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Selling Your Expertise
The Mindset, Strategies, and Tactics of Successful Rainmakers
Robert Chen
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eBook - ePub
Selling Your Expertise
The Mindset, Strategies, and Tactics of Successful Rainmakers
Robert Chen
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About This Book
Wall Street Journal bestseller Build your book of business and sell more services with this expert guide for knowledge professionals
How do rainmakers consistently and continuously sell their ideas and grow their client base? What is the secret to their ongoing success? Whether they are in accounting, consulting, investment banking, law, or any other type of professional service, it's not just their knowledge, experience, and unique services that set them apart. They succeed by adopting the mindset, mastering the strategies, and employing the tactics at the heart of rainmaking.
In Selling Your Expertise: The Mindset, Strategies, and Tactics of Successful Rainmakers, veteran communications, sales, and leadership consultant Robert Chen provides a practical guide to selling knowledge-based services in a market that demands credibility and subject-matter authority. Chen and his colleagues at Exec|Comm have helped hundreds of thousands of professionals learn to sell, influence, and negotiate more effectively. This book condenses Chen's first-hand experience and over 40 years of Exec|Comm's best sales advice, along with interviews featuring other successful rainmakers from a variety of professions and industries.
Whether you're a national practice partner at a Big Four consulting firm or an independent attorney just starting out, this book equips you with the real-life knowledge you need to:
- Develop a client-focused mindset to help build a thriving book of business
- Use effective strategies to find your ideal prospects and turn them into long-term clients, using concrete metrics to assess whether you're on the right track
- Apply practical tactics to build a trusted reputation, sharpen communication skills, manage the challenges of not having enough time to sell, and push beyond obstacles
The perfect book for consultants, investment bankers, lawyers, research analysts, and accountants, Selling Your Expertise is an invaluable resource for any professional who makes a living by selling solutions to their clients' most pressing needs.
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PART I
Mindset
We typically think of our mindset as being just that: something set in place. Difficult to alter. Potentially unmovable. But to become successful rainmakers, we need to adopt the rainmaking mindset. We must see the world, our potential clients, and our value through the lens of a rainmaker. This often means changing the way we approach sales from the inside out, leaving behind any old assumptions or thought processes that may hold us back. Our mindset determines how we perceive the world, which influences our thoughts, actions, and habits. To start thinking like a rainmaker, you must first understand the rainmaker's mindset, compare it to your own, then figure out where the gaps are.
Research shows that to drive sustained change and growth, you must influence your self-conceptâhow you think about, evaluate, and perceive yourself.1 So though assessing your mindset is important, it's only the beginning. Insights alone are not enoughâyou need to see yourself as a person who will apply those insights. Most people struggle with sales not because they can't learn sales skills, but because they don't see themselves as salespeople. They either subconsciously avoid selling, or they consciously tell themselves they cannot learn how to do it in the first place. Your willpower and determination to sell your expertise will heavily depend on your openness to see yourself as a rainmaker.
To start, challenge unhelpful but common assumptions about business development. If you equate selling with manipulating and exploiting others, you will likely struggle. No one wants to come across as callously pushing unneeded services, nor does anyone want to feel as if they are hassling or bothering potential clients. Instead, most people want to use their expertise to solve problems while maintaining a positive self-image.
The rainmaking mindset allows you to move beyond self-doubt and hesitance and get to work on building your book of business. When you adopt this mindset and enhance how you perceive yourself and the situation, you will find that your activities will become more purposeful and impactful. You will also spend less time debating whether or not you should sell and dedicate more time to actually selling.
Note
- 1. Bergner, Raymond M. âStatus Enhancement: A Further Path to Therapeutic Change.â American Journal of Psychotherapy 53, no. 2 (April 1999): 201â214.
CHAPTER 1
Eagerly Dedicated
Chapter 1: Eagerly Dedicated
Many of you reading this book are already excited to start selling your expertise and services, but equally as many, if not more, cracked this book open with a skeptic's eye. Why? Because a lot of you, in all honesty, just don't want to sell. You probably believe the costs outweigh the benefitsâselling is nebulous, time-consuming, and takes you away from the work you either love or are good at and find easy to do. Bringing in business is more difficult and less straightforward than delivering on engagements. Building a strong book of business requires that you win new clients, which often involves persuading people who don't know you well to hire you to solve their problems. That's not such a simple task, nor one most of us want to tackle.
You're smart. You're talented. For years, you've been honing your craft and taking pride in becoming an expert. The non-technical activities, like entertaining clients or networking, seem unimportant, and better left to people without âhard skills,â or those who have the right personality and enjoy that type of work. Since you mainly deliver work, most of your client interactions are with people who already value your services. It may be easy to think that sales will naturally happen as you continue serving these clients and building up your reputation. Unfortunately, that limited vantage point is also why many people struggle to build their book of business.
To become a rainmaker, you first need the desire to bring in business. Fortunately, that motivation can be acquired and developed quite quickly once you fully understand the benefits of selling. Landing clients is the name of the game. You cannot generate increased revenue for your organization unless you are eager to sell and dedicated to succeeding, two hallmarks of any professional rainmaker. To get there, you need to understand what may be dampening your enthusiasm for engaging in business development. If you are technically inclined, and pride yourself on solving complex problems, you may be prone to avoid selling for three reasons. By understanding these three reasons, and challenging the assumptions behind them, you will find yourself becoming more motivated to sell.
Why Smart People Struggle with Sales
Research shows that most people strongly resist any activity that threatens their status.1 In many professional settings, there's a general distaste for sales for this exact reason: The role is typically not seen as glamorous or glorious, and people may feel as if selling is âbeneathâ them. That's why few, if any, professionals pursued a degree in âsalesâ at college or aspired to become a sales rep when they graduated. The typical sales job does not seem to require special qualifications or credentials. The compensation is often commission-based, and large companies hire tons of salespeople, making the bar to entry seem low. Further, to most people, a job always seems higher-status or more prestigious if they are not tasked to sell a service or product. Companies recognize these facts and rename job titles to mask the role. âSalespersonâ becomes âconsultant,â âaccount executive,â âsolutions specialist,â or any euphemism that hides the four-letter word sell.
Another reason smart people struggle with sales is that there is a lag time between effort and payoff. If you're a technical expert, you are likely accustomed to seeing your hard work directly translate into results. Whether you are modeling future cash flows or writing a brief, you know how long it will take to complete the task and what the end product will look like. As you shift more time and energy into business development, if you don't immediately see results, you may begin to question your approach and doubt your abilities. Worse yet, if you are compensated on the billable hours model, you may feel pressure to get back to billable work, considering your sales efforts unproductive and abandoning them.
The problem here is the sense of uncertainty that goes along with sales. Success for any given deal does not depend solely on the quality and quantity of your effort. Timing, buyer preferences, economic conditions, personal emergencies, and other factors outside of your control all impact whether you will close a deal. As a result, you may experience a strong pull toward non-selling activities that feel more like a âsure thing.â
Senior managers in professional services firms often fall into this trap. Although it is clear that generating revenue is a critical step on the path to partnership, many professionals choose to spend the bulk of their time focusing on deepening their expertise, executing work already sold, managing teams, and improving internal best practices. These activities feel safer and more productive; they are well-defined, and you can immediately measure your results. Unfortunately, those tasks alone will not distinguish you at your firm and can hinder your career progression if not supplemented with strong revenue numbers.
The third reason smart people resist sales is because sales activity can appearâto be bluntâkind of boring. The tasks involved may come across as rote or intellectually dull. Maybe you got into your line of work because you like...