Like Sonny and Cher, peanut butter and jelly, the moon and the stars - confidence and success are an undeniable pairing that go hand in hand. Confidence opens doors, builds trust, closes deals, earns more money, and triggers referrals. In short, confidence creates success.
If you come by confidence naturally, you have already seen the results from the skill you were born with. If you aren’t inherently confident, or if you recently landed on a challenging path that is testing your inner strength, the good news is that confidence is a skill that can be easily learned and mastered.
Having unwavering confidence means that instead of struggling to command your value, you feel empowered to ask for more, go after bigger opportunities, and attract better clients who are eager and excited to work with you.
We sat down with several top consultants to discuss the key strategies for flexing your confidence muscle and how you can leverage that skill to your professional advantage.
CONFIDENCE THROUGH POSITIONING
The language you choose to describe what you do, along with the confidence you convey, work together to affect how you are perceived.
Something as simple as how you position yourself to potential clients and whether or not you sub-contract for a bigger agency or work directly with the client can make all the difference in your bottom line.
Micki Boas, a marketing strategist and author, explains that she chose to position herself as her own brand “in order to maximize my full potential. I realized that being a professional sub and freelancing under the budget of an agency was limiting me and all of my goals.”
Boas had limited her earning potential because she had maxed out at the rates agencies could pay. Once she made the switch to working directly with brands, she was able to double her rates, work on her own terms and build upon the client relationship.
CONFIDENCE THROUGH RESULTS
Sometimes consultants can get so caught up in the weeds of their work that they forget to focus on how it actually affects a client’s bottom line. Confidence means owning the results you bring to clients, not just the task at hand, and communicating that value from the start.
Handbag design consultant Alicia Skehan knows that there are thousands of designers out there. To differentiate herself, she confidently highlights on her website and during the client pitch stage the results she achieves for a client, and not just the top design skills she brings to her projects.
Simply put, Skehan “builds top-selling, seven-figure generating products for fashion brands.” This results-oriented confidence has led to Skehan meeting with CEOs and decision makers looking to grow their revenue, instead of the typical meeting with design team leads at the companies she supports.
CONFIDENCE THROUGH QUESTIONS
Client prospecting is about projecting confidence through questions, not simply showing up “as if you’re in a job interview hoping to get a role.”
By shifting her mindset from interviewee to business owner and asking prospective clients the types of questions that uncover their true pain points, Rebekah Miel, founder of Miel Design Studio, scaled her agency and increased her revenue by 50%.
This shift wasn’t an accident. It was about confidently owning the meetings and navigating the conversation from the driver’s seat.
“Realizing that the client often doesn’t know exactly what they need,” means it’s your role as a business owner to walk them through your discovery process and show the client that the decision to work together “goes both ways.”
CONFIDENCE THROUGH MINDSET
Shifting your mindset to have confidence in your value whether or not you land the client is crucial to overcoming the constant challenges you face and resilience you need to be an entrepreneur.
“Approaching deals with the confidence and expectation that things will work out has been hugely helpful in my feeling comfortable asking for more money,” explains Eliza Erskine, a sustainability consultant.
And the results speak for themselves. Ever since Erskine shifted her mindset she’s tripled her pricing and doubled her client close rate. No doubt the ones that didn’t work out simply weren’t the right fit.
Having confidence in your value as you approach each client pitch, regardless of the potential rejection, is key to closing bigger and better deals.
The views and opinions expressed herein are the views and opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Nasdaq, Inc.