Rocket Fuel: How to avoid the "free advice" trap
This week, the sales tip has been inspired by a conversation I had with one of my clients who are relatively new to the world of setting up their business, and new to the world of sales.
Hi everybody. Julie here, The Sales Ace - bringing you another sales tip to help skyrocket your business.
And this week, the sales tip has been inspired by a conversation I had with one of my clients who are relatively new to the world of setting up their business, and new to the world of sales.
It came about because they were telling me that they'd had a conversation with a prospect, that turned into three meetings where they'd given lots and lots of advice, but nothing was happening. It was going nowhere. And this person had reached out again wanting another meeting, and my client didn't know how to deal with this.
So after digging into the situation, and asking lots of questions, I kind of concluded that this person was (in technical terms) taking the Mickey. Unfortunately, it does happen, and it's happened to me a number of times. So, what I want to do is to share with you how I deal with people like this.
It's okay to give a little bit of advice here and there, and I'm really happy for somebody to pick my brains now again: that's absolutely not a problem. But to want to drain my advice, and to spend a lot of time taking advice but not actually paying for it? No. No. No. We don't like that.
So when this happens to me, what I've tended to do is say to the prospect, "I’m happy to share that advice with you, but it's not something I can do in a five or ten minute telephone conversation. That's something that I would spend a couple of hours on with clients, and that would be a chargeable fee. Here are my prices. When would you like me to put you in my diary for that?"
And funnily enough, they always say “we'll come back to you, Julie”. And I never hear from them again. And even if I follow up, I never hear from them again. So this is a really good way of dealing with those people that want your advice but aren't prepared to pay for it, and they’re taking the Mickey.
So there we go. That's a little bit of advice for this week. I hope you find it helpful!
I’ll catch up with you again soon.
