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First of all, let’s get something clear: I’m a “dumb shit”. 

These words of modesty come from Ray Dalio, self-made (unlike Trump) billionaire hedge fund entrepreneur. They are the opening lines of his the dual-volume Principles (of Life and of Work), which I am reading this week and finding fascinating.

Despite his modesty, Ray is a deep thinker; I imagine most self-made billionaires are, too. But the point he wants to make from the get-go is that he didn’t leverage intelligence to become a billionaire, he leveraged calculated investment of time. Discipline and fearlessness, over cleverness and brute force.

And his philosophical analysis of his life and work experience makes him happier than any material successes. He said he’d set the writing and public engagement aside after publishing Principles, but he just keeps at it, which is great. And obviously, he is not dumb!

Some words of wisdom from an even more notorious business philosopher:

everything around you, that you call life, was made up by people that were no smarter than you

“When you grow up you, tend to get told that the world is the way it is … but life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: and that is that everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use. And the minute that you understand that you can poke life … that you can change it, you can mold it, you’ll want to change life, make it better. ”

Steve Jobs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ydp6bR5HXw

I read a great article about Steve Jobs after he died which postulated that he was more than a businessman, he was a philosopher. A business philosopher. Like Andy Warhol before him. I don’t believe everything Steve Jobs says (he probably wouldn’t want me too, either). For example, I don’t believe that the only way to be truly satisfied in life is to love what you do. What do you think?

This may be true for Steve Jobs but I’ve met too many perfectly satisfied Spaniards, who are completely indifferent to what they do, to be able to square that assertion with my life experience.  

But tacked on to that idea was something similar but a little different: “the only way to do great work is to love what you do” . There is not one single doubt in my mind that this is pure truth. 

Roll your own philosophy

I believe it’s essential to hold your own philosophies, no matter how trivial or insignificant. Find things you believe are true. Are they also useful? Then hold on to them with all your might. As I have mentioned, deeply help beliefs are one of the prime drivers of confidence in the consultative sales process.

This is actually what sets “OK marketing” apart from beautiful marketing. The latter should be something you believe in deeply enough to connect it to your business philosophy.

What is yours, by the way? 

That’s not entirely a rhetorical question – if you think of the answer, drop me an email. (Oh and P.S.,  I collect definitions of “Digital Strategy” or just “Strategy”; lemme know if you have one for my collection.)

And by the way, my ideas are just borrowed from someone else and adapted to my situation. Here are some ideas I like to hold on to.

• Everything in business can be understood by remembering that we are no greater, and no lesser, than animals with relatively huge cerebral cortexes.
• By drawing an analogy between our business scenario and a similar scenario experienced by our prehistoric hunter-gatherer ancestors, we’ll focus on the most important variable: human nature. 
• The subconscious mind is wiser than the conscious one and can provide solutions to creative problems. But it can also be fearful; we have to let our conscious and subconscious collaborate.
• You never sell. When both sides want to proceed, both sides will know; otherwise, you’re using pressure and coercion, which will come back to haunt.
• The reason high-end B2B consulting services require conversations is that it’s difficult to understand how they’ll be delivered and build value; trust must be established.
• There is a gulf between the value that boutique and distinctly digital agencies provide, and the customers who need their services (My role is to bridge that gulf).

Here’s how I get idea: take two statements like these, preferably from trusted sources, reconcile them to each other, then apply them to your business. For instance:

• Nietzsche: “Art is the highest form of human activity“
• Gary Bencivenga:, “Make your advertising itself valuable“

Do those ideas complement one another and apply to your work in a useful way? How can your work be artful, whether or not you or in a so-called creative field?

By the way, what is an artist? I don’t know.. someone who can endow an object with the power to make an impact on the psyche? Here’s an interesting definition:

making money is art, and working is art – and good business is the best art..

“Business art is the step that comes after art. I started as a commercial artist, and I want to finish as a business artist. Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. During the hippie era people put down the idea of business. They’d say “money is bad” and “working is bad”. But making money is art, and working is art – and good business is the best art.”

Andy Warhol

Five things on my mind this week:

1. Insight I’m agreeing with

I watched a talk that cold email expert Alex Berman gave last year. When asked about the success factors of cold email outreach, Alex said:

The biggest factor I’ve found is your website. It’s not even the content of your email, it’s not your subject line, or anything.

It’s: does your website actually speak to the client?

I think this applies to almost all forms of lead generation in the high-end B2B services space, which is where Alex and I both work.

2. Musical performance that is blowing my mind.

3. Book I am reading again.

Robert B. Cialdini, Influence.

I must’ve flunked the first read because I keep finding new ideas, good ideas, useful ideas.

The fallacy of one-to-many communications for example. If you are having a stroke in a crowded park in a large city, your best chance of appealing for help does not lie in the crowd; there is not as much safety in numbers as we think. So don’t yell out help and expect something to happen.

This is what you’d say instead: “You sir, in the blue jacket. I need help. Call an ambulance” (Cialdini, p. 116).

With your personalized, 1-on-1 appeal, you have transformed the mind of your audience from bystander to rescuer.

This is very close related to the first bullet.

4. Marketing campaign I’m impressed with

Drayton Bird’s ongoing event enrollment emails and videos are part of one of the best marketing campaigns I’ve ever seen.

Am I a filthy, lying, rotten rat?

5. L’esprit de l’escalier et les coworkings

By the way, I’m mis-using the expression l’esprit de l’escalier. It translates literally to “staircase wit”, in reference to the amazingly witty remark or comeback – that you don’t think of until the next day. Or until you’ve already begun to descend the staircase.

Here’s a #protip esprit de l’escalier (should’ve included in this article, Mechanics of consultative selling) for owners of co-working offices: provide “broadcast studios”. And they should be priced for individuals, not groups.

In most co-works, conference rooms are priced for a group of people, sometimes $20, $30, or $50 an hour. And if they do rent private offices, the acoustics and lighting is usually terrible. Just by figuring out ways to orient a significant portion of seats towards natural light, you’ll win. I think a successful independent consultant only needs two to three hours per day “in studio”.

Bonus: Quote that I’m contemplating/enjoying

“here is an Undiscovered Beauty, a Divine Excellence just beyond us. Let us stand on tiptoe, forgetting the meaner things, and grasp of it what we may.

– Bernard Maybeck, creator of the crown jewel of the Craftsman style

That’s what’s been on my mind this week, yours?

Quick, how many business emails have you written? I have written 120,000. Here’s the  paper-napkin calculation:

20 emails per day
x 300 days per year
x 20 years
= 120,0000 emails

I could be off by 60,000, because maybe I only write 10 on an average work day.  60k, 120k, 30k, what’s the difference? It’s a lot.

It’s the same for you. Which is why you’re an email marketer. 

The short emails count, too. The one-sentence replies. The nothing-but-emoticon replies. Think about it; some of the most impactful emails are the shortest ones.

Some of the least impactful are the longest.

Raise your hand if you’ve read every single long email. Didn’t think so.

Of course, you’re not intentionally selling yourself, your service, with every email. But you are in practice. You’re a de facto email marketer.

Are you a good de facto email marketer?

Here are the tell-tale signs of good emails:

1. Positive, friendly tone
2. Content or tone personalized to the recipient
3. Short (my weakness!)
4. Easy to understand and respond to (another weakness!)
5. End with a question, if any further action is required
6. Ask the recipient to do one thing and only one thing

Now I can find you hundreds of if not thousands of work-context emails contradicting these rules and maybe you can too.

Secondly, this overlaps with productivity thinking, which advises on how to write work emails. But this isn’t about being efficient and helpful at work. F*#k your co-coworkers. Just kidding, co-workers!! 🙂

If you isolate those six qualities in your work emails, and work on them, then by definition you are writing good marketing emails.

I will acknowledge that workplace communication often involves lots of info. If your email gets beyond 5 sentences, copy it into a document and attach it (or link to it). Then extract the most essential 5 or less sentence that talk about the contents of the document.

Ironically, this is also a commercial email marketing practice.

In conclusion, practice asking

Now I will caveat as follows: some work emails not only don’t require a follow-up action, they don’t want one. That is, you don’t think you want a response apart from a thank you.

But in email marketing getting the recipient to take action is the whole point. So here’s your opportunity to practice email marketing at work. Practice asking for something and make sure it’s just one thing.

That’s it, that’s your homework. Will you let me know how it goes?

Here’s what I mean by that, by lead generation starts at home.

And by the way, this only applies to complex B2B services that create high-value outcomes.

The kind of services that are sold (and partially designed) through an intelligent, two-way conversations between agency and client.

When you invite your clients to have a conversation like this, they come to your home. In fact, they often visit your home before they even agree to the conversation.

And by home, I don’t mean your actual personal residence, or even your office, such as it may be.

In fact, unless you’re a very large agency located in one of a handful of large cities around the world, they’ll never come to your office until you have a formal client-provider relationship.

Your website’s homepage is your home

But they come to your home and they do so right away, often they do so before they even agree to a conversation, let alone respond to your invitation to one.

And your home is your web presence, which is anchored by, wait for it, the homepage of your website.

Paradoxically, the website homepage has become a fractional percentage of your digital presence yet more important than ever before.

Your social media stamps and your content marketing has increased your digital footprint every year.

Your name is flung accross two dozen platforms and review sites, and so on. (Though by the way, is there a single Google doc that indexes your name and positioning in all of those places? There should be).

Making the website homepage a lead generation tool

Most of us think of digital lead generation as happening on a landing page, on some kind of cheesy tool like ClickFunnels, or cooler tool like Lead Pages (or if you know what  you’re doing on your own CMS-driven website, but that’s another story).

And the landing page is where the beloved lead capture form happens, that grabs name, email, etc.

But for most B2B firms, certainly ones that do high-value business, most effective place to capture leads is right on your homepage, right above the fold.

To make this happen, we need to use the upside down strategy, which means taking the complex header and banishing it, or simplifying it way down. Put that header in the footer (and no, don’t put the footer in the head – not unless is extremely simple).

That “clears the deck” for your one, single call to action. Just one. That is visible above the fold, on your landing page.

It might be an email subscription or just a request for a consultation, but it turns the formerly decorational and informational homepage into an action center, as we used to say in my digital advocacy days.

What would it take for you to turn your homepage upside down?

In the 2020’s, successful expertise consultants will ply their trade from an interactive broadcast studio

This is a reflection on the mechanics of selling complex services through a consultative process. Later, once you have a work agreement, it can be applied to delivering services. And it also applies to audio/video content marketing.

It’s not a reflection on productivity. Nor is it strategy or anything even close to thought leadership. But it’s extremely important, especially to solopreuneurs or consultants in small firms; it’s about creating the essential communications conditions for a consultive selling mindset to flourish.

This is the practical advice that I wish seasoned consulting coaches would offer: create, and work from, a professional-grade broadcast studio.

Clarity first.

I mean measurable, physical clarity.

We don’t sell in person, we sell virtually. So your voice should be as clear as a mountain lake. As if you were there next to your client, speaking in their ear. Ok that sounded a bit creepy, but you get the point?

Your image sharp, like HD television. And to the extent it’s not sharp, it should be de-contrasted, to soften hard lines in your face. The background should be simple. Not pure white necessarily, but not open office space either.

Diffused lighting, no top or side shadow, plus a direct. soft light on your face, the camera just in front of you. The camera angle is simple too: just above eyebrow line, straight ahead, from at least 3 feet away.

This means your wireless mouse and keyboard should be set up so that you can control the broadcast while maintaining the right perspective.

Watch the video but go beyond. Use a wireless earbud (not bulky headphones): not distracting, yet never an echo. Did Dan Rather broadcast from bulky headphones?

Be able to share your screen at any time, at the click of a button. Your desktop computer becomes a live video feed first, a workstation second.

Find the right tools to make this happen; create a professional broadcast studio, and consult from it. This is step zero.

Second: calm delivery.

You are calm, composed, and poised. After all, you’re not selling. You are hosting a guest in your interactive broadcast studio.

The technical clarity of your audio and video feeds is a double-edge sword. If you rush what you say, if you are scattered, if you are nervous, it will register painfully. If however, you are calm, poised, and relaxed, those qualities will set the tone of the conversation. Which is important when you consider the following strategic considerations:

• If anything, rather than selling, you’re being to sold to in the sense that you are determining fit.
• And because you have a lead generation program in place, there are more conversations like this one just around the corner.
• So there is no need whatsoever to turn this conversation into a client-consultant relationship.
• The question isn’t how much something costs, or even whether you should provide that thing.
• The question is what is the problem that needs to be solved.
• Of course, you may have the habit of creating the solution – and the price – on the fly, but that’s a good habit to unlearn.

The calm you convey through your high-fidelity connection will help you can materialize all these good things, plus other important mechanics, such as “next steps”.

Third: know thy calendar. 

A broadcast studio always has an events calendar on hand. It describes your availability in the coming weeks and months. Bonus points if you know enough about your client conversation partner to have put their important dates on your calendar. It’s the first, pinned tab on your browser. It’s one of the reasons why it’s so natural for you to schedule a follow-up meeting (if one is warranted based on what you’ve learned).

Speaking of which, never begin a consultive selling conversation without having written down, until you commit them to memory, times for the follow-up conversation. You don’t search your calendar, while on the call, to find your availability for that conversation; the calendar is just a backup because you already have those times in mind, or in case you need to get more than one meeting on the books.

Does MSNBC news anchor Brian Williams say to this to his guests, “Wait a second, hang on. Umm…. let me check my calendar to see when we can have you on again. Umm… Tuesday? Wait no, no. Wednesday would work…..”. 

Fourth: program the interactive feed:

You have opened between 3 and 10 tabs in your browser before you begin the call. As mentioned, have the calendar ready. But also, your client’s website and whatever else is relevant: meeting notes, diagrams, designs, decks, etcetera. Take some time to figure out what makes sense.

Conspicuously absent is anything not helpful to the client, including bookmarks and browser extensions. Unless they are relevant to the conversation, all of these things are distractions.

When Brian Williams turns his broadcast to a screen of pre-programmed information, does he have to “pull it up”. “Hang on, let me find that”. No. His viewers are busy and so are your prospective clients. There will be exceptions to this rule based on the flow of your unique conversation, so make sure you have the obvious things accounted for. 

And if there is no screenshare, then all of this must be delivered in advance.

In conclusion, you are running a business form an interactive broadcast studio. Your desktop computer and its appurtenances must be carefully calibrated to realize that communication model. Transform it from a workstation to the technical centerpiece of your studio.

To snap this back to reality, however, you won’t always have a distraction-free office. Maybe you work from a co-working office, or a Starbucks, or your living room. There are cats, dogs, spouses, kids, baristas, and other people holding conversations. There could even be unreliable connectivity through which to deliver the audio and video waves that comprise your delivery.

Or maybe you have your own professional office, or office space with a conference room – but don’t assume that’s all you need. I have been in very high-rent office conference rooms with terrible camera angles, echo-y acoustics, and bad lighting.

Perfectly lit, distraction-free, high-connectivity (“high-clarity”) space – space that by definition you exercise a high degree of control over – is expensive.

What can you do to bridge the gap between your reality and your “ideality”, the professional sound and video studio completely free of distraction? 

And here’s the most important question: can you bridge that gap enough to create the right mindset, in yourself and in your conversation-partner, to set the right tone for your conversation?

Yesterday I wrote about the importance of cultivating confidence in the value of what you provide. Confidence can manifest itself as:

• swagger
• audacity
• friendliness
• authority
• charm

I never thought it’d be possible to define that last one, charm. Being charming in business, specifically in marketing, and super-specifically, in copywriting, confers an advantage. It can show up in all kinds of places: product design, web design, copywriting, user experience, marketing materials, and more. But charm isn’t what you might think. It’s not the exclusive domain of presidents and celebrities. It doesn’t require an outgoing personality, wit, a smooth, articulate delivery, or polish of any other kind. It doesn’t even require confidence, though that can’t hurt.

So what is charm and how can you cultivate it?

The New Oxford American Dictionary defines it as “the power or quality of giving delight or arousing admiration.” And charm has a close verbal sibling, charisma: “compelling attractiveness or charm that can attract devotion in others”.  What these two qualities have in common is that they describe one person, relative to how they are viewed by multiple other people.

But here’s a much more “inclusive” definition of charm, from copywriter Drayton Bird:

The person who is charming has the ability so talk to you and make both of you feel as though you were wonderful.

You see? It’s the creation of a shared feeling. It puts charm in the context of a two-way conversation, of two people. 

How to Be Charming in Sales and Marketing

Are there mechanics to charm? There certainly are; many were outlined in the classic, How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie. But let’s look at how Drayton Bird’s three ingredients break down into places where you can take some kind of action.

Indirect flattery (modesty)

“I’m not really wonderful but you are”.

The secret to indirect flattery is humility. A useful way to think about humility in the context of owning a business that provides an expertise-derived service is this: your services are not valuable because you are brilliant. They are valuable because you have done the work to gain the insight and skill to provide results to your clients.

Honesty

Honestly not only the best policy. It’s as rare enough now to make you pleasantly conspicuous.

Honesty is not about “being blunt” or “telling it like it is”. That mindset is complete bullshit, to be honest. It is about examining very carefully what you think the important truths of a particular business problem are. By examining them carefully, you will understand them. By understanding them, articulating them will come naturally. 

Liking people / liking to help people

Number three and four come across naturally, to all human beings. And they are sort of the same thing. Of course, you don’t have to like everyone. There are some people not worth liking. But most people you will like, so ask yourself, how can I help this person.

So for all three cases, the secret to charm is to figure out how to cultivate these tendencies, all of which already exist inside you.

And here’s the real secret, they exist in other people too, and by manifesting them in your interactions, you will bring them out, such that you will create a shared feeling of being wonderful.

Charm.

I wanted to atone for the article I wrote earlier this summer on the psychodynamics of selling in copy. This article is also about psychology but it’s about the importance of your confidence (not tricks) in your business development efforts, particularly lead generation.

That article told you how to exploit the deep-seated and instinctive behavioral tics that we homo sapiens have inherited from our homo habilis, homo erectus and other hominid ancestors (thanks ancestors 👊). We cultivated them collectively in our gene pool to survive on this planet. That’s why there’s nothing sillier than humans deriding animals for their instinctive behaviors – as if we were any different!

Anyway, you might find it a bit creepy to think about how to capitalize on our instinctive behaviors through sales and marketing language. But that is exactly what copywriters and other salespeople do. Does this message sound familiar? – “You should get/rent/buy/reserve this now because I have other people interested in it and there’s limited availability“. It works, doesn’t it?

And it’s kind of unsettling to know why it works, then put it to use, then see it in action. 

Which is why I suggested in that article that you should employ genuine goodwill and helpfulness. And be selling something good, something valuable. As David Ogilvy said, “Advertising is only evil when it advertises evil things.”

Why confidence matters

Now speaking of valuable, I’ve written before about the importance of strong positioning to your sales and marketing efforts; it increases demand by narrowing the competition. It also deepens your skills through repetition – you’re repeatedly solving the same kind of problem so you get better at it.

So why is it, then, that some services providers run extremely successful firms with bad positioning? In the company-culture world, why are some executives extremely successful despite never having cultivated an area of expertise? Sometimes it’s just connections. Often, they do really good work.

But not always. So how do they do it?

The answer is almost always that they have a ton of the emotion we call confidence or self-belief.

Depending on your personality type, this can come across as charm, swagger, quiet, reassuring confidence, challenging, critical insight, or inspirational leadership. Whatever, the case, there is an outsized connection, for owners of services firm, between confidence and success in business development.

Who uses confidence to generate demand and sell?

Liston Witherill, sales coach to consultants, appeals to consultants desire to “sell with confidence”. But who else needs confidence?

Quick digression on terminology: for me, a lead takes many forms but think of it as a measure of demand for your services. And if you put all this stuff (marketing, lead cultivation, sales, pricing/negotiation) into a big basket, one convenient label for it is business development. A sale, or at least a sale worth pursuing, is an exchange which creates profit, which Harry Browne defines as happiness.

Question for you – do you practice business development? Do you conscientiously increase measurable demand for your services in a way that yields leads – which can be cultivated and turned into sales?

In my mental framework, you do, no matter who you are. Or at least you try, like me (I’m working on it!).

I primarily address what I’m saying to owners of complex services firms but we all sell, every working day, all the time. 

As an employee, you sell the value of your work to increase your job security, your leverage, and other ambitions. It’s disappointing to put time and effort into solutions which are never realized, isn’t it? That’s partly because the sale is incomplete. You exchanged your work but didn’t back validation, just your wages. This is why generating demand for, and “selling”, your solutions is especially important in a large organization, with 100s of cooks in the kitchens.

The last time I had an employee position, about a decade ago, I worked at a firm with 3,000 employees total, 500 people in my division, professional services, and 50 people on my team, digital solutions. Making a name for your services as an employee in that context has a lot in common with establishing a great positioning for your firm as a business owner. But confidence goes a long way. (And let’s be honest, it goes way too far, especially in large organizations. But that’s another story.)

I think this is because it’s almost impossible to express the value of your complex services work in specific terms, partly because they are too complex to describe without a very deep understanding of them (which we’re all working on, right?). And partly because they are unpredictable and imprecise. Which doesn’t mean, “not valuable”.

In the digital marketing services discipline, for example,  the calculation of ROI in sub-disciplines such as “conversion rate optimization” and “search engine optimization” is much more of an abstract concept than you’d think. So-called performance marketing can only be calculated in grand, over-arching terms because it is always impossible to equalize out all variables when comparing one period of time to another, which is the basic method for performance marketing.

The fact is that the entire Universe is in constant flux; time itself is nothing. It doesn’t exist other than as a concept whereby we quantify motion. One thing moves relative to another and – voila – time exists. But you’ll ever recreate those unique conditions; Q1 2018 is never the same as Q1 2019. The Facebook Ads’ “lookalike list” is a great concept, but it’s only that: a concept. It is not alike.

So if you can’t sell services based on precisely quantifiable results, if you can’t prove their worth in advance, where do you turn for leverage in the sales conversation? Positioning is probably the most important strategic factor. But deep confidence is fundamental.

A formula for success in selling services

Another sales coach (and marketing expert and author), Blair Enns, has written extensively on the impact of self-belief in the sales process in particular.

The traditional formula for any kind of work, he will tell you first, for broad context, goes something like this:

P = M x A

Performance is equal to motivation times ability

That formula applies to almost any endeavor. You can even apply it to other species, too. The performance of a dog in finding a buried treat is roughly equal to his motivation (hunger) multiplied by his abilities (smelling and digging).

Motivation is pretty self-explanatory but it’s interesting to imagine what that might look like. Drayton Bird writes about doing his best work in his early 40s after he had lost everything at a prior business and staked all of his remaining money in a “startup” advertising agency. He had no plan B. Meanwhile, he had a family to support, a reputation to protect, and only one client… He describes his prevailing emotional state during all this as desperation. Later his agency was acquired by Olgivy & Mather and he became well known for this craft.

The more desperate you are, the better you are likely to do.
– Drayton Bird

Now some dogs are desperate whereas others are well-fed. Some just love the game of treasure-hunting. So there are many kinds of motivation but if you’re desperate, leverage that.

To bring this around from dogs digging up our backyards to professional services, the abilities part of this equation is exactly where positioning comes into play. The narrower and better cultivated your positioning, the greater your perceived, and probably de facto, abilities.

But this formula gets most interesting when we introduce the self-esteem into it. This entire article is about that one little variable.

SP = M x A x SE

Sales Performance is equal to Motivation times Ability times Self-Esteem

So there you have it: selling complex services to other businesses is a product of your drive, your positioning-based ability, and your confidence, confidence in yourself and the rest of what you’re selling.

That confidence is what makes it possible to name pricing that reflects the true value of your services.

And if we don’t name the right price we probably won’t get it. And then both sides lose, because you’ll never, ever do your best work unless you’re getting a fair price. Your compensation is a token of gratitude for the help you’re providing.

Confidence will allow you to guide your client towards expressing the proper amount of gratitude. 

How to develop confidence in the value of the services you provide

Everything we’ve talked about so far begs the question, how do you cultivate that confidence, that “self-esteem”?

There are essentially two ways, which I’m going to break down in a second:

• Deeply-held beliefs 
• Options 

I think we’ve covered the deeply held beliefs quite a bit, but I’ll restate them as the outcome of your natural and cultivated skills and talents as applied to your market positioning. That creates beliefs.

There’s a hack for strengthening your hold on those beliefs, though: writing, or let’s just call it self-expression.

Experts write.
– Blair Enns

If you express your thinking about what you do in some way, you may deepen your belief in it (as long as you actually have something of value to provide). So I don’t care how you write or otherwise express yourself, but this is the how.

Maybe you dictate into your phone or computer. Maybe you have a conversation with your colleagues and record it. Maybe a private journal, maybe a public weblog, maybe you draw diagrams. Maybe you constantly do recorded webinars. But there is something about getting those thoughts outside of your head, and into some other dwelling. It will let you pick out the good things from the rest, refine them, and use them to generate and sell demand for your services.

Your self-expression can also double as content marketing, which confers long-term lead generation benefits if done properly.

Let’s talk about options too, because, without them, your deeply held beliefs have no purchase.

“Options” sounds like lead generation, lead flow, but there’s more to it than that. Blair Enns talks about three kinds of options that matter to business development outcomes: clients, leads, and money in the bank.

• Clients generally means good client relationships, but mediocre or even bad ones will do. There is something about currently being engaged that changes how you present yourself. You are busy. You are not undermined by your own idle hands. A decent substitute for client engagement is structured lead generation such as content marketing or outbound email marketing.
• Leads, which again, I define as quantifiable units of demands. The key here is that the lead materializes in the form of what I’d call a lead flow. A lead flow should be steady, reliable, and of sufficient volume to create more opportunity than you can respond to. The goal of lead generation is to create a steady and reliable flow of worthwhile conversations.
• Money in the bank. Because you are selling complex services, as opposed to widgets, their value is closely related to what’s fair. There are few objective pricing measures for your services and that can result in their value being called into question, at which point you may undervalue your own services because you don’t have enough money in the bank and you sense a chance to fix that problem. 

Of course, part of the money solution here lies in finance, which as about far from an area of specialization for me as ballet dancing. Remember that this is an entirely relative question.

What matters, therefore, is not how much money is in your firm’s bank account, and by extension your own, but whether that amount of money is appropriate for your businesses, and your own, financial health. Your risk tolerance comes into play a little but the questions is, do you have control? There is a reason why Ramit Sethi doesn’t accept coaching students who have credit card debt. 

If you have the right amount of money on hand, that will translate to tangible confidence and express itself in your sales and marketing, including that crucial moment when price is negotiated.

When you put it all together, you get not just beliefs, but a (great) feeling, an emotion: confidence. 

In conclusion, business confidence cultivation is an essential practice

Cognitive behavioral therapists are right: emotions are determined by beliefs, and beliefs are determined by actions. And vice-versa. And, yes, there is a virtuous cycle here. The key is to determine what actions to take. 

Let’s recap some prime candidates:

• Making difficult decisions about who you solve problems for – and who you don’t (positioning)
• Deepening your insight into your services and your clients through self-expression
• Building a structured set of lead generation systems
• Being in control of your personal finances, whatever that means to you and your business

Building true confidence using methods like this is a long game but a crucial one. What if you need to act fast and put money in your account. I also have a very particular opinion: I believe that of everything I’ve talked about here, the surest way to business development success is reliable and consistent lead flow, through systematic lead generation. Nothing builds your confidence like knowing, during a sales conversation, that another such conversation is right around the corner. That’s how I think of lead flow.

But it’s not the only piece of the puzzle. So how about you, is this is a long game or a short one? And what’s the most effective way for you to build your business development confidence?

A few days ago, I wrote about hybrid expertise firms, where I argued that small firms need to acquire, contract, or hire talent in multiple expertise areas even while they offer a narrow range of services to a narrow range of clients.

That got me thinking about blending not just expertise areas but services, too. Whereas that post was directed at agency principals, this post is for anyone in the digital professional services world thinking about expanding their skills.

One of the most powerful types of expertise hybrids are those that involve SEO.

But writings about this subject generally known as “hybrid SEO services” have to do with hybrid services within the realm of Marketing Expertise: SEO and copywriting, SEO and email marketing, and the granddaddy of them all, SEO and Paid search, ie., search advertising as on Google AdWords.

Unfortunately though, it’s when services come from two different expertise areas that they acquire the most problem-solving value and thinking.

Previously, I’ve defined the four key expertise areas for a digital firm as follows:

1. Creative Expertise
2. Technical Expertise
3. Sales & Marketing Expertise
4. Business Expertise

I think there’s a right way and wrong way to do this; like building a hybrid expertise firm, the right way is based on drawing from multiple expertise areas. I

Each of us inherits inclinations towards one or more of these areas. But there’s being inclined and there’s developing expertise that allows you to think about solving problems in a different way.

Some people have said: everyone should learn to program. Or, everyone should practice design thinking. And not to become an expert, necessarily but to improve one’s ability to solve problems.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlBr4SI-NYY

It had nothing to do with anything practical, it had to do with using them [software programs] to be a mirror of your thought process, to actually learn how to think … I think everybody in this country should learn how to program a computer … I view computer science as a liberal art.
– Steve Jobs

I don’t disagree with the specific point and I completely agree with the larger point.

It pays to understand the technologies you use in your daily work, as well as those that comprise whatever solution you put in your clients’ hand.

For example, if you work in either design and branding or in UX design, all of the your creative output will be delivered through the medium of Content Delivery Networks, the now-ubiquitous technical methodology for making apps and websites load fast.

Meanwhile, most of your output will be delivered through the web using a CMS product such as WordPress. For both visual and UX designers, understanding the constraints of CMS from a business, marketing, and technology perspective will vastly improve the quality your work.

Being Expertise Multi-Lingual

Which is exactly the point: understanding your expertise area from the perspective of the other ones that are most important to digital services

Not because you’ll comply with the another system’s requirements. It’s not about compliance; it’s about blending your way of solving business problems with other ways of doing the same. That’s where the sum-greater-than-parts effect kicks in. What better way of blending thinking than understanding that thinking.

Everyone on a digital team should have an understanding of the four pillars of digital services: creative expertise, technical expertise, sales & marketing expertise, and business expertise.

Examples of Hybrid Expertise

But I’m not talking about just understanding for the perspective of organizating your thinking, which is the excellent point Steve Jobs makes in the video above. I’m talking about actually acquiring another concrete skill – from area of expertise outside the one you have already mastered (and if you haven’t mastered any, this doesn’t apply to you yet) and joining it together.

Many SEOs make the mistake that they are stronger for focusing on SEO to the exclusion of all other forms of marketing, let alone other service areas. Not Sara does SEO and Volacci.

Sara does SEO

There is a woman named Sara Dunn whose YouTube series “Specializing a Web Agency” is terrific. And by the way, if you’re thinking about taking the specialization journey like the comprehensive and structured workshops on specialization offered by Philip Morgan. Philip’s target customers are self-employed software developers (ie freelance consultants or small agency owners) but in my opinion anyone who fits into digital services world can benefit from his approach.

Anyway, Sara’s specializations are web design and SEO, a perfect example of hybrid horizontal expertise

In the world of digital services, web design falls dead in the center of Creative Expertise and SEO is a fundamental skill (well, a large collection of related skills, actually) to Sales and Marketing Expertise.

By blending those two disciplines, she provides customers in her target niche (the wedding industry) with two very different, yet very complementery skills and expertise areas with which to solve problems. For a wedding planner or someone else in the wedding industry asking themselves, “how do I get more wedding clients?“, Sara’s form awnswers that question.

Volacci

Volacci is another small agency that marries SEO, a form of Marketing Expertise, to another expertise area, Technical Expertise. In Volacci’s case the particular form of technical expertise is Philip Morgan calls a “Platform Specialization”: Drupal.

Drupal, as you may know, is not as simple to use and understand as its CMS counterpart, the more popular WordPress. Nor does it have the built-in on-page SEO optimization tools that WordPress comes with (or are easy to add on as plugins).

Yet it’s a much more flexibile product, meaning that with the right customizations, it’s possible to automate scaled-up SEO optimization, for the kind of large scale sites (1000+ pages) that Drupal is so good at supporting.

For example, I built and SEO-optimized a 10,000+ page Drupal site in 2006 that, despite never being optimized or redesigned since, now gets 30,000 unique visits a month.

So in a nutshell, SEO for Drupal represents a huge missed opportunity. And by specializing in both, Volacci solves that problem much more effectively than if it only dealt in either SEO or Drupal.

The elusive business-SEO hybrid expertise

So far we’ve looked at the following SEO hybrids:

• Sales & Marketing Expertise (SEO) <-.> Creative Expertise (Web Design)
• Sales & MarketingExpertise (SEO) <-> Technical Expertise (Drupal)

What’s missing? An “SEO-marriage” of Marketing and Business Expertise. For example:

• Sales & Marketing (SEO) <-.> Business Expertise (Market research)

Unfortunately, I have no specific recommendation for a firm or consultant that marries these two expertise areas. And when I say marries these two areas, I mean someone who really understands business planning and strategy, such as an MBA, a business owner, or a seasoned veteran of complex consultative sales & marketing who has transcended an implementation deal and become a strategic advisor to her business.

That hybrid-expert person understand:

• Whether SEO should be pursued as an inbound marketing strategy, in the first place. This is a form of market research and validation that only be performed by that rare individual with both specializations
• How and why to re-engineer the DNA of the business model itself to lend itself to SEO marketing opportunities.
• How to pursue and maintain a position of market advantage by leveraging SEO

In theory, a good “pure SEO” will advise on some of this. But in practice? Not so much. Most good SEOs are scienticists, deeply immersed in their craft, toiling at away at decoding a complex algorithm, and ranking thousands of webpages at a time for high-value keywords.

One you master something, you have two paths:

• Keep mastering it and double-down on learning your craft
• Sacrifice a little bit of that continued learning to bring a new discipline into the fold.

What’s your path? And what’s your expertise? Let me know, I’d love to think about this from your perspective!

Is yours a complex services business? It could be if your firm is one of these:

1. Design agency
2. Marketing firm
3. Advertising agency
4. Software/data service company
5. Sofware publishing company
6. PR firm
7. Web agency
8. Digital marketing firm
9. Management consulting firm

If you’re one of these, you may have some things in common with the rest of the firms on the list: you have a relatively complex sales process. By which I mean you have a sales process that is not only lengthy but highly customized and involves many different personalities and interwoven personal agendas.

And you should be selling something that is based in digital strategy.

Let me explain by drawing a contrast: e-commerce.

Buying a garden shed on Amazon may be a very long sales process, but it’s not a complex one. Even if the product itself is so complex that it needs its own explainer video, the sale itself is simple. It happens with a click. Viola. E-commerce.

And e-commerce is full of complexities –  but these are unlike the complexities of a complex services firm.

E-commerce as an area of expertise is anything but simple. I know this because early in my career I helped build one of the world’s largest e-commerce sites, at the time, Tiffany & Co, then went on to create e-commerce solutions for a decade in various verticals within the nonprofit sector. It gets really complex, really fast.

But the single interaction is not complex for the user, even if it’s for an extremely large amount. A nonprofit client of Blackbaud’s, where I formerly worked, once gave $250,000 in a single online donation. The technical, creative, and marketing expertise that went into creating that moment, not to mention the emotional complexities in the mind of the donor, were profoundly elaborate.

But that sales process was less complex than the sale of $250 in services from one of the types of agencies mentioned at the outset.

Not-so complex services business

Also less complex that high-dollar donations – or luxury jewelry purchases – are the sale of many kinds of services.

Landscaping services may also cost $250 but selling them is fairly simple, even if there is some negotiation involved.

And just because the payment might be complex, that doesn’t make the sale complex. The landscaper doesn’t take checks, he tells you, but he has a credit card processing services, but it’s in his office, he’ll have to call you tomorrow to collect payment. Does 1:20 pm work? He had to reschedule. You see? Payment can be complicated, even if the services isn’t.

How can that be? First, let me recap what factors DON’T involve complex services:

• The amount of the sale
• The technology involved in the sale
• The complexity of the designing and marketing that goes into the sale
• The fact that what is being sold is a service
• Negotiation
• Complexity of payment

So what’s left over that makes some services businesses so complex. Two things:

• the personal relationships that are part of the sales (and marketing) process
• the communication, and simplification, of inherently complex services

The services sold by management consulting firm, or an advertising agency, or a custom web development shop, are often extraordinarily complex; more so than the buyer realizes into she is well into an engagement. For that reason, they have to be well communicated before services are rendered.

What makes it even more complicated is the explanation of the intricacies of a service such as custom app development, or content marketing, in and of themselves constitute a form of services: strategic consulting, which is the dispensing of expertise as advice in exchange for compensation.

The sale itself is not a transaction. It’s an emotional and reasoned transformation that occurs in the purchaser of services after she has gained the trust and understanding necessary to want the services on offer. The rest is just details.

It’s all about relationships. and then some

Speaking of emotional, the crown jewel of complexity services is the personal factor: relationships. Have you ever decided to take a long journey with someone? Perhaps a hiking trip, a train trip around Europe, or a cross-continental journey? Don’t tell me that was a simple journey in terms of the relationship because you’re not a robot. Hopefully, it was a wonderful, interesting, and rewarding experience. But here’s what didn’t happen: you and your traveling companion didn’t didn’t get to know one another any better, didn’t deepen your relationship.

Well, so it is with complex services businesses. Someone on the services provider must get to know the buyer, because how can they be of service, which is at the heart of services as a business deliverable, without knowing how and whether they can serve?

The owner, the communications strategist, lead developer, senior consultant or project manager, gets to know someone on the client side, really well.

And that’s before the sale.

At least if that someone has a talent for complex, consultative selling.

So the next question is, how does a complex services business generates leads that are especially suited for this kind of interaction? Or before we get to that question, even, how do you know if you need to generate those kinds of leads for your firm?