Clients can smell selectivity. It is one of the early cues that signal to them to drop their guard and participate in meaningful discussions of fit, or raise it and retreat behind the protective cover of “the selection process” where they ask for credentials, proposals and presentations.

It is human nature to follow what retreats from us and to back away from what advances. Confucius famously said, “Speak softly and people lean toward you; speak loudly and they lean away.”

Buyers prefer to be politely vetted by a seller who has clearly defined parameters of the nature of the work he will do, the type of client he will take on, and the budgets with which he will and will not work. The client’s experience in dealing with the selective expert versus the enthusiastic generalist who barges headlong into every opportunity is night and day different. One invites him to advance; the other causes him to retreat.

Back Again to the First Proclamation

Selectivity begins with positioning—the very focus of our enterprise. Our public claim of expertise must describe who we help and how, and in this description those that would be better served by others should be able to select out. The client should be able to determine from a sentence or two whether our expertise is likely to meet his needs.

The narrower our claim of expertise, the more integrity we earn. By staking a narrow claim we build the credibility for the client to assume we have capabilities beyond our claim, whereas a broad claim generates the opposite reaction. The client knows the great difficulty of amassing broad expertise, and when such a claim is made he assumes our true expertise, if any, must be much smaller than what is declared. In his very first interaction with us, in reading the words on our website without having even met or spoken to us, he makes judgments on our integrity that will impact the dynamics moving forward.

The first proclamation lays the foundation for all others, including this, the sixth. If we have succeeded in specializing, then selectivity becomes easier for us.

In Pursuit of No

No is the second best answer we can hear. If the answer is no, we want to hear it as soon as possible, before we and the client unnecessarily waste valuable resources. When an opportunity first arises, therefore, we try to see if we can kill it.

This is contrary to how we typically act, but it is a powerful approach that lets us weed out poor fits early and eliminate those opportunities where the client would not hire us in the end (or those where we would regret that he did). If the opportunity is right and we retreat just a little, the client is likely to follow. The retreat-and-follow is an important test of how much the client recognizes and values our expertise. It tells us if he sees a fit and indicates to us the power we have to lead any engagement.

Our inclination is to avoid the questions to which we think we may not like the answers, but here again we must learn to fight our tendencies, demonstrate the selectivity and efficiency of the expert and march headlong into these conversations in pursuit of no. There are many common reasons why an engagement might not make sense: money, the nature of the client’s need, his willingness to let us lead, geographic location, the depth of our experience. We want to develop the habit of putting on the table for early discussion these or any other concerns we, or the client, might have.