I think it's close to impossible to be successful at winning clients if you don't have an excellent feel for how they think: what they want and need, what they believe in, their hopes and fears.

And very often the easiest and best way to get that feel is if you're very much like your clients.

If you're like them, you share their wants and needs, so you don't have to spend an age figuring them out – you just know.

That's certainly something that helps me. As someone who's done consulting and coaching for over 20 years now, 10 of them in my own business, I kind of know how other consultants and coaches think and feel.

But while that commonality is very useful, it's easy to forget that you're not like your clients in every respect. Or that you're not like all of them.

For example, for years I thought that no one would be willing to pay for a high priced program from me where I worked with them personally.

Because my preferred way of learning is to read and experiment myself (and because to be perfectly honest, sometimes I'm a bit tight), I found it difficult to believe that people would be willing to pay what seemed like a small fortune to work personally with me to help them achieve their goals.

And indeed, high priced programs aren't for everyone.

But there are very many people who do prefer this style of learning. Probably rather sensibly they feel that by working with someone closely and getting feedback they'll make much faster progress.

And it turns out I rather like working with these sorts of people.

Yet for years I didn't offer a program like this, simply because it's not something I'd buy myself so I assumed no one else would want to buy it.

Big mistake!

Even if, like me, you're very like your clients. Don't assume you're like them in every respect, or that you have the same wants and needs as all of them.

Make sure you sanity check your assumptions, otherwise you could be missing out on very lucrative opportunities just because they reflect a need you don't have yourself.