Identify a Pressing Problem within Your Niche

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The key to making money from your niche is to identify some existing problems that need solutions. If you can identify a problem that really hurts people, this will become your entrance point into your niche.

By definition, your niche will be something you’re knowledgeable and passionate about. That means you will probably already know what the most pressing problems are in that field. If you don’t, or if you want to validate your gut feelings, there are several ways to research problems:

As mentioned, spend time in online forums where like-minded people communicate with each other. Watch and observe.

Interview an expert in the industry.

Read trade magazines or journals that cover this industry.

Get some hands-on personal experience.

Most times, identifying pressing problems won’t be hard. You’ll probably be able to come up with a decent list of potential problems in an hour or less if you know your niche inside and out.

If you’re having trouble putting your finger on the most pressing problems in your niche, consider forming a small mastermind group to help you work through things. Ideally, this type of group should have five or six people, each of whom you know you know and respect. Get the people in your mastermind group to look at the niche with fresh eyes. Their outsider’s perspective may be able to help you uncover problems that are sitting right in front of you but that you cannot see for one reason or another.

Don’t be put off if there already seem to be a lot of people who are offering their solutions to some clear problem in your niche. That simply validates the fact that a sizable market opportunity exists. If you can create some kind of solution that tells your solution in your voice, it will stand out because people will recognize it as genuine rather than contrived.

Whatever you do, keep things simple:

Identify an obvious and pressing problem.

Develop a solution that is genuine and authentic.

Find ways to tell people about your solution.

Don’t try to develop products that will impress the experts in your field. They aren’t going to buy what you have to offer because they have their own ideas about how to put together a solution. Instead, develop products that will appeal directly to the non-specialists.

Don’t let the quest for perfection stand in the way of building your Portable Empire. Even if you don’t have anything new to say, the fact that you’re saying it in your voice is going to make it interesting. As long as you’re telling your story honestly, people are going to want to hear it. The only mistake you can make is to not start now.

–Pat O’Bryan

There’s no need to try and reinvent the wheel. You can just see what’s working for other people and innovate. That’s much better way to do things. Find your topic and then ask yourself, ‘What do I know’ or ‘Who do I know that knows something about this topic? ‘Solve those problems and sell the solutions.

–Craig Perrine

Choose a Niche You Are Passionate about Personally

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It’s impossible to try and be an expert on everything there is. That’s too broad and too ambitious a goal. Instead, you need to identify your niche–the one area of specialization you know a lot about. Identify a subject you feel passionate about and start there.

Finding your niche is quite simple. Ask yourself a few questions:

“What do I have fun doing?”

“What do I like to play around with in my spare time?”

“What am I passionate about?”

“What am I knowledgeable about?”

“What problem do I most like to solve?”

“What subjects do I consider to be intensely interesting?”

Your answers to these questions will then point you in the right direction when it comes to identifying your own particular niche. Choosing a niche is usually straightforward because it is the kind of things you already have fun doing.

If you’re having trouble thinking about the niche that’s just right for you, try this exercise:

Take two blank pieces of paper.

Head one piece of paper with: “The 10 Things I Am Most Knowledgeable About.” Then go through and list the 10 items you have deep knowledge of and expertise in.

Head the second piece of paper with: “Some drivers put bumper stickers on their cars that say ‘I’ d rather be fishing,’ In a similar vein, fill in the blank: ‘I’d rather be_______.’

To identify your niche, look for an item that crops up on both lists.

The 10 Things I Am Most Passionate About
Fill in the blank: “I’d rather be_______.”

Once you’ve come up with some suggestions for your niche, do some online research:

Do a Web search (using Google or a similar site) and try to find out who is already marketing to your future customers.

If your search shows there is nobody else who is trying to market to that niche, it suggests you’ve probably identified a hobby rather than a niche.

Don’t be discouraged if it’s clear that loads of companies are already marketing to your potential customers. This is good–it means the market size is viable. All of these companies are potential joint-venture partners for you.

See if there are any forums where your potential customers hang out or kick around ideas. If there are, visit those forums and lurk. Find out what kinds of problems people are striking in your niche. This kind of information will be a goldmine if handled correctly.

Every problem is a product. Find the problem and sell the solution.

–Pat O’Bryan

Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you’re doing, you will be successful.

–Albert Schweitzer

The “Inner Game”

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In addition to learning all of the “how to” mechanics involved in building your portable empire, you also need to work on getting your mindset in order. Building your own online business requires that you have a set of skills that are different from those of employees. At the same time as you’re learning all of nuts and bolts skills integrated into the seven steps, also focus on getting your inner game aligned.

The “Inner Game” 1: Have a higher goal than merely “making money”

As amazing as it may sound, after a little bit of early success, working hard just to make more money gets to be a little bit stale. Once you’ve made enough money to buy yourself some of the toys you’ve always admired but have never been able afford, you’ll sit down and think “what next?”

The first generation of Internet marketing gurus don’t focus on making more money. Instead, they work on projects that feed their souls. Some of them are so busy using their financial resources to try and make the world a better place that you wonder how they find the time to do anything else. It’s not at all unusual to find them:

Taking medicine to villages in third world countries.

Setting up community health care facilities.

Providing educational funds and scholarships.

Working with economically challenged athletes.

By consistently following the seven steps, you will be able to generate for yourself a steady income. As you get better, that income will grow and eventually outpace your own financial needs. To stay motivated to keep getting bigger and better, start thinking now about what kind of charitable work you would like to fund in the future. This will not only inspire you to work hard, but it will also feed your soul.

The “Inner Game” 2: Understand what your “money thermostat” is set at

Everyone has a “money thermostat”–a self-belief about how much money you’re entitled to make from the work that you do. It’s something you learn from your parents without even realizing they are influencing your internal beliefs quite so profoundly.

You have to make a conscious and deliberate effort to reprogram your own thermostat if it is set too low. Otherwise, you’ll stop working at your online business as soon as you’ve made enough money to pay your bills each month.

To set your thermostat higher, remind yourself:

We all live in an infinite universe

The universe has unlimited wealth.

The more personal wealth we generate, the more good we can do for causes we really care about.

The universe doesn’t mind how much we make–it’s perfectly happy for us to make whatever we earn.

The “Inner Game” 3: Learn how to avoid self-sabotage

When you start achieving a level of success with your online business that exceeds your comfort level, you can actually do things unconsciously that throw a spanner in the works. Be aware of this. You have to keep on giving yourself permission to excel. Day by day, reset your money thermostat a little higher and expand what you’re doing to that newer and higher level.

The “Inner Game” 4: Inject loads of authenticity

The best authors write just they way they talk–with an authentic voice rather than changing their vocabulary to terminology that they would never use from day to day. When you think and talk about Internet marketing, you need to do the same. Put together articles and e-books that are couched in everyday language rather than trying to use a fake “internet marketing voice.”

A good practical way to achieve this is to imagine you’re telling a good friend what you want to say over the phone. Write down your thoughts in the kind of friendly, conversational tone you’d use in that setting. If people want to read what you write because they share your passion for the topic, they will appreciate hearing your authentic voice come through rather than someone who is trying to be what they clearly are not.

The “Inner Game” 5: Find your own “gold zone”

Athletes and musicians talk about getting “in the zone” all the time. From an Internet marketing perspective, you get in the zone by doing great things yourself and not just by reading about what others have achieved. The people who succeed are those who find problems to solve, come up with products that address those specific problems and then sell them.

The defining characteristic of being in the zone when it comes to building a successful online business is that you’ll be surprised by how easy everything is. You’ll come up with a substantial problem worth solving, some practical ways to get your product to the people who will be most interested and the opportunity to make a great living by providing a worthwhile solution.

Keep in mind a few suggestions:

If you seem to be getting bogged down, that might be a good indicator you’ve picked the wrong topic. Keep looking until you find something that is both fun and profitable.

If nobody is buying what you have to offer, change it sooner rather than later. One of the great advantages of an online business is that you can make dramatic changes instantly. You don’t even have to reprint your brochures or other promotional material–just change your website.

Life is too short to bang your head against the door marked PULL. You can push and push and band and hit and throw bombs and cry and just generally exhaust yourself. And the door will stay closed. Find your passion, and then find people to pay you for doing what you love. Quit banging on the door and just open it.

–Pat O’Bryan

The “Inner Game” 6: How big is your sandbox?

Successful people are always positive in tone and energetic. They’ve given themselves permission to play in what are very big sandboxes. Or put differently, they have the self-confidence and personal drive to think big and do interesting things.

There isn’t a certifying board that grants this permission. Instead, you have to make personal decision to be a success. You will attract what you focus on. If you focus on concepts and ideas that are large and impressive, in effect you expand your sandbox and move onto a larger stage of life. Focus on prosperity and happiness, feel responsible for generating your own outcome and then start doing whatever it takes to achieve the outcome you want. This is a much better idea than spending your life worrying about failure, scarcity and unhappiness. Give yourself permission to succeed.

The “Inner Game” 7: It’s better to fail big rather than live small

Sam Walton’s Rule #1 was: “Break the rules.” For most people who come out of the education factories, getting a good job and keeping it is the epitome of success. The problem with that is if you like to think for yourself, working for someone else is too limiting and restrictive.

Nobody ever accomplished anything important, or grand, or outrageous by coloring inside the lines. Following the rules is for losers.

–Pat O’Bryan

Outrageously successful people don’t wait for permission to be great. They just go out and do it even if that puts them outside mainstream thinking. Most of these people end up being self-educated anyway because they blaze their own trails and do the things that other don’t even attempt.

Feel free to join their ranks. Nobody is going to invite you–you have to seize the opportunity for yourself. Be prepared to have some grand failures along the way, but out of the ashes of these glaring defeats you will be learning what it takes to soar to great heights in the future.

The “Inner Game” 8: Learn how to “fail up”

The only way you’re ever going to learn how to do new things in life and in business is if you’re prepared to fail initially while you’re getting the hang of it all. Therefore, give yourself permission to fail when you’re trying new things.

Even better, go out and find something that is incredibly fun and completely screw it up the first few times you try ir. Then keep at it until you get the hang of it. Fail up in life and in your career. Unless you’re doing this on a regular basis, all you’re doing is treading water. Learn how to do new things all the time.

There ain’t no such thing as failure. It’s all data. To succeed big you may have to fail big. It’s just a stretch of highway: you may have to go through some bad road to get where you’re going.

–Pat O’Bryan

The “Inner Game” 9: Authenticity works best

All successful Internet marketers project their personalities so strongly that they end up becoming their brand. They all have an interesting story behind their success that they tell. It seems like most consumers prefer to interact with someone who is genuine–even if that includes a few warts and quirks–rather than someone bland who uses corporate speak.

Don’t try to compete with big companies by attempting to be a cheap imitation of them. Say something interesting and say it in your own voice. A certain percentage of the population will relate, and from that percentage you will do just fine. Be authentic.

The “Inner Game” 10: Un-frame yourself

We all use mental frameworks every day. They are our mindset or the set of filters through which we see the world. If you want to see more possibilities, change your mental frames for different ones. Un-frame yourself and let your imagination come to the fore. To make sure you’re doing this, always ask yourself:

“What frame am I using to look at the world today?”

“What does the world look like that frame?”

“How can I combine what I’ve got and what I do to create something the market will buy.”

When you start un-framing yourself, you’ll actually find the world has no boundaries and no limits except those you have imposed yourself. Give yourself permission to remove those boundaries and you’ll be able to develop some amazing assets, skills and talents that align with your passions.

Once you stop defining yourself as what you’ve done and who you were, and open up to the infinite possibilities available to you, what do you see? Anything is possible. In an infinite universe, such as the one we live in, it just doesn’t make any sense to acknowledge any limitations.

–Pat O’Bryan

The “Inner Game” 11: What’s next?

A few years ago, the Internet would have been unimaginable to most people. Today, most people can’t imagine what the world would be like without the Internet. In a similar vein, you can guarantee that what becomes available to us in the future is just as hard to visualize using our current experience base.

With that in mind, keep your mind open to fresh ideas and concepts. Look at what others are doing and see whether there isn’t a market opportunity available by going in the opposite direction. Acknowledge that what becomes available in the future may require a different set of skills and be ready to learn as you move forward.

If you have a healthy appetite for change and growth, you’ll probably be able to position yourself advantageously whenever and wherever the next big thing rolls into view. Have an open mind mixed with strong doses of self-confidence.

The “Inner Game” 12: Move from your comfort zone into the fun zone

When the rubber hits the road, it always takes courage to try new things. Stretching yourself in any new direction is always scary. It’s much easier to stay in your personal comfort zone and keep on doing what has always worked for you in the past. The problem is that if you stay in your comfort zone, you’ll never reach your fun zone–where you get to do things that are exciting and adventurous.

Realize that there really aren’t squads of “e-book police” who will come and take you away if your first attempt at writing an e-book is lousy. Instead, you won’t sell that many. Over time, however, you’ll get better and with persistence you can come up with something that sells like hotcakes.

The point is not to limit yourself. Get out and have fun learning how to do new things. There is literally a universe without limits to explore if you give yourself permission to do so.

The “Inner Game” 13: Wealth is all in your mind

As you become more and more successful, you’ll soon find that wealth is far more of a state of mind than you even thought possible. To take a simple example:

If you walk all the time and someone drives by in a run-down car, you think they’re wealthy and if you could just get to where they are all your problems would be solved.

When you buy first car, you’re happy for a while until you notice your friends have nicer cars. You imagine that if you could do the same, life would be sweet.

By the time you can afford a luxury up-market car, you start to realize that amassing more and more toys really doesn’t give you the feeling of accomplishment you expected. Instead, you start to focus on other rungs of the ladder of success. You get a richer view of what success really means and you start going after other things that are more interesting and powerful.

The whole point is that as you become more successful, your attitudes and belief systems will evolve and change. You’ll start to realize that your previous goals were too low and there’s so much more you can achieve with the tools you already have. Anticipate that and enjoy the journey. After all, if you kept the same standards of success you had as a child all your life, you’d end up buying all the candy in the store and giving yourself some serious health issues. Grow and evolve and improve your goals, especially your financial ones.

You have to change your inner ‘wealth thermostat’ before you can accept, and keep, wealth at a greater level than you’re used to. It’s an infinite universe. Everybody can have the wealth they want. There’s no shortage of anything, once you do the mental work to attract that wealth, and the much harder mental work of allowing yourself to accept it. All I do is create information products and market them. Then I do it again. Over time, I’ve developed multiple streams of passive income. Developing the strategies I used in my business was important, but more important, I think, were the changes I made in my attitude and belief system that allowed me to succeed. I had all the tools I needed all along.

–Pat O’Bryan

The “Inner Game” 14: Dealing with information overload

The same technology that enables you to build your own online business can also deliver to you far more information than you could ever read in a lifetime. If you’re not careful, you can end up spending more and more of your time learning stuff you’ll never be able to use. To cut through this blizzard of information:

Clarify in your mind what it is you do, and then pick one guru to follow. All of the gurus have their strengths and weaknesses, but it’s impossible to study them all in detail. Pick one guru, follow his or her advice and make their strategies become yours. Go with the guru you choose and follow their advice to the letter.

Decide where you need to be heading in the future and listen to whoever has already been there and done that. Remind yourself you’re not trying to go everywhere, but one place n particular.

Focus on the little things you must do to succeed. Trust your intuitions. If you find something useful, study it and use it. If what you’re looking at is merely noise, delete it quickly. Save your mental energy for what really counts. You should be able to say within a few seconds whether what you’re looking at is relevant to your needs or not.

The “Inner Game” 15: Turn problems into opportunities

If you’re not careful, little things will come along that stop you from conquering the world. The key to avoiding getting sidetracked permanently is to find practical and workable ways to turn every problem into an opportunity to move forward instead. To do this:

Understand and appreciate what you are strong at and the places where your skill sets are weak. Rather than being depressing, this is actually quite liberating. Acknowledge openly that you’re going to need to hire others to help you in some areas of your business and then go about hiring the best help you can get.

Always keep reminding yourself that there are so many gifts and talents that nobody on the planet has them all. That’s perfectly fine. Focus on making the most of what you do have.

Never let a lack of resources hold you back. Once you know what you don’t have, it’s time to get creative. Look at who does have resources and find out what it will take to enlist their aid. With the use of a little creativity and technology, you’ll be amazed what you can come up with.

Look long and hard at any excuses you’re in the habit of using. If you’re not careful, you can hide behind a logical sounding excuse for years and years. Have the mindset that you’re going to turn each excuse into an opportunity to move forward, and you’ll be amazed at how rapidly you can move forward.

Don’t forget to keep notes along the way so you can write a book about how you did what you did in the future. Other people will pay good money to learn from your experiences. Keep your eyes open to the hidden opportunities that are embedded within any problem you face. There will be plenty there as long as you’re looking out for them.

The “Inner Game” 16 Life is meant to be an adventure

One of the real advantages of creating an online business is that you can take it on the road at any time. You can literally run your business from a laptop anywhere in the world that takes your fancy. There’s no dress code, no office hours, no time clock to punch in and out every day. That’s great, but with that freedom comes a fresh and distinctive challenge.

The long-term success of your online business will be fueled by the new ideas you keep coming up with. To generate more ideas in the future, keep expanding your experiences. Get into the game and have fun.

The trick about ‘work’ is that it’s a boat that carries you where you want to go. It’s the means through which you achieve your goals. Only rarely is attachment to the boat a good idea. When you get to your destination, it’s okay to get out of the boat. Or not. If you’re very, very lucky, work becomes a magic carpet that you really enjoy riding. That’s what the Portable Empire is all about. Realizing that life is an adventure and putting that sense of adventure into every single thing we do.

–Pat O’Bryan

The “Inner Game” 17: Destroy to create

In order to attract good thing into your life, you often first have to tear down and destroy the old and superseded systems of the past. You have to make room in your life for something new by giving up what you don’t want. This will require a leap of faith because you’ll be going from the known to the unknown, but this is the exact point at which you indicate whether or not you’re serious.

Unlike the infinite universe of possibilities, your personal energy levels are finite. If you devote all your energy to things that don’t matter, there is no room for positive things to come into your life.

I have heard two highly successful businesspeople give a passionate lecture about deleting the word ‘try’ from your vocabulary. Think Yoda. There is no ‘try.’ If you’re going to do something, do it with all your heart, and with a full intention of accomplishing what you set out to do. It is a waste of your time, for example, to ‘try’ Internet marketing. Don’t bother. If you’re going to be an infoproduct marketer, and you can’t seem to find the time, now is the time to look at the things standing between you and success, and make the decision to choose success. This means not choosing the things that were causing you to fail. Delete them. Stop doing them. Make room for success in your life, and leave no room for distractions. Get rid of what’s not working. You’ll be amazed at how quickly the void is filled with things that do work. This works for whatever your goal is. If you’re going to do it, don’t ‘try’–DO.

–Pat O’Bryan

Your Portable Empire

How To Make Money Anywhere While Doing What You Love
by Pat O’Bryan
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The Internet now makes it feasible and practical for you to build and run your own “portable empire”–an online business that can be run from anywhere in the world in your spare time. You can even set up, develop and grow your portable empire while working full-time at another job, expanding your professional career or doing whatever else you choose.

The whole key is to develop and sell information products online. Day after day, people worldwide are spending good money to buy the information they want and need. If you can discover what information people are willing to pay for and then develop the products they are already searching for, you stand to make some very good money yourself. This is the way to build and grow your own portable empire.

It’s important not to over-complicate things. There are only seven steps involved in building your own portable empire:

Seven steps in building your portable empire

1. Choose a niche you are passionate about personally

2. Identify a pressing problem within your niche

3. Create a solution you give away for names and e-mail addresses

4. Contact list owners and get them to give your solution away

5. Find more problems and create more solutions you can sell

6. Continue building relationships with customers and JV partners

7. Repeat the cycle so you build multiple streams of passive income

Your Portable Empire is a system for creating an online business you can run from home, or anywhere else. It’s almost totally automated. You choose your niche, gather your list, build relationships and solve problems. Then you sell solutions to your list. Most people make active income. They work once, they get paid once. The Portable Empire system is based on passive income. You work once, and get paid over and over again.

–Pat O’Bryan

Know How to Establish Credibility

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The key to making more complex sales is to establish and then cement your personal credibility. In practical terms, that means overcoming the two most difficult conversational challenges:

1. Quantify the genuine cost of problems in meaningful terms
2. Connect at the most senior levels of the organization

When you successfully overcome these two difficult conversational challenges, your sales will naturally accelerate and increase. Once you have enough credibility to enjoy the sponsorship of the organization’s top leaders, your ability to sell a complex solution becomes unlimited. That’s a great position to be in and something truly worth aiming for.

Quantify the genuine cost of problems in meaningful terms

Corporate customers by and large have built up an immunity to self-serving and superficial return-on-investment and total-cost-of-ownership figures supplied by average sales people.

They want more specific information about what the absence of value is costing them. It’s the sales professional’s job to guide customers through these financial calculations as an integral part of the overall diagnostic sales process.

Three questions you need to help the customer answer
In the final analysis, there are really only three specific financial questions you need to help any prospective customer answer:

What is the current absence of value in this area costing us in hard dollars and cents?

What would be the anticipated financial impact we can reasonably expect to gain by investing in this solution?

How much will we need to invest in order to achieve the desired results?

The principles of financial conversations
When you have a financial conversation which enables the customer to answer these questions openly and candidly, then making a decision about whether to buy what you offer or not can be made easy. The transaction either meets the customer’s normal investment criteria or it does not.

Keep in mind a few points:

The numbers you use don’t have to be exact, but they must believable. Estimates are perfectly acceptable as long as they are credible from the customer’s point-of-view.

The customer needs to understand the methods used to obtain the numbers or they are no use at all. If there is no confidence in the method used, the numbers might just as well be plucked from thin air.

You want the customer to “own” the final numbers arrived at, so they must have input into the calculations. Their averages and industry benchmarks need to be used.

The Point of Conversations Is to Answer 3 Questions

An effective diagnostic financial conversation will take place during the diagnose phase of the sale. It will almost entirely focus on the three questions that need to be answered:

The current cost
In complex sales, there are usually multiple consequences that stem from a problem. You have to identify each and calculate what that consequence will cost the company if it eventuates. No one person will understand the true cost of each consequence, so you’ll need to talk to a number of people.

Once you have all this information, you then develop a worksheet that summarizes and tallies up:

The indicators of each problem and its consequences

The projected cost of each individual consequence

The total cost each time this problem occurs

The number of times this problem will arise each year

The total annual cost of the problem to the company

The return-on-solution
If what you offer reduces costs, then income is generated from the money the customer will not have to spend in the future. Or if what you offer generates new income, then the calculation becomes very direct. In either case, it should be reasonably straightforward to come up with an estimate. Just use numbers that are credible to the people at the company and conservative.

The customer is the sole judge of what is reasonable and believable in this area so get their full participate in making these calculations. Numbers plucked from thin air by the sales person are absolutely pointless.

The cost of the solution
Direct costs will be what the customer pays you for your solution. There will also be indirect costs they will incur to use your solution. Make certain you don’t gloss over these costs in your enthusiasm to make a sale. The diagnostic approach suggests if anything, you should over estimate any less-than-obvious costs. This not only builds trust but it also creates credibility traps your competitors can fall into.

The two main solution costs which tend to get glossed over but which you need to include are:

Implementation costs — employee training, one-off construction requirements, delivery costs, etc.
Normal usage costs — the need for any ongoing maintenance, training, materials, etc.

Set out everything you have found about the current cost, the return-on-solution and the costs of the solution in a report you can title: “Return-on-Solution Report.” This report needs to clearly and succinctly set out the following numbers, along with the sources of the information used:

The outcome expectations and the specific return-on-solution associated with that outcome.

The total cost of the solution when the purchase, implementation and use of the solution is taken into account.

The overall return-on-solution, which will be calculated as being the anticipated gains minus the cost of the solution.

Details on how you can right-size the investment in the proposed solution to allow it to meet the company’s return on capital invested requirements.

Note if you’re to have any chance at all of making a sale, you have to get familiar with monetizing your results in detail. This should be something you get better at all the time.

Connect at the most senior levels of the organization

A reality of high-stake sales is the final decision will always be made at the senior levels of the organization. You must be comfortable talking with the CEO, the CFO or any other C-level executives. You also need to anticipate how senior executives think and what they look for.

The Three Challenges of Communicating with Senior Executives

Engaging senior executives in the sales process is a challenge because:

They have different perspectives, and a sales approach designed for line or operational managers simply won’t work.

Sales people tend to get intimidated by senior managers. That nervousness often translates into awkwardness.

It’s more difficult to get time scheduled with them.

The 5 Principles of Communicating with Senior Managers

To get around this, the diagnostic sales approach provides five guidelines you should follow when engaging senior managers:

1. Make the issues you address relevant in the larger context of the business enterprise.
To earn time with a senior manager, they need to be convinced what you want to talk about is relevant to their level of responsibility. As a generalization, senior managers have these metrics in mind:

CEO — earnings-per-share

CFO — return-on-investment, earnings-before-tax

VP of Operations — cost-of-goods-sold

To communicate with senior exectuves, translate what you speak about into terms which align with their own personal dashboards. Establish you have something to talk about which is relevant to their job measurements. If you don’t have that, you won’t be able to successfully engage senior managers or get past their assistants.

2. Demonstrate incontrovertibly your statement of value is valid and credible rather than artificially inflated.
To keep an executive engaged, you need to show the consequences of what you’re trying to solve are substantial. In short, that means you need to establish significant people, processes and financial issues are involved. You need to show these exist at a level only a senior executive can address, otherwise the matter will be delegated down the ladder where it will most probably die. It’s vital, therefore, that you establish a substantial matter is at stake which will impact on the company. In doing this:

Use all the information gathered during the diagnosis phase of the sales process. You should be well versed on the indicators, causes, consequences and cost of everything of substance.

Be succinct. Reduce everything to one sheet of paper.

Stick to the facts — they should speak for themselves.

Use terminology which aligns with the upper management perspective. Don’t get into the details the executive lets other people handle, or else he or she will have you go see these people instead. Be relevant.

Ask for feedback on any bases you have not covered, or aspects of the problem which have not been addressed.

3. Talk about problems and solutions which are actionable rather than merely hypothetical.
Actionability is determined in the design phase of the consultative process. Senior executives want to manage successful organizational changes which generate tangible benefits rather than fishing expeditions which may or may not turn out to be helpful. As you meet with senior executives, describe how people’s behavior will be impacted, how internal processes will be enhanced and how the desired financial returns will be generated. If you can’t show an executive the problem and solution are actionable, they certainly won’t have the confidence to invest.

4. Provide a solution with value which is actually measurable and quantifiable.
Even large corporations have limits on their resources. Executives allocate funds where they will generate the greatest returns. Tracking those returns is a constant challenge, so you have to show what is being suggested is measurable. Summarize what has been learned during the different phases of the diagnostic sales sequence to the executive. Suggest which specific measures will be most appropriate for measuring success as the project unfolds. Show this has been well thought out.

5. Approach the discussion on the strength of consensus and alignment with others in the organization.
Senior executives realize they will be depending on others to implement anything they buy in such a way the full value is captured. Therefore, if there is a consensus among other staff this is the best way to move foward, explain that in your conversations. Show there is already a groundswell of support behind the project and that this momentum will be useful in overcoming any obstacles which crop up.

The measure of your success in working with senior executives comes when they begin to think of you as a trusted advisor and business partner rather than a sales person. This may sound too good to be true but if you can demonstrably add value, there is no reason why you can’t attain that kind of rapport. It all comes down to your mind-set, discipline and skills.

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