Last Sunday my email was about how your number one competitor is most often the status quo: your potential clients deciding not to do anything.

And I made the point that you're often better off focusing on helping those clients see that something needs to change rather than proving you're an expert (if they don't think they need to change it doesn't matter how expert you are, they don't think they need that expertise).

How do you do that?

The answer is to sloooow down.

A big mistake I've made myself  many times is to get too excited when I'm talking to potential clients. 

We start well by talking about problems they might have or goals they're trying to achieve. But what I used to do was that when I heard something I thought I could help with I immediately jumped to talking about what the solution could be.

I felt like I was adding value and proving my expertise by giving them lots of ideas on how they could solve their problems.

The problem for me was that they usually didn't hire me when I did that. 

I'm sure you've figured out why already. I was moving way too fast.

It obviously wasn't a surprise to the people I was talking to that they had a problem. And since they weren't living on a different planet, they were usually aware that there were solutions to that problem even if they didn't know the details.  

The reason they hadn't already implemented a solution was that to them, the pain of changing seemed greater than the pain they were experiencing from the problem itself (at least in terms of a gut feeling). So they stuck with what they already had.

By jumping straight to talking about solutions I was giving them details of something they weren't yet convinced they needed. Worse: the more details I gave them the more difficult and painful the solution seemed to be – so I was actually putting them off.

What I should have done instead was spend much more time exploring the impact of the problem. Asking about what effect it had. Using my experience to suggest possible side effects and contingent issues they hadn't realised were happening.

When I started doing that, my results took a big uptick. I was still adding value when I later suggested solutions. But this time I was suggesting solutions to people who now realised they needed them.

Of course, sometimes when you explore the impact of a problem it turns out it's not worth solving after all. In that case, it's your duty to recommend that they stay with the status quo.

But usually, that's not the case. Usually, they mistakenly stay with the status quo because you haven't properly helped them see the true impact of the problem they have.

Don't let that happen to you.