Ever been at a networking function and someone asks 'And what do you do for a living?' ...

If you say something like "I'm a systems analyst" ... or "I'm a project manager" ... or "I'm in sales" ... the response is likely to be something like, "That's interesting ... who do you think is going to win the football on the weekend?"

In other words, labels are BORING.  They make people glaze over.  Which is fine if you like talking football.  But if you're wanting to get 'out there' and generate business as a self-employed consultant - labels have no intrinsic value.  They will never excite a potential client into hiring your services.

For a start, that potential client will have his or her OWN pre-conceptions of what your 'label' does!  And secondly, a label doesn't bring to life the things you CAN do.  The VALUE you bring to the table.  No company WANTS a financial controller for example.  What they WANT is for their funds to be managed so they can continue to grow, they want their tax done correctly so they stay out of trouble with the tax department, and so on.  They want the OUTCOME, not the 'label'.

To explain this a little more, let me relate a brief story from one of our recent Incubator Workshops.  As part of our process of helping participants see the true value they bring to the table for a potential client, we do what we call a 'What does THAT mean?' exercise.

One delightful lady at our event, when asked to explain what she brings to the table in terms of value, said that she's a 'Project Manager' specialising in systems. (Yes, a 'label'!  And it means nothing unless it's dimensionalised.)

"And what does that mean?", I asked her.  "Well, it means that when I go into a company, there's often tension and lack of communication between the key departments, and I bring them together in a common purpose."

"And what does that mean?", I asked her again, drilling down.  "Well, when everybody in a project has a different agenda, things just don't get done, or they take a lot longer to do, and the outcomes are not as good.  I bring cohesiveness to the project."

"So would it be fair to say," I asked, "that when you bring this harmony and integration to a project, you get the project delivered faster?  And perhaps you save the company money in potential cost overruns?"

"Oh, absolutely!!", she responded, now seeing where this was leading.  "Cost overruns can cost an organisation many hundreds of thousands of dollars.  What's more, getting everyone on the same page improves morale and that means valuable people don't leave.  And that saves the company even more hundreds of thousands of dollars over time!"

Can you see the thought process here?  Without the skills to drill down and articulate the VALUE inherent in her skill base, she was ... just a 'label'!

In our course, 'Taking the Leap' into High Income Consulting, one of the key skills we teach is how to identify and ARTICULATE the value you bring to the table.  It can be the difference between a nice salary each month, and the ability to charge a fee ten or twenty times as much, and have clients happy to PAY it.

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