The Desert of Arizona
Sunny 42 Degrees
I was in a cooking mood last night, so dinner was crispy salmon over crushed new potatoes. Basically, it was salmon over a type of warm potato salad with crab meat in it. (There weren’t any leftovers.)
Here’s the recipe if you’re interested.
Very quick, very simple, very good.
Later on in the evening, I saw an episode of Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations. In this particular scene, he was in Spain eating tripe, which is basically the stomach of a cow or an ox.
During the scene, he said something that jumped out at me.
He was explaining that tripe, even though it’s good, is a hard sell when people find out what it is. The way you sell it is to get people to watch OTHER people eating it and enjoying it.
Then, all of a sudden, the folks who didn’t want to touch it get curious.
In other words, people are more attracted to things when they see other people enjoying those things.
It’s just a form of demonstration.
Sometimes you are the one demonstrating, sometimes you leave it to others.
I gave up hard selling quite some time ago. In the professional services business, pushing like that works against you.
There’s a ratio you need to keep in mind. The quality of the client and the size of the fee tend to decrease as the pressure you exert on those folks to SELL them increases.
Less “selling,” better clients. More “selling,” lower quality clients.
If you’re not building a Platform, what ARE you doing to attract clients the smart way?
As it turns out, if you build it, they actually do come. You just have to build it right.