Back in my corporate consulting days I ended up as the account manager for one of our big global clients.

It was a big change for me, from being primarily a consultant to focusing 100% on business development. And it didn't start particularly well.

Because I was now contacting clients to try to set up meetings to sell to them, they were rather less eager to meet with me than when my role had been to support them as a consultant.

One client in particular, one of their Global VPs who I'd worked with in the past, just stopped taking my calls. Very frustrating as I'd seen him as my best source of new business.

I was convinced that if we got into a decent discussion, I'd have some valuable things to talk about with him that he'd be genuinely interested in. But I just couldn't get through to have that discussion.

So when I heard he'd be speaking at an industry conference in Geneva I persuaded my organisation to fly me over there to attend, aiming to “bump into” him to start up the discussion.

And it worked exactly as planned. I listened to him speak one morning, then later that day saw him over coffee, had a brief chat and obviously said something interesting enough because we arranged a follow-up meeting back in his office for a week or so later.

Of course, now that I look back on it, I can see it was both a good strategy and a bad one.

Good in that it worked. The methods I was using to get through weren't working, so I tried something different that did work.

Bad in that it was both a big investment on the off chance it would turn into something. And more importantly, it was still me chasing him.

Had it been less easy for me to snag the budget to attend the conference I might have been forced into something more creative. And I might have realised that the best route would have been not to try and find a way of fooling him into a meeting he didn't really want, but to get him to want to have the meeting.

When we met up a few weeks later I discovered that's exactly what another firm had done. He told me that they were about to start a big global consulting project with a relatively small, specialist firm.

The difference was that the specialist firm hadn't approached them, my client had approached the specialist firm. Their CEO had published a book and had been featured in one of the industry magazines on exactly the area my client was looking to improve. They'd positioned themselves as authorities in that field, and my clients had contacted them to talk about working together.

My firm could have done that project just as well – we had a lot of experts in that area too. But we weren't well known for it and we hadn't established any sort of reputation. So while I'd been phoning, emailing and flying over to a conference; our competitor had stolen a huge march on us by establishing themselves as experts and having people calling them.

Now this was nearly 15 years ago. Building a reputation then was often done by writing a book and appearing in big publications. It took time and relatively big budgets.

Today even individuals and small firms can become known as one of the leading experts in their field. Clients are much more likely to seek out experts themselves and even less likely to rely on suppliers contacting them.

That's why one of the primary marketing strategies I use is to become known as an Authority. It's one you can follow too.

That doesn't mean you stop reaching out to clients proactively. But you're a lot more likely to get a response if they already see you as a leader in what you do. So in parallel with any outreach campaign, make sure you're devoting at least as much time to building your perceived authority.

To your success.