How Your Dream Client Perceives You

Your dream client is going to determine who you are and how to respond to you based on what you show them.

If you begin your conversation with your dream client by introducing yourself,  your company, and your solutions, you will have established yourself as a traditional salesperson. Your dream client will perceive the interaction as typical, and you as a commodity. This is too low a level to result in a better outcome for you, because the outcome isn’t great for your prospect.

If you begin your conversation with an attempt to elicit your dream client’s existing pain as a way to compel change, you will have established that you are very much like the salespeople who have visited this prospect in the past. Those salespeople also looked for ways to displace your dream client’s existing provider by promising better outcomes and a greater ROI.

If you enter the conversation at a much higher level, a more strategic level, then you will have positioned yourself as someone who may be a strategic partner and a trusted advisor. By demonstrating that you think like a business person and someone who knows how to compel and lead change, you differentiate yourself in a meaningful way, creating a preference for you, your solution, and your company.

You are now the largest part of the value proposition, especially early in the process of change, like it or not. You can no longer rely on products and solutions to carry the load when it comes to differentiating you or your company.

More importantly, your dream client is going to allow you to be whatever you are, and they will treat you accordingly. If you look like an undifferentiated commodity, they’ll accept you as just that. If you look like a peer, they’ll accept you as such.