Do It Yourself

If you want someone else to nurture your dream clients for you, then you are never going to have the relationships you need with your dream client. When someone else provides the insights, the information, and the good ideas, they become the value creator.

If you want to build relationships before you need them, then you have to do the building.

When someone else does your prospecting for you, you aren’t proving that you are so valuable that your dream client should be honored and flattered at the opportunity to speak with you. Instead, you are simply telegraphing that you think so little of your dream client that you believe they are supposed to be compelled to meet with you through the process of answering qualifying questions. Is it any wonder they cancel your meeting or fail to show up?

If you want to speak to your dream client, you’d pick up the phone and call them.

The subject matter expert you rely on isn’t really a trusted adviser. They’re just someone you brought to the meeting to answer important questions that you haven’t learned to answer yourself, mostly through learned helplessness; it is actually the process of avoiding responsibility by pretending to not know anything.

If you want to be a trusted advisor, you know you need trust and advice. If you don’t have the advice, well . . .

Just Do It

Some things you should do for yourself, even if there is someone else who might be able to do it for you. Ask yourself why someone else should be doing these things for you.

Are they nurturing your dream clients because they need a relationship with your dream client or because you don’t want to do the work?

Are they prospecting for you as a supplement for your massive effort at creating opportunities, or because you are too lazy to prospect, too afraid of the telephone, or because you mistakenly think it’s beneath you?

Do you need a subject matter expert because you don’t understand quantum mechanics or because your learned helplessness has prevented you from being able to present a decent web demo?

Where you are the primary value creator, do things yourself.