The Desert of Arizona
Sunny 63 Degrees
First up, if you haven’t read this book, please do yourself a favor and go get it. Read it once, read it twice, you want this book at any price.
Sorry about the rhyme, it just tends to come out naturally. That book is going to walk you through a different way to approach client attraction. A better way, by far. One of the issues talked about a lot by the author is the difference between diagnosis and prescription. If you’ve never thought much about this, read carefully…
I was on a Mastermind call yesterday with a business owner selling to a very affluent crowd. The conversation turned to pricing and process.
As I listened, something jumped out at me. It’s something that is very common in the world of the service provider. It’s where service providers shortchange their own value with absolutely zero help from anyone else!
They do it by making a very important process invisible to the prospect. The process I’m talking about is the one where they use their experience and their expertise to chart the best course of action towards the goal.
Think about your service business. Are you receiving any compensation for actually diagnosing the client’s problem and charting a course to the goal? Or are you simply compensated for “doing the work?”
Would doctors get paid the fees they do if they skipped over the diagnosis part? How would your view of them change if you had no idea what amount of education and experience went into actually figuring out what was wrong with someone and how to help them through it?
If you tell your clients what they should do right away because it’s easy and obvious for you, you are shooting yourself in the foot. Not only that, when it SOUNDS easy to your prospect, they respect the advice less. So in addition to hurting yourself, you’re decreasing the chances that they will actually be served well by taking your advice.
I didn’t make these rules up folks, but that’s how it works.
When you’re speaking to a prospect, you might consider getting in the habit of revoking your own prescription privileges until AFTER you’ve actually diagnosed what’s going on with your prospective client.
Whether or not you engineer things so you get paid for that is up to you. But don’t you think it’s valuable? Of course it is. What’s the cost to the client of getting work done that WON’T lead them closer to their goal?
If you can’t imagine the idea of charging for a diagnosis, then you’ll want to make sure to tune into the upcoming “Becoming the Hunted” online training. Details are here.