Adjust Your Mindset to Sell Your Consulting Services

You can learn all sorts of strategies and tactics to sell your consulting services. 

And those are worth learning… 

But they won’t do you much good if your discomfort with “sales” takes the wheel. 

Or you believe that selling can only be an icky transaction.  

If you hold onto that kind of unhelpful mindset, it will be difficult as heck to use the strategies and tactics in a way that works and feels good to you and your would-be clients. 

But what is mindset? 

Mindset is your attitudes, your beliefs, and habits of thinking that define what you think reality is. Essentially, it is how you've set your mind to look at the world around you and yourself in it.  

Mindset matters tremendously to your success as a consultant.  

It’s not just about reducing stress or feeling better. It is about seeing things accurately enough to make good choices and take the right action.  

But when it comes to selling, it’s easy to get stuck in a mindset that continually feeds an aversion to selling. 

And that means you may be making choices and taking action that yield less business. 

So, if you want to get more clients to hire you to do the work you were meant to do and bring in the income you need, you need to attend to your mindset—as a business imperative. 

The key with overcoming your aversion to selling is to ignite your desire to help. 

At the heart of selling is knowing that there are a lot of people in companies and organizations that truly need and want your help. 

Maybe it's just that they need the expertise that you have. It might be that they have some great people working for them but not your particular expertise. You can come in as that expert and help them accomplish the things they couldn’t otherwise.  

Maybe they need someone who can bring a fresh perspective. Someone who has a broader or new way of looking at things that they are struggling with or has seen others solve.  

Often clients just need more “hands on deck”—that is, someone who can be an extender to their staff so they can get the things done that they need to but don't have enough capacity.  

Sometimes they just need you to come in to get things unstuck and/or moving at a much faster clip.  

Sometimes the client just needs to feel relief. They're stressed out, they have too much to do, and not enough time or ability to do it. They just want you to help them, so they can take things off their worry list.  

Think of the good you can do if you can get in there and help them! 

And if you can understand that selling is really just opening doors to helping, it will get much easier. 

That doesn’t mean it will be completely comfortable, but if you can shift your mindset enough, you can make better choices and take better action to clear your path to helping. 

The key is really this: Don’t let made-up mindsets hold you back. Take advantage of the fact that mindsets can be changed.  

And then take action to change it. 

If you want help shifting your mindset so you can become more comfortable with selling your consulting services (and get past the perceived scarcity mindset trap), you can grab my free tool Cultivating a Consulting Business Mindset. 

Link to get the tool is in comments below!

Cheering you on,

Deb