When you’re starting to offer advisory engagements to clients and prospects, it’s very common to get nervous.

Say you’re talking with a prospect and you can tell that they need help beyond writing. In fact, you can see that it doesn’t yet make sense to go right into a writing project — mainly because they need to make some other decisions first.

But you’re nervous ... because you’re not sure how to think about what they’re telling you.

Or you’re not sure how to explain that they need to do something else first before creating that marketing asset.

Here’s what I do to help me get better clarity quickly and calm my nerves. It’s a bit of a decision tree or decision flow chart. A powerful heuristic, if you will.

I ask myself the following questions:

1. Does it sound like they need help coming up with the right solution or intervention? In other words, the right solution is not well defined yet. And you can’t really move forward with anything until they figure that out (hopefully with your help).
2. Do they have the right intervention BUT need help improving how they’ll produce that intervention? For example, they have the right idea for how to solve the problem. But as you listen to them talk about it, you realize the topic, theme, or approach they want to take is flawed.
3. Do they have the right intervention AND the right approach ... but they need help bringing that intervention to life? For example, they want to interview 15 subject matter experts, which is way too many. Or they want to do too much too quickly.

Why are these internal questions valuable? They’re valuable because they can help you categorize the exact type of need the prospect has AND how you’ll steer the conversation and how you’ll offer to help them.

And if you can determine this quickly and efficiently during that prospect conversation, you’ll have more mental and creative bandwidth to listen more attentively to what they’re saying AND end the conversation by stating your case confidently.

So give this heuristic tool a try next time you go into a prospect or client conversation where you notice that they may need help beyond just writing.