Quick notes to help you grow your business in less time with less effort. . . starting next week.
In this issue:
- Thoughts on Deciding
- Being Human
- Random Stuff
Thoughts on Deciding
- When a crisis occurs, we need as much data as possible. Knowing this, see data collection opportunities as a preventative step that answers the question, "What will we wish I knew two weeks from now?"
- Decisions made in the moment don't always stand the test of time. When analyzing your people's decisions, start by having them put themselves back in time before the final is known. It reveals a lot.
- Mistakes are okay because they teach lessons, but don't make the same mistake twice. Good advice, but expensive. Slightly less expensive advice: the best lessons are learned from others, especially if mistakes get avoided.
- One-to-one, face-to-face communication is powerful, even if it isn't always profitable. Long before our ancestors made pictures on walls or created the written word, they looked each other in the eye. It's in our genes.
Being Human - Can I get a better price?
“You do not get what you want. You get what you negotiate.”
– Harvey Mackay
In sales, money/budget talk shows up in two spots. One is early in the decision process, ball-parking costs, and one is late in the process, negotiating price. If you've done a good job at opportunity development, then designed a solution to match, there tends to be little negotiation. However, most sales in professional services are complicated, communication is always a challenge, and the time pressure to get things done creates gaps between the opportunity and the solution.
This leads to negotiation.
My negotiation advice is that the price for the solution offered is the price. This means, if we're going to offer a concession, we need to find a reason behind the reduction. If we don't, we're saying the price really wasn't the price. This ends up training clients to negotiate everything, and is one of the reasons sales can be a little dysfunctional.
Since the price for our solution is the price, if we change the price, it has to show up in our solution somewhere. The most obvious place to do this is in the elements that make up the solution, but sometimes it can't be done. I get it. I suggest the next best place for justifying a price reduction is inside your operations. Let's find a place to charge the difference to, and let the client know.
For instance, if we normally offer terms, to get a lower price, the client has to pay up front. This lets us tell the client we will charge the difference to accounts receivable because they won't need to follow up with collections. Or, maybe we get a commitment for a video testimonial for the client. Or get them to agree to serve as an on-call reference. We can charge these kinds of discounts to the marketing budget. We can say, "I have no idea if our marketing is working anyway, might as well take that budget and use it on this discount for a client like you.
Get in the habit of finding a business reason to account for discounts, and explain it to your clients. Otherwise, the price isn't the price, it's a suggestion, and suggestions are negotiable.
Random Stuff
“The hum of bees is the voice of the garden"
– Elizabeth Lawrence, landscape architect
Right outside my window I can see the underside of our backyard pergola. The year after it was built, I looked up and saw a few perfectly round holes on a couple of the headers. I thought, "huh, wonder why the builder drilled little holes there?" One evening, sitting under the structure, I heard buzzing and looked up to see a big fat bee going into the hole.
Carpenter bees.
Somehow, I had made it through multiple decades of living without knowing there was such a thing as carpenter bees. Turns out they're everywhere.
I hated having to kill those bees, but they foiled my other attempts to get rid of them. Now, every May, they've become a regular feature of late spring. They bump and bounce around the bottoms of the headers, and I run out and shoo them away. I have a trap that works well, but it tends to kill them, so I'd rather just shoo and hope they find another place to nest.
This year's couple have been unusually persistent. My usual tricks didn't work, so I head to Google to see what others have done. There has to be a trick I don't know about.
The Reddit forums show up high on the results. A quick scan shows someone asking a very similar question, "How do I convince carpenter bees to leave my gazebo alone?"
The highest rated answer: Get a second, tastier gazebo.
