Professionals Do - Home Page

Unfortunately, you're in a relationship business.

What do professionals do? They:
Get some fundamentals right
Deepen their expertise through intentional focus [[]]
Cultivate a point of view on how things should be done: [[]]
Communicate their value clearly [[]]
Design their services to improve client outcomes [[]]
Invest in and maintain their network
Use, manage, and take seriously a CRM: [[]]
Know of, meet, and maintain collegial relationships with their peers/colleagues/competitors: [[]]
Build relationships with those most likely and able to refer business [[]]
Handle referrals with structure & process, projecting interest in the opportunity and lack of need for the opportunity [[]]
Expand their network in thoughtful ways [[]]
Keep past clients in the loop without wasting their time or overburdening them (provide value before, during, and after the engagement) [[]]
Value their own work
Regularly collect evidence of results, as objective and measurable as possible
Seek to understand why they win and lose deals
Read their clients' trade journals or equivalent
Communicate with and treat their prospects/clients well
Follow up
With leads
With prospects
With open loops of any kind
Seek maximal value
Proactively look for and suggest ways to make things better within or adjacent to the current engagement scope
Suggest sources of value your client may not know about
I'm not sure where to slot in the following:
Theory: deciding to be a "thought leader to your network" is likely to pay off better than trying to "be a thought leader" because the latter implies winning at a search or audience-building game. The former implies that you will take ownership of one or more questions and labor for your network to "answer" those questions (if they're the right kind of questions for thought leadership, there probably won't be a single, definitive, one-and-done answer, but rather an ongoing discussion that speaks to the question in a productive way). This roughly fits under "provide value before, during, and after the engagement".
Mindset stuff
This is still fuzzy, but I think professionals think of their profession as "real" in a way that some of us don't think of ours as "real". Hmm...

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