Most of the time we interact with clients we need to be believable.

That could be in our marketing, when we're talking to them about working together or when they're paying clients we're recommending a course of action to.

If clients don't believe in us, it usually won't be long before they're ex-clients.

And if they don't believe in us when we're talking about working together, then the chances are we never will.

Now there are lots of things you need in place to be believable. But one of the big ones that is often missed is simply that you have to believe in yourself.

I don't mean the rah-rah “believe in yourself” motivational stuff.

I mean that if you're offering to do something for a client you must be confident you'll be able to do a great job.

If you're not, the client will pick up on it. It'll “shine” through subconsciously in your body language, word choice, the tone of your voice.

If you're trying to promote a service and you realise in your heart of hearts that you don't fully believe you can do a great job then you have two choices.

The first is to convince yourself.

I don't mean kid yourself. I mean go out and get feedback from people you've done this service for before. There's a good chance you'll get great feedback that will help build your belief.

And if you don't get great feedback, that's a sign you should shift to choice 2.

The second choice is to back off. You might want to sell this service. it might be a very prestigous thing to do and it might make you a lot of money.

But if you're not super confident you can do a great job you should scale back and focus on something you are confident you can do a great job with.

Eithically it's the right thing to to. And marketing-wise it is too as your potential client will pick up on your lack of belief almost every time.

So scale back to something you can do really well and work on building the capabilities to do the thing you want to do really well too.

You might need to do it a few times pro-bono or do it as an extension for an existing client. But either way you need to build up your own belief that you can do this brilliantly.

Only then will you be able to transmit that confidence over to your potential client so they'll feel comfortable hiring you.