The Profitable Consultant: Starting, Growing, and Selling Your Expertise

Foreword

Sales and marketing can be uncomfortable for professional business consultants and executive coaches. I've known many coaches who want to be above promoting or selling their services. They believe that their work should speak for itself and that marketing and promotion—selling—is demeaning.

Maybe they don't want to be associated with those pushy or annoying people that so often garner the title salesperson. Perhaps they don't want their clients to think of them as one of these distasteful people. Possibly they see self-promotion as a reflection of professional or personal deficit.

Whatever the case may be, it holds them back. One of the things that I frequently tell people when they ask me for advice about how to get a job in consulting is: “You have to sell yourself. You have to develop the [You] Brand.” Most people aren't really salespeople. You still must sell; the trick is to do it in such a way that you are not seen as a salesperson—and that's where people need significant help.

The Profitable Consultant will give you that help. Taking traditional beliefs about how best to grow a practice and generate revenue, and turning them completely upside down, Jay Niblick rewrites the business development playbook for the consulting and coaching industry.

We're in a different field than most other professions. What we need isn't conventional business development techniques; it's a new methodology specifically designed for us—independent business consultants and coaches—and ...