The best part about being a home based marketing consultant is there are very, very few of the frustrations other businesses -- whether home businesses or brick and mortar businesses -- have to deal with. But, there are a few. And the good thing is they are easily dealt with. For example, one thing that sometimes sticks in people's craws is when you get a prospect who thinks they know it all. Who has an ego that won't admit they really don't know what they're doing when it comes to marketing, and are basically sabotaging themselves. And one of the "frequently asked questions" I get from my students who I am training to be home based marketing consultants is what do you do about them? How to you convert someone like that into a paying client. My first response is you probably can't. In other words, he's probably not a prospect and not worth the time and the energy to do that. The thing I have found that works the best is to say, "Thank you. Good luck to you. Maybe we'll check back in a year. ? Then, hopefully during a year, his ego's gotten him into enough trouble. He's continuing to have bad results in his business. He's continuing to get beat up by the marketplace. His competition is out-performing him. His customers are leaving him because of his ego, and he's not paying attention to them. That's something that I would recommend you leave to the marketplace to help fix rather than you try to. Especially since you're in a positive mental attitude consulting business, and that's what you want to be in. You don't need someone like that trying to drain your energy. No amount of money is worth that. And so that's why I would recommend that you just leave him alone and come back and revisit him after the marketplace has bloodied him up a bit, because what you don't want to do is have him pay you for trying to get some marketing in place when he's got an anti-marketing attitude. That'll kill everything that you do. And you'll have an unhappy client. He'll probably want his money back, and it just gets into a bad relationship. What I tell my students to do is go in and identify and pre-qualify someone like that because what you would probably find out then by doing that is that you don't want to proceed working with him. At least not until later, when he asks you to and has proven he's going to let you take care of things. |