“Sell Money” means proving to customers that your product will help them make more money, spend less of it, reduce the risk of losing it, or stay compliant (avoiding fines and legal risk). Demonstrate how spending money with you will make them more money. If you say you’ll “increase revenue” or “decrease costs”, you sound just like everyone else. What's equivalent to money in their mind – leads? Close rates? Social activity? Collections? Employee engagement or fulfillment? As much as we love and know engaged employees and fulfillment are vital, how do you prove to customers that you can help them make money with them? How can you make the case they are needed? CASE STUDY: WHAT ACME LEARNED FROM FAILING AT OUTBOUND LEAD GENERATION YOUR CURRENT STRENGTH CAN BE A FUTURE WEAKNESS Services businesses (especially custom development shops, consultants, design agencies or anyone who does a lot of custom work), and “utility player” employees who are great at everything, have a special struggle with nailing this. Being great at many things so far has been your strength, because you could take on any challenge and deliver results. But your strength has now become your weakness. Because the Fear Of Missing Out holds you back from picking One Thing to specialize in and be the best at. “What do I pick? I can be world class at x, y, z…” (And that One Thing has to be specific – not “We’re the best in the world at custom software development.” Vague. ) “But if I’m going to be the best in the world at training public speakers, then I’m going to miss out on being the world­class artist I want to be. Or we’ll miss out on the financial services market. Or this mobile app we could do, or...” If your One Thing struggles, learn and pivot, until you learn how/where to win. Let go of knowing what the answer is ahead of time – just get to the next step. And re­evaluate. And repeat. Guaranteed, though – if you’re spreading yourself across multiple things, you’re just deluding yourself. The problem is a mindset shift in services. When you decide to go for growth, you need to switch your whole sales attitude 180 degrees: From: “What's your problem? We can solve it. Whatever your problems are, we have many capabilities. There’s something we can do for you if we look hard enough.” You end up solving different problems in different ways, making it virtually impossible to scale. To: “Here's the problem we are the best at solving…with our repeatable solution we have delivered 1,000 times. Do you have it? No, you don’t have it? Do you know anyone else who might be interested?”