Jason Leister: How to Stop Wasting Your Time With Prospects (Part I)

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I had a prospect not too long ago that came to me by way of referral. I tell you this because referrals generally produce a higher quality prospect for me than non-referrals do. In fact, the referrals that flow into my business all have a very eerily consistent thing in common: the referral is almost exactly the same type of client that’s doing the referring! The “frugal” clients tend to send others who are just as frugal. The clients who are freely willing to pay for value send clients who are also willing. It’s bizarre, but it proves itself to be true over and over again in my business.

Of course there are always exceptions. And those exceptions can be extremely annoying. Like when a great client sends you a dud referral. But that serves a valuable purpose for me. And that is that it reminds me of the importance of process. And that if you have a process that works, then you don’t need to get emotionally involved in each potential client that comes along.

Without a process, you tend to do stupid things that waste your time—as the story I’m about to share with you will prove. In this scenario I was dealing with a referral from a great client. The mistake I made was to assume that means anything about anything. It doesn’t. New clients are new clients and they need to walk through the same process everyone else walks through.

This is more for you than it is for them. Remember, in your service business we’re after leverage. One form of leverage comes in the form of systems which remove the need for you to think.

Having a client intake process also prevents you from having to make judgement calls (guesses) about whether or not this prospect will be a good client. You don’t want to do that because you’ll just drive yourself nuts. (I know.)

The first call with this prospect lasted about 20-25 minutes. During that time, we discussed her business and the major issues she wanted to solve. From this call, I gathered two important pieces of information. First, money was not a limiting factor here. This is a well established business with thousands of customers. Second, the woman I spoke with on the phone understood the need for the type of services I provide. Our first call was cut short due to scheduling so we arranged another call for the following week.

During the second, I asked a bunch of questions about the business, about the objectives and about how a solution might look. This call lasted close to 1 hour. In my experience, it often takes this long to really dig deep enough to figure out what is going on inside a business. Near the end of this phone call, I asked the prospect what type of budget was set aside for this project. She replied, “Well, actually none. There’s no budget for this. The owners don’t really like to spend money.” Doh. At this point I chuckled and said I would send an outline of what I proposed along with recommendations for what I’d do.

By now, I’m sure you can see where this is going. I DID submit the proposal, which was extremely reasonable compared to the value of the project. I eventually received a reply that the owners wanted to hold off for a little while to see the effect of some recent changes to their marketing strategy.

Stay tuned next week for what you can learn from this scenario…