In How Clients Buy, Tom McMakin and Doug Fletcher present seven elements that must be present before a prospect will be ready to buy a professional service. They must

• be aware of you
• understand what you do
• be interested in your services
• respect your work
• deem you worthy of their trust
• have the ability to make a decision, and
• be ready—the timing must be right.

Like the essential ingredients for making bread, Tom asserts these Seven Elements represent a mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive (“MECE”). Consequently, they constitute a list of essential ingredients for business development success. Using the Seven Elements, you can conduct a self-assessment at the firm, practice, or personal level to gauge your relative strengths and weaknesses.

There are no tricks to translating the results into remedial action. However, discipline is required.

• Unlike the children of Lake Wobegon, not all professional services firms are above average across all Seven Elements. Be honest with yourself.
• Focus on your weaknesses. I know, it’s hard—most of us would rather double-down on our demonstrated strengths.

Expertise and integrity don’t translate into business success unless there is sufficient awareness among those you wish to serve. Similarly, improving on already strong awareness will be for naught unless prospective clients understand how you can help.

When researching How Clients Buy, Doug Fletcher and Tom McMakin interviewed dozens of successful rainmakers. Their subjects ranged from solo practitioners to managing partners of global consulting firms. Doug and Tom’s goal was to field test their business development hypotheses. In addition, as Doug explains, several themes regarding the essence of rainmaking emerged from their conversations.

Don’t Call it Selling

“Sales” is a word loaded with baggage. Dump it if it makes you uncomfortable. The task remains:

Identify a community of companies and executives to which you would like to be of service and then do everything you can to help connect those in that industry with introductions, smart articles, and peer meetings.

Add value. Be of service.

Do Great Work

In the long run, no amount of clever marketing will overcome poor execution. You are the product. Future sales depend on your reputation, which is built one project at a time. In a connected world, there is no room for anything less than great work. It’s table stakes—a necessary but insufficient requirement for sustained success.

Take Responsibility for Business Development

Doing truly superior work is easier said than done. Nevertheless, to maintain personal and professional flexibility and freedom, it’s imperative that you take personal responsibility for business development. Commit time. Be disciplined. Make it a habit. Start now.

Build Relationships

Effective networking isn’t a matter of exchanging business cards in a generic hotel ballroom while drinking insipid wine from plastic cups. Make time to seek out interesting people. Be generous with your time. Give away your best stuff. Invest in others without expectation of return. Cultivate serendipity. It’s worth it.

Wear the Style That Fits

Actually, Doug and Tom advise, “Develop your own style.” However, I think that’s inevitable if you take responsibility for business development, build relationships by being generous over time, and consistently do great work. The clients you serve, the culture of your firm, and your personality and experiences will shape what works. Go with it. Resist the temptation to imitate slavishly. Being authentic in our approach is not only more effective, it’s easier to sustain.

Stay Persistent

Satisfying the Seven Elements of Business Development can be devilishly difficult. On many occasions, I’ve been devastated upon discovering that my carefully cultivated prospect simply isn’t ready to engage. While disappointment may be inevitable, hearing, “The timing isn’t right,” should be affirming. After all, it suggests your prospect:

• is aware of you
• understands what you do
• is interested in your services
• has come to respect your work
• deems you worthy of trust, and
• has the ability to make a decision.

Stay in touch. Continue to add value and cultivate your relationship. When the time is right, you’ll be in the position to engage. It’s a marathon consisting of a million sprints. Know that and you’ll be less inclined to quit.

When it comes to professional services, Tom McMakin believes trust is everything.

Trusting the person you’re going to engage with is the whole ball of wax…There’s an information asymmetry in the world of expert services.

To sustain and grow our practices, those of us who offer professional services must be trustworthy.

True Expertise is a Credence Good

Not all goods and services demand the same level of trust. Trust is paramount in professional services because real expertise is a credence good. That means the risk of exploitation of the buyer by the seller is high.

According to Wikipedia,

A credence good is a good whose utility impact is difficult or impossible for the consumer to ascertain. In contrast to experience goods, the utility gain or loss of credence goods is difficult to measure after consumption as well. The seller of the good knows the utility impact of the good, creating a situation of asymmetric information.

As Tom explains, the professional service provider diagnoses the disease and the cure. The cost of the treatment is often high, and the consequences of failure substantial. As a result, demonstrated competence is a necessary—but insufficient—condition for engagement. Clients must trust you.

Types of Trust

Kent Grayson is a professor at Northwestern University who studies information asymmetries and trust as a member of The Trust Project. He highlights three factors that determine the degree of trust:

• Competence—the perceived capacity of the service provider to do what she says she can do
• Honesty—the perception of truthfulness and commitment to do what she says she will do
• Benevolence—the believe the service provider will not exploit information asymmetries to your disadvantage

Tom describes trust along two dimensions: one of the head and one of the heart:

• Will you do you what you say you’ll do?
• Will you have my back?

Based on their work developing The Six Temperaments™ framework, Charles Green and his colleagues at Trusted Advisor Associates conclude something similar. They find the most trustworthy people represent a combination of high reliability with a capacity for intimacy.

The Calculus of Trust

Trust is an accumulation that depends on our behaviors over time. As Tom notes, “Do you have my interests at heart? The thing that really fuels that kind of trust is experience.” Furthermore, trust is easier to destroy than to build.

That’s not to say that we can’t accelerate the development of trust. However, be cautious and respectful of the process. Trust-building is subtle and a function of the interplay among the frequency, substance, and mode of interaction.

Frequent interactions can increase trust, and technologies such as email and video conferencing can increase frequency. That said, such technologies are “narrowband” in the context of emotional range. In addition, frequent interactions sometimes come at the cost of substantive depth.

Being Trustworthy

Trust isn’t earned. That is, our behaviors can’t demand obligatory reciprocation in the form of trust. Trust must be granted. However, we can—and must—be consistently trustworthy.

The folks at Trusted Advisor offer these principals of trust-based selling, which serve as excellent guideposts:

• Client orientation for the sake of the client, not the consultant. “Client focus” for the seller’s sake is the bogus focus of a vulture.
• A medium- to long-term perspective. Focus on the relationship, not the transaction.
• A habit of collaboration. Don’t speculate about what clients are thinking—ask them.
• A willingness to be transparent. Nothing destroys client trust faster than the consultant who appears to be withholding information or trying to control the client.

Money Talks, and Bullshit Walks

Again, trust is such a central feature of professional service relationships because of information asymmetry. A key way to demonstrate trustworthiness is to better align your interests with those of your client. You can do so by having skin in the game.

Skin in the game can take many forms. Not all currencies are money. Some forms appeal to the head, others the heart.

Demonstrating emotional authenticity and intimacy is difficult for many of us who wish to be perceived as being professional. That’s because authenticity and intimacy are risky. As Bill Noonan explains,

Defensive routines are patterns of interpersonal interactions people create to protect themselves from embarrassment and threat. The conditions of threat and embarrassment arise when our abilities are negatively evaluated by a colleague or authority figure.

Being vulnerable is uncomfortable. Visible gaps in our emotional armor can be interpreted as weakness. Weakness can be exploited by others. However, by abandoning our defenses we demonstrate trust. Such a gesture can go a long way toward evoking trust in return.

For a more hard-headed approach, consider guarantees. David Maister—co-author (along with the aforementioned Charles Green) of the classic book, The Trusted Advisor, and a man How Clients Buy co-author Doug Fletcher considers a mentor—advocates professional service providers offer unconditional satisfaction guarantees to their clients.

Many will dismiss the prospect of offering a satisfaction guarantee as being “unpractical.” Maybe. On the other hand, there is no denying its usefulness at communicating skin in the game. Besides, if you don’t trust your skills and client enough to offer a guarantee, maybe you should reconsider the gig.

Don Scales runs Investis, a large digital communications agency. He is a marketing guy who talks about brands and their power to convey compelling stories. But he is also a numbers guy who holds a degree in chemical engineering and mathematical physics from Rice and an MBA from Harvard. In a world where selling is often pitted against marketing, Don has a foot planted in both camps.

The Sales and Marketing Spectrum

Traditionally marketing and sales are two poles that define a spectrum of work companies do to drive revenues. The work is different in several important respects:

• Focus: Marketers ask themselves how to effectively communicate with broad audiences. Think websites, brochures, and campaigns. Salespeople ask themselves how to effectively communicate with individuals or small teams.
• Time: Marketers play the long game. Think brand, research, and product launches. Salespeople play the short game. The product is set. It has advantages, and it has a price. Their job is to tap the ball in the hole.
• Push and Pull: Marketers speak of demand generation. Their focus is on bringing products to market that inspire customers to beat a path to a company’s door. Salespeople get in planes, trains, and automobiles to go meet customers. They offer what a company has to sell. Their focus is not on demand (that would be order-taking in their world) but rather on supply generation.

Much of this language comes from the world of consumer products. But does it apply to the provision of professional services? The short answer is yes. The longer answer is that in a world where individuals and their expertise are the product, professionals need to have both long and short-game skills to finish the full eighteen holes.

Above All, Think

Ask Don about how to land a new client and his main advice is, above all, to think. He says that professional service providers don’t have a product to brand or sell, per se. They have their experience and their brains which they bring to the table. They are solution providers. In that world, your market research and product development (things that marketers do) happen in the same instant as you are presenting and pitching (the work of salespeople).

This a radical notion that undermines centuries of conventional wisdom about the power that stems from a division of labor workforces. Nineteenth-century sociologist, Émile Durkheim, wrote the division of labor inevitably produces “a proportionable increase of the productive powers of labor.” It is as if the world of professional services is a throwback to a time when those in business were craftspeople who had to be skilled in everything from design and production to marketing and sales.

Marketing and Selling Required

That is why professional services are so hard to scale. An expert point of view can scale. Write a book and it can be read by thousands. But experience and brains are difficult to productize and deliver to large numbers of customers. Which is why Don’s message that we need to both be marketers and salespeople continues to be critically relevant to anyone who is in the business of building a practice around their expertise.

Doug Fletcher is one of the most likable people you’ll meet. His easy-going manner puts one at ease. So, it’s a bit jarring to hear Doug advise, “Forget about being likable.”

Instead, Doug encourages us to do great work and take really good care of our clients. In his estimation, respect and trust trump likability.

How to Win Friends

In 1937, Dale Carnegie published How to Win Friends & Influence People. The book is still a bestseller more than 80 years later. How to Win Friends is part of the sales canon. Doug calls it the “better personality” approach to business development success. Doug’s admonishment to forget about being likable seems heretical in the face of such sustained popularity.

There’s nothing wrong with being likable, of course. When it comes to professional services, however, it’s easier to learn to be likable than it is to develop real expertise and cultivate respect and trust. Likability isn’t a discriminate factor.

Fake It Until You Make It?

Early in my career, I did not yet know what I didn’t know. My ignorance was no sin and could be remedied with experience and effort. My arrogance, on the other hand, was a problem.

I was guilty of believing that by adopting the dress, look, and patois of my profession, I could fake it until I made it. To a degree, I conflated fitting in and looking the part with becoming a true craftsman. Unfortunately, my faking it camouflaged the degree to which my understanding was facile and my presentation glib. By over-emphasizing appearances, I underserved my clients and missed opportunities to develop a deeper capacity to serve effectively.

Surgeons Should Not Look Like Surgeons

Philosopher and gadfly Nassim Taleb goes further. He notes, “Reality is blind to looks.”  True expertise is complex and difficult to explain. Consequently, “The people you understand most easily [are] necessarily the bull***tters.”

He advocates selecting among experts via negativa: look for signs of success when the expert doesn’t look the part—when they aren’t conventionally likable. For instance, when faced with a choice between two surgeons at a reputable hospital—one highly polished and credentialed and the other rough around the edges—Taleb leans toward the latter. To earn respect and trust with a personality that runs counter to received wisdom is difficult and, thus, suggests hidden, superior quality.

It’s no wonder, then, that Taleb features the following praise for his latest book, Skin in the Game:

The problem with Taleb is not that he’s an asshole. He is an asshole. The problem with Taleb is that he is right.

Being an Ass Isn’t a Strategy Either

Going out of one’s way to act like a jerk isn’t a great idea. As Doug notes, “Like is a tie-breaker.” Sometimes, though, being right means losing popularity contests. But being right—and having the courage of one’s convictions—are the keys to building respect and trust That, rather than likability, wins new business over time.

As You Sow, So Shall You Reap

Levison Wood knows something about generosity and so does Kris Klein.

As documented in his Walking the Himalayas series, Wood shared a meal with Kirgiz shepherds in the Wakhan Corridor in the remote northeastern corner of Afghanistan.  In the documentary, the chief welcomes Wood over the open fire and offers him the eyeball of a sheep and then a bowlful of brains. Wood explains these are the choicest pieces. Kirgiz tradition is that the good stuff is always shared.

While the prospect of chewing on an eyeball might seem foreign to you or me, the idea of sharing the good stuff with others is familiar.  The world over, people in a community are taught to share with others, particularly strangers, with no expectation of return.  Call it karma or paying it forward, human beings have a sense that what goes around comes around. As the early Christian writer, Paul, wrote to a community in Galatia, “As you sow, so shall you reap.”

The Secret to Effective Content Marketing

Kris is the CEO of the well-regarded marketing and sales strategy consultancy Lenati.  He believes in “top funnel demand.”  From where he sits, he sees a lot of small professional services businesses initially rely solely on their network of relationships to scale.  Over time, however, those relationships cannot keep the firm on a high-growth path.

I asked Kris to hazard a guess about the relative proportion of demand-driven business to non-demand driven business that exists in his own firm.  He reported that it used to be that 100% of new business came from the network, but now the firm is generating about 30% of its business using automated outreach and content marketing, so-called demand marketing.

Here is how it works:  You give something of value to the audience you hope to court on your website.  This can be anything from a consumer’s guide to an instructional video or a whitepaper.  The important thing is that the target audience finds it when they are looking to learn more about the subject on which you are an expert and then is attracted to the content.  From there, marketing automation takes over. Software can track who is downloading your content and then follow up (automatically) with additional useful content.  Over time, having reminded your would-be customers about your expertise, having given them something of value and stayed top of mind, they either call you asking for your help on a project, or you can call them.

I asked Kris what made him so successful at this approach.  He confided that there is a secret to content marketing.

His secret?

“You have to share your good stuff.”

Give Away Your Best Work

Seth Godin has written, “In the digital world, the more free samples you give away, the better you do.  The miserly mindset that afflicts the merchant watching inventory walk out the door at the market is counterproductive in the digital world.” But what Kris is talking about is somewhat different from Godin’s philosophy of free samples. Kris is talking about giving away your best work, and that is harder.

Like the Kirgiz herdsman, don’t sandbag your generosity. If you believe that welcoming a guest is a duty and a high honor, then serve up the eyeballs and don’t keep them for yourself to munch on after the party is over.  Serve them without a feeling of loss but instead with a feeling of creating something greater: a new friend or ally.

The same goes for content marketing.  If you hold back your “good stuff,” your efforts will be less effective.  Your good stuff is, by definition, the most interesting stuff.  If you hold back and offer up only your not-so-good-stuff, your offering will be less compelling.

Giving away your best work won’t be easy. “This was hard to create. I want to be paid for it. What if I do attract a new client, what will I have to show them that they haven’t already seen? Then there are my competitors. Won’t they just rip off my stuff?”

All good points, and all are wrong.

Salma Jafri writes,

Give away the why, what and who. Give away the inspirational content. Give away the content that shows people what’s possible. Give away the results. Give away the stories. Give away your opinion. Give away your best thoughts on the topic.

Instead,

Charge for the how, Charge for showing people how to get from A to B. Charge for the processes that you’ve made. Charge for showing the systems you’ve set up that they can replicate. Charge for the templates. Charge for, “I’ll hold your hand all the way.” Charge for customization. Charge for training. Charge for empowering your audience.

Indeed, Salma gave away that insight for free and look what happened. I received that gift and found it valuable and now am passing it on to you. It is as if there is a direct relationship between the value you offer and the speed at which word spreads that you are a source of expertise and insight.

So, don’t hog the eyeballs, share them with every honored guest who shares a meal in your yurt. “Share the good stuff,” as Kris says.

According to The 8 Rules of Business Golf,

Golf isn’t merely a leisure sport. It’s the martini lunch of the modern workforce, the buoyant venue where work gets done.

That may have been true, but golf—and country club memberships—are in decline. It’s been said that golf is too time-consuming, too slow, too expensive, and too difficult. I think Tom McMakin has identified another reason for the structural diminishment of the sport: it’s become a less effective way to cultivate business relationships over time.

The Propinquity Effect

With due respect to Mark Twain, “propinquity” is a useful five-dollar word. It refers to the psychological proximity between people. It can derive from physical closeness, kinship, or other similarities. Propinquity is one of the main factors leading to interpersonal attraction.

As Tom explains, professional services are bought based on relationships and trust. Not surprisingly, the cultivation of propinquity is a key indicator of potential business development success. Frequent interactions over time are the building blocks of relationships—something social psychologists call the mere-exposure effect.

White Shoes and Golfing

A white-shoe firm describes professional services firms in the U.S. that serve large corporations. Historically, the term referred to firms run by WASP elites, particularly those in Boston and New York who attended Ivy League schools, where the white buck dress shoe was a distinctive fashion accessory.

The people in white-shoe firms lived near one another. They attended the same schools, went to the same churches—and played golf at the same country clubs—as their prospective clients. Propinquity abounded. More often than not, the resulting familiarity bred affinity rather than contempt.

As Tom explains:

So maybe our parents were accountants in Poughkeepsie. In order to generate business, in order to create those relationships off of which they’d scope business, they’d meet people at the synagogue or church, or they’d meet people at the golf course. They’d get to know them over a lifetime, and then they would scope business off of those relationships.

However, the emergence of new technologies—and the globalization they have encouraged—are undermining these traditional sources of propinquity, trust, and new business opportunities.

Globalization, Specialization, and Complexity

More than 200 years ago, Adam Smith noted, “The extent of the division of labour…is necessarily regulated…by the extent of the market.” Small towns have general stores, while big cities have boutiques. Small towns have all-purpose CPAs. Global markets have, “very narrowly niched accountant(s) that sells expertise around transfer pricing as it affects sovereign wealth funds.”

• Communication and transportation technologies have extended the scope of the markets we providers of professional services can serve. That’s enabled specialization.
• If you can reach a global market, so can your competition. Our desire to differentiate ourselves encourages specialization.
• The resulting proliferation of diverse and inter-dependent service providers has fueled complexity. In turn, the management of complexity is enhanced by cognitive diversity. That demands specialization.

Niches tend to breed more niches in an expanding market (e.g. heavy metal genres). The more specialized we become, the less likely it becomes that our practice will be supported locally.

The Challenge of Building Long-Distance Relationships

Golfing may be on the decline for a variety of reasons. I suspect that globalization is a primary cause. As the scope of our services narrow, we have to reach farther afield to make a living. The effectiveness of hanging out at the country club as a business development strategy is diminishing.

That’s not to say the importance of relationships, referrals, and trust has diminished. In fact, there is a reason to believe that trust may grow in importance.

Have you ever tried to explain to your child or parent what you actually do for a living? People think they know what accountants do, but few will immediately grasp “transfer pricing” as it relates to “sovereign wealth funds.” As we specialize, our services are increasingly likely to be characterized as credence goods.

In “On Doctors, Mechanics, and Computer Specialists: The Economics of Credence Goods,” economists Uwe Dulleck and Rudolf Kerschbamer observe,

Education and experience give experts the ability to diagnose the exact needs of customers who themselves are only able to detect a need but not the most efficient way to satisfy it. The information problems in markets for diagnosis and treatment suggest that experts may be tempted to defraud customers.

Our specialization creates an advantage. At the same time, it pushes us away from local clients, makes what we do harder to understand, and can increase the threshold level of trust required to engage our services. It’s tough to build trust across distance—even more difficult than playing golf well.

Even if the primary purpose of your practice isn’t to make money, making money is a requirement for sustaining your practice. By definition, a sale is the exchange of a service for money. So why isn’t selling featured in the curricula of business schools—or any other professional schools?

The Rise of Intellectualism

In his most recent book, Skin in the Game, Nassim Taleb defines intellectualism as, “the belief that one can separate…theory from practice.” The problem with intellectualism, according to Taleb, is that it obscures the causal links between thoughts, actions, and consequences. Theories not subject to the balancing feedback of consequences are dangerous to one’s commercial health.

Nevertheless, beginning early in the 20th century, businesses schools embraced intellectualism and scientism, which Taleb defines as, “a naive interpretation of science as complication rather than science as a process and a skeptical enterprise. Using mathematics when it’s not needed is not science but scientism.” As Tom McMakin and Doug Fletcher note in How Clients Buy:

Like other social sciences, including sociology, anthropology, and psychology, the study of business suffered from an inferiority complex as newcomers in the academic ranks. Business departments made up for it by emulating the hard sciences like mathematics and physics, teaching economics, finance, the management of resources—anything that could be quantified—while eschewing soft skills like people management or sales, which might be better learned standing at the side of an experienced practitioner.

As a consequence, “intellectual” marketing pushed aside “commercial” sales as a featured topic of discussion within the academy.

The Perception of Sales as Being Grubby

The omission of sales from the curricula of academic training need not be a constraint. If it’s truly important, we would expect firms to make an investment in developing the sales skills of its employees and partners. We don’t, though. More often than not, junior partners are left to their own devices.

While selling is acknowledged as being necessary to a firm’s survival and success—and “rainmakers” rewarded handsomely—the act of selling is commonly perceived as being grubby or déclassé. It’s not something done in polite society.

Part of that perception is due to our self-awareness that professional services are a credence good. Per Wikipedia,

A credence good is a good whose utility impact is difficult or impossible for a consumer to ascertain…The seller of the good knows the utility of the good, creating a situation of asymmetric information.

Asymmetric information gives rise to the agency problem, in which the seller of a service can be tempted to exploit the buyer. Professional ethics and misunderstanding of what selling entails result in a misperception of sales as being inherently manipulative and, in the long run, potentially damaging to our reputations.

Even while acknowledging the requirement for sales, we cringe at the thought of being labeled a salesperson. Too often, that aversion stunts our professional growth and ability to make a living.

Misguided Essentialist Philosophy

Plato and Aristotle cast long shadows. Essentialism as applied to sales—the persistently popular view that salespeople have intrinsically different and characteristic natures or dispositions—is a perspective that diverts our attention from what is actionable. That is, it focuses on the seller and ignores the buyer. That’s a mistake.

The American Bar Association reports that there has been an 18% increase in the number of lawyers in the United States over the last 10 years. That’s somewhere between 2-3 times the rate of growth of the country’s population. The competition among providers of professional services continues to heat up. Relative market power is shifting to buyers.

Focus on Clients

Business development is a practical requirement. It’s worthy of our study and understanding—notwithstanding the neglect of sales by schools. Furthermore, a seller-centric perspective that emphasizes persuasion and manipulation are short-sighted, outdated, and ineffective. Bullshit and exploitation aren’t sustainable in a competitive environment predicated on trust.

Tom and Doug offer an alternative path, one characterized by the following:

• An empathic view the client’s buying process
• The demonstration of trustworthiness and competence, and
• The cultivation of meaningful relationships over time

A focus on how clients buy reconnects theory and practice. It acknowledges the reality of the marketplace. It allows us to be more effective salespeople without compromise.

In the second of a series of interviews, Andi Baldwin of Profitable Ideas Exchange spoke with How Clients Buy co-authors Tom McMakin and Doug Fletcher about the framework they call, “The Seven Elements.”

A Set of Conditions

The Seven Elements is a set of conditions that must be present in order for a prospective client to buy your services:

• Prospective clients must, of course, become aware of your existence.
• They must understand what you do and how you are unique.
• Prospects must develop an interest in you and your firm. Your services must be relevant to their goals.
• They must respect your work and be confident in your ability to do what you say you can do.
• Potential clients must trust you to have their best interests at heart.
• They must have the ability to engage you, which means they have sufficient authority, budget, and organizational support.
• A prospective client must be ready to act. The timing has to be right. Sometimes all other conditions are met but some other priority supersedes.

Not a Linear Process

The buying process for professional services and consulting isn’t linear. You can’t drive prospects through a funnel. The dynamics of each prospect’s buying journey will be unique.

However, you can anticipate your prospective clients’ buying needs and take actions that facilitate their buying.

• What can you do to make prospective clients aware of your firm? How might you stay in touch and add value over time to help ensure you remain top of mind?
• How might you sharpen your messaging to make it easier for prospective clients to understand what you do and how you are different? Are you making it easy for champions to explain to others what you do? Alternatively, are you guilty of being intentionally vague about your core capabilities?
• Have you done your homework to understand your prospective client’s needs and priorities? Have you made an honest assessment of your capacity to help them achieve a material objective?
• Have you provided objective proof of your capabilities? What testimonials, referrals, case studies, and guarantees can you offer?
• How might you demonstrate through words and actions that you place your prospective client’s interests above your own? Do you lead with value without expectation, or do you take a narrow, transactional approach to the relationship? You can’t earn trust in the sense that you can’t demand trust. But, you can demonstrate you are worthy of trust.
• Are you clear about how your prospective client makes budgeting and buying decisions? How might you support an advocate in her efforts to gain the support of her colleagues?
• How might you stay on top of the dynamics that can shift a prospective client’s priorities? If all other preconditions have been met, how are you staying in touch so you’ll be there when the timing is right?

Honest Self-assessment Pays

If our role in a firm is marketing, there may be a tendency for us to rate others’ awareness and understanding of our services highly. On the other hand, if we are primarily focused on business development, we may tend to rate the trust and respect felt by others as being high. Nevertheless, we probably have weaknesses that could be our undoing.

After all, it’s insufficient for a client to reach six of seven thresholds. A prospective client might be very aware of you, understand your services, respective your capabilities, have an important and pressing need and have the budget. If they don’t trust you sufficiently, you’re unlikely to get the gig. So, continuous and honest self-assessment is required to identify and rectify deficiencies. Cultivating The Seven Elements is a discipline and practice rather than a campaign.