Now and again I answer questions posted on LinkedIn’s question and answer section. Today I saw a good question asking members what would be the one piece of advice and/or wisdom they would give to entrepreneurs such as those found in professional services who start their own business and have to sell. Here is how I answered that question…

Most of the professional service providers you are talking about have a fatal flaw when it comes to selling their services… I’ll explain by sharing an experience…

I was invited last year to speak on Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) at a lawyers conference in Vienna. I therefore had an international audience from across Europe and Americas of the smaller law firms. In my experience, lawyers are pretty much a very confident group of people and my audience of different nationalities were no different. Lawyers are generally very intelligent, articulate, quick thinking and possibly a little aloof… particularly this group when they had to get up and experience a few NLP exercises. However, they did it with good humour and at the end of the session their natural confidence was still high… and then came the close of the session…. However, before that, let me put into context the close…

One of the main themes I teach on NLP is that behaviour follows intention. Whatever a person’s intention it will come out in their behaviour – we are human and we can’t stop our intention flowing out of our behaviour. Most people can pick up if something is not right, for example, sales people who only have their own interests at heart will come across as such. We don’t trust them and back away. Therefore, if your intention is to sell, you will come across as selling. If however, your intention is to help someone to buy this will equally come across and be more successful.

So, having shared with my audience many aspects of NLP and human behaviour, I asked my audience how confident they felt at selling their services and I think I had a unanimous vote of high confidence. I then asked how many of them were confident and comfortable about explaining their fees to their clients. Immediately the atmosphere in the room changed and many people suddenly did not look confident and again most said they were neither confident nor comfortable about asking for their fees… and here I closed them…If you are not confident in asking for your fees, why should the client feel comfortable about paying them! If you come across as thinking it is wrong, why should your client think it is right!

The lesson – be confident in asking for your fees, or the client will feel something is wrong!

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