If you’re a professional services principal, you rely on seller-doers to grow your business. We define a seller-doer as any billable professional who intentional acts to help generate revenue. These are typically professionals with 5-20 years of experience who have not yet reached rainmaker status.

Have you wondered about the keys to developing successful seller-doers? For many firms, dormant seller-doers are sitting there waiting to be unleashed.

Or if you’re ready to take your first step to become a seller-doer, do you wonder if you can do it and do you know where to start?

Or perhaps you’ve been a “sometimes” seller-doer with uneven results and a lot of headroom to grow.

If so, you may have wondered about the success factors for highly capable seller-doers.

In researching a book I’m co-writing on the topic of becoming a seller-doer, I’ve uncovered some clear keys to seller-doer success.

You can easily grasp the keys to success through the answers to four simple questions that seller-doers should ask themselves: Should I? Could I? Can I? Will I?

Let me pose them to you and then explain.

1. Should you?

Do you have the DESIRE to set out on the journey to becoming a seller-doer, or perhaps a better one than you are today? If you don’t have the motivation, then be content with the status quo.

There are many potential motivators: achievement, advancement, compensation, rewards and recognition, job security (as if), job satisfaction, and the intrinsic value of doing the work that you are passionate about. Some are better than others. [I’ll go into more detail in a later post.]

2. Could you?

Do you have enough BELIEF in yourself to begin the journey and to press on when you meet embarrassment or outright failure? If you don’t believe in yourself, then when you face obstacles or outright failure, you’ll trample desire as you retreat over it and to the safety of the status quo, where you feel most comfortable.

3. Can you?

Do you have or can you develop the ABILITY, that is, the knowledge, skills, and attributes for success? Unbelievably, this is the easy part if you know the learning strategies that work best.

4. Will you?

Will you have PERSEVERANCE? That is, will you face your fears and doubts? Will you accept failure as learning and be undaunted by it? Will you persist and make marketing and business development a habit and not merely a hobby?

Although it’s not a very catchy mnemonic, you can easily recall these four ingredients of success through the acronym DBAP.

Desire. Should I?

Belief. Could I?

Ability. Can I?

Perseverance. Will I?

In future articles, I’ll break down each of these questions a bit further and offer some advice that may help you.

Until then, if you aren’t yet a consistently successful seller-doer, ask yourself which question you’re stuck on right now.