March 6, 2020
They’re probably wrong, but that’s okay
Sent by Jonathan Stark on March 6th, 2020
REMINDER: Coming back by popular demand is The Pricing Seminar, led by yours truly. Lessons starts on Monday March 9th, and you can enroll now visiting here. Now, on to our regularly scheduled program...
If a prospective client spends some of their time talking to you about a possible engagement, they are making an investment. And when a businessperson makes an investment, they typically do so with some hope or expectation of a positive return.
In other words, they think you can probably help them somehow. And they might be right. Unfortunately, they might also be painfully naive about exactly what that would entail.
This can result in the prospect talking in vague generalities about aspects of your craft that they have heard of and that they think might be solutions to problems the have, but that they don’t really understand (and might not really be the right solutions at all).
Here are some examples from the tech space:
- “You do machine learning? We need you add some machine learning to our sales funnel.”
- “You do blockchain? Can you convert our database to crypto by Q3?”
- “You do HTML5? Great! We need some media queries added to our mobile responsive images.”
(For the non-technical folks in the crowd, these are comically misguided requests - I suspect that you can think of a few common howlers that you get from your prospects from time to time.)
Here’s the thing…
Clients don’t need to understand the nuances of your craft. In fact, you want clients who don’t. Otherwise you’ll end with one of those “I know enough to be dangerous” micromanager types.
So what do you talk about in the sales interview with a prospective client? You turn the conversation around to them. Ask them what they’re trying to achieve. What their objective is. What a home run would look like.
Once you understand what their desired outcome is, you can set your price based on that.
Yours,
—J