The Desert of Arizona
Sun 41 degrees
This is the longest Client Letter ever sent. But it can help improve your business in a major way.
You might file this somewhere to come back to several times.
Here’s what it’s about:
How not to waste your time with people who are in no danger of becoming clients.
I had a prospect in year’s past that came to me by way of referral. I tell you this because referrals generally produce a higher quality prospect for me than non-referrals do.
In fact, the referrals that flow into my business all have a very eerily consistent thing in common: the referral is almost exactly the same type of client that’s doing the referring! The “frugal” clients 🙂 tend to send others who are just as frugal. The clients who are freely willing to pay for value send clients who are also willing. It’s bizarre, but it proves itself to be true over and over again in my business.
Of course there are always exceptions. And those exceptions can be extremely annoying. Like when a great client sends you a dud referral. But that serves a valuable purpose for me. And that is that it reminds me of the importance of process. And that if you have a process that works, then you don’t need to get emotionally involved in each potential client that comes along.
You simply send them through your process and you see what (if anything) comes out the other side. With the intake process for potential new clients clearly outlined in your head, you have something that can be measured, tweaked and improved over time.
Without a process, you’re going to have to make it up as you go. And that’s when you do stupid things that waste your time—as the story I’m about to share with you will prove.
Why I make a big deal about this is actually quite simple: in the service business, time is everything. It’s really the same in every business, but in the service business it’s even more obvious.
You only have a certain number of hours in the day to work, grow your business and engage in the activities that will provide the type of lifestyle you want to live.
If you’re just getting started, there’s a good chance you don’t value your time quite like you’re going to when you get busy and start having to cut things out.
If that’s your situation, here’s a tip: start valuing your time now, even if no one else is.
If I had cemented this habit in my head years ago, I wouldn’t be so adept at creating time wasting situations like the one I’m about to tell you.
In this scenario I was dealing with a referral from a great client. The mistake I made was to assume that means anything about anything. It doesn’t.
New clients are new clients and they need to walk through the same process everyone else walks through.
This is more for you than it is for them. Remember, in your service business we’re after leverage. One form of leverage comes in the form of systems which remove the need for you to think.
Having a client intake process also prevents you from having to make judgement calls (guesses) about whether or not this prospect will be a good client. You don’t want to do that because you’ll just drive yourself nuts. (I know.)
The first call with this prospect lasted about 20-25 minutes. During that time, we discussed her business and the major issues she wanted to solve.
From this call, I gathered two important pieces of information. First, money was not a limiting factor here. This is a well established business with thousands of customers. Second, the woman I spoke with on the phone understood the need for the type of services I provide.
Our first call was cut short due to scheduling so we arranged another call for the following week.
During the second, I asked a bunch of questions about the business, about the objectives and about how a solution might look. This call lasted close to 1 hour. In my experience, it often takes this long to really dig deep enough to figure out what is going on inside a business.
Near the end of this phone call, I asked the prospect what type of budget was set aside for this project.
She replied, “Well, actually none. There’s no budget for this. The owners don’t really like to spend money.” Doh.
At this point I chuckled and said I would send an outline of what I proposed along with recommendations for what I’d do.
After getting off the phone, I reconsidered moving forward. Instead, I sent an email to my prospect explaining that “no budget” wasn’t really something I would work with. I recommended she go to the owners and secure some realistic numbers so we could move forward.
She responded explaining that the company was in fact serious about the project and asked me to please submit my proposal.
By now, I’m sure you can see where this is going. And in just a moment, I’ll go through the mistakes that were made and what I did to ensure they don’t happen again.
I DID submit the proposal, which was extremely reasonable compared to the value of the project.
I eventually received a reply that the owners wanted to hold off for a little while to see the effect of some recent changes to their marketing strategy.
About the Toll Booth
The purpose of telling you all of this is to show you the importance of making a conscious decision about WHERE you put the tollbooth in your business. What’s the line (which should be clear to YOU and your prospect) over which only paying clients are permitted to cross?
In other words, how far do you go for free? Does that amount of distance increase the attraction of the prospect and increase your chances of getting paid or does it decrease those things?
The longer I go in this business, the shorter the “free” distance is getting. When I started as a copywriter, I gave absolutely no thought to this part of things. But now, with time being such a precious resource to me, it really, REALLY matters.
In fact, after this experience, where I effectively wasted hours of my time that I can’t get back, I decided to insure something like this would never happen again.
As I often do in my business, when I come up against a challenge that requires me to draw on something that’s not a well developed skill for me (like discipline), I figure out a way to force myself to act.
Let me explain…
I’m not the most disciplined person in the world. In fact, I’m really, really good at rationalizing why NOW is not the best time for X, Y and Z.
I’ve identified discipline as something that needs work. So the way I deal with it is to structure things so I don’t have a choice.
That’s why, at ArtofClients.com, I write a daily email. People expect it daily and that means I have to produce it daily or else I look stupid.
BINGO, instant discipline.
Another thing I’m not so good at (yet) is saying NO. So I have to build it in to the process so that I don’t put myself in the position where I feel I should say yes.
Here are the Mistakes I Made
I made two serious mistakes. First of all, never speak to someone who has the power to say NO but doesn’t have the power to say yes.
I chose to ignore this bit of advice because I thought the source of the client (a referral) warranted it. I was wrong.
My second mistake was that I moved my “toll booth” way too far into the process.
I really wasted too much time before I found out the truth about what I was dealing with.
Money has this funny side effect, you see. When you start talking about it with a prospect, the truth about whether or not they’re a real prospect comes out fairly quickly.
How I Fixed the Process
If you take a look at the services page on my website, you’ll see how I changed my process for new prospects that walk through the door. You can see it at this link: www.jasonleister.com/services.
As you can see, we deal with money right upfront now in the form of the Monday Mastermind. My consultations with a prospective client are extremely valuable because I ask them questions about their business they probably haven’t thought deeply about.
So I no longer will offer these for free (I used to). Instead, there is a nominal fee of $99 for the initial consultation with a prospect.
In addition, prior to that consultation, you can send an informational sheet outlining general fee ranges. This way, there are no surprises.
How to Make This Work
This approach requires some serious changes to the investment I make in the marketing I do to generate clients.
When you start charging for what most other people freely give away, you’d better have a good reason for it. OR, you’d better have enough leads to make it possible.
And that’s the focus now. Ramping up the lead machine so I truly cannot handle all of the interest in my services.
This is not hard to do, but it does take work. A lot of it actually. Mainly in the form of writing and publishing.
This is why the PLATFORM is so important.
After my experience wasting time with this prospect, where I demonstrated what a poor steward of my time I’m capable of being, I must now force myself to never make that mistake again. And the way I do that is to simply change the process so it’s not possible for me to make the same mistake.
(Depending on the prospect situation, I sometimes feel it’s smart to skip the paid consult, but rarely is that decision a good one.)
Think about the process you use when a new prospect makes himself known to you. Do you have a process? Or do you just make it up?
I did that for a long time. But now I’m getting way too busy for that to be practical. I have to streamline things so that my PROCESS does more of the sifting and sorting for me. That way, my focus can stay on other things until I know I’m dealing with a truly qualified prospect.
When most service providers think of “working with clients” they probably actually picture themselves doing the work.
The process work is where the real value is. And it provides a huge amount of leverage and confidence when you get it right.
It’s worth the work. Think about it.