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.

The better your positioning, the easier it is to give insight away.

they buy. The format doesn’t matter too much, though I am drawn to the physical format and not just a digital one because it feels more substantial.

Your leverage comes from confidential data gathering that only you can interpret.

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.

All this works if you standardize your data gathering, because only then can you make the comparisons easier to apply. You might play with that initial survey for a year until you get it right, but after that, you’ll want to land on one specific instrument that’s used with all of your similar clients. Which should be quite possible if your position

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.

You are selling objectivity, which comes from externality. One of the only reasons you can actually help them is that you are not in their world. They are inside their own jar and can’t read the label. You enter that world and you see the label clearly. It’s not that they aren’t capable of reading other people’s labels—just not their own. They are

Second, clients will not pay a premium for ongoing presence, long term. They will only pay a premium for episodic presence.