Secret Tradecraft of Elite Advisors: Covert Techniques for a Remarkable Practice

Clients come to experts with challenges that they can’t solve. They’ve picked all the low-hanging fruit and it’ll take a ladder to get the rest. Or they’ve eaten everything on the plate except the vegetables and it’s going to be a slog to get through the rest of the meal.

When you do all the hard work to understand what’s going on and you don’t share it—effectively—you negate your role.

Your website should help a prospect make an honest decision about whether it’s a good fit to work with you, and he should do this on his own, before he ever talks to you,

One of the things that impactful experts do is make connections between disparate areas of knowledge. They see things in one field and apply them in another. Useful nuggets of insight are buried everywhere.

The first opportunity is when you are initially discussing the engagement. You’ll want to give the prospective client multiple options for the engagement, each one priced and scoped differently. You’ll probably have a good idea of what they should hire you for, but it’s still helpful to most (not all) prospects to hear the options. You’ll also be p

Most clients aren’t ready for everything, so don’t overwhelm them. This can also be a strategy for a later engagement that’s more “advanced” in nature.

No middle ground: free to prospects … or high fees to clients. The distinction here is that the free stuff is unapplied, leaving the prospect to figure out what parts work and which ones need to be modified. Your clients, though, pay you good money to figure that out for them.

what you should be talking about is whether you are a mutual fit and how you will go about solving their challenge. Nothing else.

it’s your job to know which tools—in which order—to apply in solving that for them.