The Digital Marketer’s Guide to the Polite Decline
** “Let’s hop on a call.”
** “I want to pick your brain.”
** “It will take only 5-10 minutes.”
These are all traps– don’t fall for them.
While we may appreciate the many folks that would like to take us out to a 2
hour dinner in exchange for private consulting, we would go out of business operating this way.
The same goes for anyone trying to run a business in their field of expertise.
You started the company for a reason — you are good at what you do and believe you can charge money for your services.
While you may have thought it to be worthwhile at the beginning to sit down with anyone and everyone who would take your advice, you would eventually realize that it leads to a lot of wasted time with “potential clients” who never become clients.
Don’t waste your time giving away 50 free consultations, in the hopes that you’ll land that “big one”. Charge away!
These people are well-intentioned. In their mind, inviting us out to dinner is a nice gesture where THEY are doing us a favor. And while some people seem well-intentioned, there are a variety of ways some people will try to get free consulting.
How to Qualify “The Big Ones”
So, how can you decrease your chances of these people looking for free consulting? Dennis Yu has three main tips and tricks he uses to qualify “big”
clients:
Master Agency Management | page 67
“My Power Hour consultation is $1500, which is a steal for companies that are spending more than $2K a day or making $5K in digital conversions per day.”
These tips can be boiled down to a couple overarching tactics we use at CoachYu: a Strategy Assessment Form and the “Power Hours”
When there is a potential client, no matter who they are or what they do, we send them to the Strategy Assessment and have them fill in their goals, content, and targeting (GCT) strategies. This allows us to see if they are a good fit for our company and vice versa.
The second tactic we implement is the “Power Hour” . This is a chance to sit down with Dennis himself and go through your current digital and social media marketing strategies. He will tell you everything you want to know and you can purchase as many of these Power Hours as you would like.
It is important to remember that you are giving your time here. Set your prices in a way that many will go with while a few believe it to be too high and think you’re crazy.
Master Agency Management | page 68
Dennis has said, “Your price should be set where a few potential clients balk at your prices and call you crazy. This means you are separating those who are truly invested and ready to do what it takes from those who are just looking for the cheapest alternative.”
The “Polite Decline”
People don’t realize that we do this for a living — social media is a hobby to them.
It would be akin to you needing help with X, finding the world’s best in X, then expecting that expert to spend an evening with you providing free advice in exchange for dinner.
Insert whatever you like for X to make this example more personal — digital marketing, playing an instrument, building a deck — you name it.
An evening with them is an evening away from our families, our clients, our teammates, our health, or anything else we might be spending time doing.
Our meetings have to cover the cost of our operations, so we have to be selective, increasingly so.
Related to these are the spammers who want us to give them “just 10
minutes” of our time so they can pitch us or get free consulting. Yet they haven’t done any homework to personalize their mass messages, nor are they willing to when asked. And we all know “just 10 minutes” turns into “just 10
minutes longer?”. They drag the 10 minutes out, gleaning onto every suggestion that comes out of our mouths.
I’ll reiterate- many of these people are well-intentioned, trying to offer something (other than money) for your time. But you need to make money to survive. That’s why you started the company — to make money doing what you’re good at. And if the pieces are all in place, people will pay you.
Prioritize your time. Keep in mind your family, paying clients, your team, and all aspects of your life. You can’t go around taking time away from these parts Master Agency Management | page 69
of your life in order to give free advice to “potential clients” who aren’t willing to pay the small fee up front for your services.
That being said, don’t be a jerk. We learn to practice what’s called a “polite decline”, where we’re gracious about it.
Politely decline the invite in one way or another. Some ways can include but are not limited to:
“Thank you for the offer, but I have to keep paying clients a priority and don’t have time to fit in ____. (This is a good time to point them to something like a Power Hour which would put them on the high priority list of a paying client.)
“I’ll have to check the dates as it draws closer and see where the priorities are and if I can get away for _______. If you want to risk me not having time to fit it in, that is fine. However, if you want to guarantee my time you can schedule a Power Hour (or similar barrier to separate high priorities from low).”
Relationships are not more important than your time.
The question comes down to how you can maintain a relationship but not lose your time. Including a polite decline mentioned above you could also direct the individual to a piece of content that may address their “Polite decline” is the answer every time — and sometimes this:
“Don’t spam– earn the right to my attention”
”Surgeons don’t leave the emergency room to go out to knock on doors”
”Your time and knowledge are precious-- spend it with those who appreciate
