By the Ocean
Sunny 76 Degrees
7:55 a.m.
If you work with clients, learning how to sell yourself is the most valuable skill you can develop.
Without this skill, you will quickly become a commodity, experience downward pressure on your fees, and watch as the best and most profitable clients go to someone else.
The funny thing about this skill is there’s not much selling involved! Yes, a sale happens, but it happens because it’s engineered to happen, not because it’s forced to happen.
The prospects buy because they choose to buy, not because you coerce them to buy.
What this means is that trusted advisor status in the marketplace requires an approach to selling yourself that is quite a bit different than what you see other people doing. If you think that selling yourself is about doing something to your prospects, you’ve been brainwashed.
If you want the relationship with your buyer to be stronger after the sale than it was before, you can’t “sell” that buyer anything. That’s a surefire way to position yourself as a salesperson. And what do we all know about those folks? Salespeople can’t be trusted.
The smarter path is to engineer a situation where the buyer sells himself on what you have. You don’t do this by luck or chance, you do this by design.
What you get as a result is the ability to ATTRACT and ADVISE to a sale.
When that’s the method you use to have sales happen, you get better clients who pay you more, respect you more and are more engaged.
You actually create this result on purpose, by controlling HOW THE SALE HAPPENS.
No one taught me any of this during my brief and bizarre career as a car salesman 25 years ago. The approach we were taught there, where we hunted down people, cornered them and said whatever was required to get their money, is why no one trusts the car lot.
At the other end of the spectrum is what we’re talking about.
“Selling yourself” the smart way is not an event, it’s a process. It begins with mindset, it involves the energy you carry, it involves how you relate to your prospects, the role you play in their journey, it involves how you make it clear to them just how valuable you are, it involves the demonstration of your unique position in the marketplace.
There’s a lot that goes into doing this well, which is why most people suck at it.
As we approach the fall, where a lot of business tends to happen in the world of professional services, I’m opening enrollment for 10 people for my eight week How to Sell Yourself offering. It’s part course, part coaching, all designed to reconfigure how you sell yourself in the marketplace over the next 60 days.
If you’re selling baked goods in your business, it’s probably not a good fit. But if your prospects are buying YOU, then it’s something to look at.