If Not Now - When?

The first step in becoming more adept at selling your expertise is getting intentional, but it's more concrete than that. Every sales meeting, email, piece of content - everything - should start and end with intention, aka an agenda and next steps. Every meeting needs a goal and clear next steps to drive the sale to a conclusion. 

Without a doubt at his very moment, you have the situation backward! Here’s why.

Seth Godwin’s book “This is Marketing”, sets this situation up-right. Here is an excerpt for illustration:

Marketing is not a battle, and it’s not a war, or even a contest, marketing is the generous act of helping someone solve a problem. Their problem. Marketing involves very little in the way of shouting hustling or coercion. It's a chance to serve instead.

The Lock and the key

It doesn't make any sense to make a key and then run around looking for a lock to open.  The only productive solution is to find a lock and then fashion a key.  It's easier to make products and services for the customers you seek to serve than it is to find customers for your products and services. And yet this is precisely the order in which we go about our sales and marketing.

Yet who needs this pounded into their thick skulls more than yours truly? If you, like me, exist in this new market reality landscape coming from the old “grip & grin” school, welcome aboard!