The hardest part of selling expertise? Not giving it away.
Sarah Tucker called this out in The Wall Street Journal after discovering that a substantial speaking engagement she assumed was paid had been viewed by the organizers as an opportunity for “visibility, introductions and future opportunities.”
“Value unspoken is value undefined,” she writes. “If you do not define the value of your work clearly, someone else will define it for you. Often downward.”
There’s a version of this that consultants, writers, strategists, and other people who sell expertise encounter every day.
When it comes to selling our expertise, we are our own worst enemies. We give away what we’re trying to sell.
We research the prospect before the meeting. Study the competition. Diagnose the problem. Identify the reframing. We walk into the conversation ready to show how quickly we can see what others have missed.
And that’s precisely where demonstrating our value can turn into an inadvertent freebie.
We don’t just show them that we understand the problem. We start solving it.
The strategic idea. The story. The positioning. The language. Our own brilliance and singular value.
We’ve done the work before we have the work.
The problem is that thinking is difficult to sell without revealing some of it. A prospective client can’t inspect judgment, pattern recognition, synthesis, or strategic position before buying. We have to demonstrate concretely what we can do.
But demonstrating expertise and delivering it are not the same thing.
Baxter’s warning: “Never ever do substantial professional work without clarifying terms first. Not because people are wicked. Because ambiguity is expensive.”
The problem is that in trying to prove the value of our expertise, we can end up giving them the very expertise we’re trying to sell.
It begins in the pitch, the exploratory meeting, the “informal conversation,” the request to hear how you would approach the problem.
The job is to make the strength of your thinking unmistakable without handing over the thinking they should be paying for.
Show them that you see the problem. Show them why it matters. Show them how you would approach it.
Then stop.
The pitch should make them want the answer.
It shouldn’t give them the answer.
