Professional Services Marketing: How the Best Firms Build Premier Brands, Thriving Lead Generation Engines, and Cultures of Business Development Success, 2nd Edition

24

Selling with Hustle, Passion, and Intensity

Take time to deliberate; but when the time for action arrives, stop thinking and go in.

—Napoleon Bonaparte

In our work with professional services providers over the years, we have seen too many professionals intend to sell and not enough actually sell. They talk about how they are going to make the transition to rainmaker and build their own practices or how they are going to achieve phenomenal, top-line revenue growth for their firms through more focused business development efforts. They read books and attend sales training seminars. They make plans to sell. They talk about what they should do.

Then all too many do nothing. Oh, they can justify their inaction: they were busy with other things. Perhaps worse than the nothing-doers are the people who shuffle papers and do next to nothing. These toe-dipper-inners deceive themselves by saying, “I did my practice growth work today!” even if their action was uninspired, untargeted, and unproductive.

If you really want to bring in some clients and some dollars, you've got to “stop thinking and go in”! With hustle. With passion. With intensity. (HPI, folks.) And your HPI needs to go on for hours on end. For days on end. For months on end.

If you don't, then you'll never know if you could have succeeded.

The ideas in this chapter were originally published as an article in a RainToday.com e-book, The One Piece of Advice You Can't Sell Without.

In the introduction to The One Piece of Advice ...