“The Curse Of Mastery”: Why You’re Losing Potential Clients

Advisors are often involved with what’s called the “expert consultant sale”.

A person has a problem they’re not equipped to solve, so they seek out an expert who is.

They pay the expert for their time, acquired skills, and for the years spent honing their craft.

But how does your prospect ultimately decide on which expert to go with, especially when there’s an abundance of advisors available at any time?

I suggest to you that being an expert is the very thing that predisposes you to answering the above question incorrectly.

Why?

Because of the “curse of mastery”.

In your initial meeting, when your prospect begins talking about themselves and opening up about their issues, your instinct is to suggest a path to a solution which you know very well.

By the time you’ve educating them on the solution path and options, it’s quite common to hear: “I’d like to think about it and get back to you.”

What is there to think about?!

What’s going on here?

Isn’t the solution what they want from you?

Not exactly.

What you need to realize is that in the expert consultant sale, there is a trust gap between you and your prospect, and this trust gap cannot be bridged by your knowledge as an expert, nor the efficacy of your expertise-based solution.

Why?

Because your prospect is not an expert and has no ability to judge whether you’re right for them based on that information (which is why demonstrating your expertise free of charge, or doing “free consulting”, does little to progress the sale).

When you approach the sale only from your own point of view as the expert going straight to the solution, that trust gap remains open under the surface, and everything you share solution-wise, falls on deaf ears.

“I need to think about it” really means, “I’m not sure about this. I don’t trust you enough. This may not be right for me”.

As long as that indecisiveness is lurking under the surface, the sale will never happen.

The curse of mastery is assuming that the sale depends on projecting enough knowledge and expertise.

It’s not about showing them that you’re an expert, it’s about creating the feeling in your prospect, that out of all the competent advisors they could choose, you’re the one they can trust to go with… you’re the one for them.

This trust decision is more emotional than rational.

It’s often missed by advisors because they’re too deep in the technical mastery of their discipline.

It’s not that mastery doesn’t have value, but it only has value after the sale, not before — because the prospect needs to become your client first before they can experience your expert mastery.

Pre-sale, what they care about most is: “Do I trust him or her?”.

My number one recommendation to overcoming this syndrome is to re-engineer your sales process to work more like a doctor’s.

When a patient goes to see a doctor about a shoulder problem, 99% of the time it’s a shoulder problem that the doctor has seen before.

But the doctor doesn’t let that stop them from carrying out a thorough, no assumptions, diagnostic process.

They still examine the patient and perhaps order an MRI scan before prescribing any medication or treatment (and the patient pays for it as part of the overall treatment process, it’s not provided for free).

The key point of difference here is that the patient experiences the doctor’s mastery through their process, before they get to experience it in their solution.

Trust is created in experiencing the doctor’s process of having their problem thoroughly diagnosed and clarified.

And because the process is so pragmatic and understandable to the patient (who isn’t a medical expert), the treatment program is never questioned nor second-guessed.

It’s simply accepted and complied with.

If you can refrain from skipping ahead to your solution and let your prospect first experience your mastery through your trust-based process, you’ll generate the same kind of implicit, no-need-to-think-about-it trust, that a patient has of their doctor.

You’ll also significantly simplify your sales process from the kind that most experts use, where they try to prove themselves by doing essentially free consulting (over multiple meetings), to one single meeting only, where they commit to work with you.

If you do this right, and are open to thinking differently and defying industry norms, then you can become a trust authority, a category-of-one.