great catching up on the podcast. I want to make sure that people can check out your book and everything you guys have going on. Where should they go? What is the one place they should check out?

WinWithoutPitching.com you will find everything about me there. I am not really on social media other than I am on LinkedIn. So Blair Enns on LinkedIn, a little bit.

Oh, I thought you were definitely on X or TikTok or whatever.

I have an X account, I have not posted in years. I used to be active back when it was fun.

Yeah. All right.

It has not been fun for a while.

There you go. All right. Thanks, Blair for coming on.

Thanks, Michael. I appreciate the invitation.

Important Links:

Blair Enns at LinkedIn
Win Without Pitching
Simon Sinek’s The Infinite Game
Reid Hoffman and Chris Yeh’s Blitzscaling
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