Preface
It is no longer good enough to be good at what you do. You must dem- onstrate a baseline of excellence just to survive. The thing that will really make you stand out in your market is how effectively you can communicate about what it is that you do and how happy your clients are to have had you do it. You have to demonstrate results. You have to be able to sing your own praises, toot your own horn, and stand up and shout to the world, in a variety of different formats, why anyone should buy your services. Specifically, what you have to tell the world is why they should buy your services from YOU. It is not how good you are at what you do that matters; it is how effective you are at marketing and selling what you do. The good news is that you already have the skills to do this. You know who your audience is and what your message is. Now you just need to figure out how you can communicate your message in multiple different ways to reach all the varied styles out there in your intended customer base.
Not unlike the frustrated artist who lines the walls of his home with his own paintings and wonders why he hasn’t been discovered, those of us who are just good service providers and not good networkers, marketers, and salespeople will be sitting home alone. Example: Many attorneys have told me that they create great work product or are fabulous litigators and they assume clients should just know that and somehow find them. It would be nice if it worked that way, but it doesn’t.
That’s why I wrote this book. Tons of coaches, trainers, and consult- ants are great at their craft, but don’t know how to sell their services to corporations and organizations. Whether you are selling to companies or to individuals, if you are a self-employed professional, you will find in this book the essential mental perspectives that will open the floodgates to new business and repeat business. You will also find the all-access pass to expanding new business with your current clients. There are many books saturating the market about sales and selling. You can also find a fair number of books on networking. There are quite a few materials about marketing. However, it is the intersection of networking, marketing, and sales that is the sweet spot where you can seal the deal. There’s no class that you took in school that taught you how to integrate the critical trinity of networking, marketing, and sales. This book shows you how.
Seal the Deal will save you time. Attorney clients have told me that as associates, they were actually taught to expect it to take them seven years to get business from their marketing and rainmaking activities. SEVEN YEARS?! With integrated activity in the three domains (networking, marketing, and sales) mapped out in this book, you can reduce that cycle time by 85 percent or more. Some people believe that if you are good at network- ing, sales will happen. Others believe that if you are good at marketing, sales will happen. Many will tell you that if you are good at sales, there’s a pretty good chance sales will happen. Seal the Deal will show you that if you are good at all three (networking, marketing, and sales), then sales are guaranteed to happen and you will build a six-figure business in a relatively short time.
