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

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Last week I gave you an example of a time when I could have better utilized my time with a prospect.

The purpose of telling you all of this is to show you the importance of making a conscious decision about WHERE you put the toll booth in your business. What’s the line (which should be clear to YOU and your prospect) over which only paying clients are permitted to cross? In other words, how far do you go for free? Does that amount of distance increase the attraction of the prospect and increase your chances of getting paid or does it decrease those things?

After my experience, where I effectively wasted hours of my time that I can’t get back, I decided to insure something like this would never happen again. As I often do in my business, when I come up against a challenge that requires me to draw on something that’s not a well developed skill for me (like discipline), I figure out a way to force myself to act.

I’m not the most disciplined person in the world. In fact, I’m really, really good at rationalizing why NOW is not the best time for X, Y and Z. I’ve identified discipline as something that needs work. So the way I deal with it is to structure things so I don’t have a choice.

That’s why, in one of my businesses, I write a daily email. People expect it daily and that means I have to produce it daily or else I look stupid. BINGO, instant discipline.

Another thing I’m not so good at (yet) is saying NO. So I have to build it in to the process so that I don’t put myself in the position where I feel I should say yes.

Here Are The Mistakes I Made

I made two serious mistakes. First of all, never speak to someone who has the power to say NO but doesn’t have the power to say yes. I chose to ignore this bit of advice because I thought the source of the client (a referral) warranted it. I was wrong.

My second mistake was that I moved my “toll booth” way too far into the process. I really wasted too much time before I found out the truth about what I was dealing with. Money has this funny side effect, you see. When you start talking about it with a prospect, the truth about whether or not they’re a real prospect comes out fairly quickly.

How I Fixed The Process

I finally wised up and changed my process for new prospects that walk through the door. We deal with money right upfront now, even before I speak with them. My consultations with a
prospective client are extremely valuable because I ask them questions about their business they probably haven’t thought deeply about. So I no longer will offer consultations for free. Instead, there is a nominal fee for the initial consultation with a prospect.

How to Make This Work

This approach requires some serious changes to the investment I make in the marketing I do to generate clients. When you start charging for what most other people freely give away, you’d better have a good reason for it. OR, you’d better have enough leads to make it possible.

And that’s the focus now. Ramping up the lead machine so I truly cannot handle all of the interest in my services. This is not hard to do, but it does take work. A lot of it actually. Mainly in the form of writing and publishing.

After my experience wasting time with this prospect, where I demonstrated what a poor steward of my time I’m capable of being, I must now force myself to never make that mistake again. And the way I do that is to simply change the process so it’s not possible for me to make the same mistake.

Think about the process you use when a new prospect makes himself known to you. Do you have a process? Or do you just make it up? I did that for a long time. But now I’m getting way too busy for that to be practical. I have to streamline things so that my PROCESS does more of the sifting and sorting for me. That way, my focus can stay on other things until I know I’m dealing with a truly qualified prospect.

When most service providers think of “working with clients” they probably actually picture themselves doing the work. The process work is where the real value is. And it provides a huge amount of leverage and confidence when you get it right. It’s worth the work. Think about it.