Saw a really awesome tweet the other day, by a user called @theJamesDo:
“You are not in the business of subsidizing your client’s business. If they cannot afford to pay someone to solve their problems in relation to the size of the problem, it is not your problem. Problem solved”.
Couldn’t have said it better.
And it really matters for the kind of people that I like to work with:
Good people, who are in business with a mission and have values and who operate with integrity – because people like that, people like us, we very often are too generous with our time.
We don’t put our mask on first before taking care of another person.
And so we give and we give, and we spend another hour and get on another help, and give more free consulting, just churn away so much time, trying to get a buyer to endear themselves to us.
Hoping that will finally say, oh I take pity on you and thank you so much for all the time and now I’m going to buy from you.
But it’s exactly the opposite of what will happen when you give too much without a limit.
If you’re too generous with your time (remember, that’s your scarcest asset), they are not going to take you seriously.
Because if you don’t value your time, they don’t value your time, and then why should they pay for it?
How to fix this problem, and still be a nice person who isn’t salesy:
Decide for yourself how much generosity you can apply and deploy, and put a hard limit on it.
This many hours, that many meetings, whatever works for you.
And when you reach that limit, you tell your buyer:
“Say, there’s only so much I can do for free. Should we talk about working together?”
You’ll either get a “yes”, or a “later”, or a “don’t have the money”.
And while it might sound harsh, a buyer who doesn’t have the money is in the end not your problem – but it becomes your problem if you keep trying to enroll them by giving more of your time.
Makes sense, right?
Then get much, much more of this, in my 10-week personal training programme, Sales for Nice People.
Cheers,
Martin
