I've been doing quite a few interviews for podcasts and hangout shows recently. On one of them I got asked the question:

“What core ideas do you believe everyone listening should embrace if they're going to be successful?”

You may have heard my answer before, but I make no apologies for banging this particular drum time and time again.

For me the most important principle in marketing for professional service businesses is to give Value In Advance. In other words to prove your value to potential clients in advance of them actually working with you by doing something useful for them.

I can't tell you how much time people waste on the uphill task of trying to convince potential clients how great they'd be to work with, when it would just be easier to prove it. 

Legendary professional services marketing expert David Maister used an approach to Value In Advance that many of us could do well to emulate.

When asked by a potential client to create a proposal and then present it to them, Maister offered them an alternative.

He explained how all the proposals and presentations they'd see would look pretty similar and wouldn't really shed any light on the key question of how good the professional would be to work with and how effective they are at what they do.

So he used to suggest to them that rather than him spending a bunch of time writing a proposal and then presenting it to them, he would come down and run a half day workshop for them to help progress their project.

At the end of the half day they'd know what he was really like to work with and have confidence in his abilities to get results for them based on the effectiveness of the workshop. And he'd know what they'd be like to work with as a client.

They could base their decision on real experience working with him, not just what he told them it would be like.

And, of course, none of their time together would be wasted. They'd have made progress whether they hired him or not. As opposed to having wasted a bunch of time with him creating and them presenting a sales document.

Could you do something similar in your business?

Even if you couldn't do exactly the same thing, the idea behind his approach of finding a way of turning a pitch into a value-added interaction together is a smart one that can be applied in many different situations.

I bet you could use it too.