You should not sell to everyone who is willing to buy from you. This is especially true for freelancers, copywriters, consultants, and solo professionals.

While this may sound crazy, especially if you are revenue-starved, give it a bit more thought and you’ll see that I’m right.

Some customers are simply not worth the revenue they produce; because some customers are complainers, whiners, high maintenance, and end up costing you more in time, energy, and employee morale than they ever produce in revenue.

The truth is, most of us can identify these “problem children” customers a mile away. There’s just something about them that sets off the red flags early in the relationship, usually before any purchases have been made.

Learn to watch for these signals. Identify the kinds of questions, comments, and attitudes that you know are warning you that the person you’re talking to is a “problem child” customer.

Have a predetermined, polite, but firm routine in place for turning such customers away. You want to do it gracefully, because you don’t want to insult anyone or imply that they’re simply a “troublemaker” before you’ve even had a chance to get to know them.

But you and I both know that your biggest problem customers did not come as a surprise to you. Chances are, you knew in the first conversation you had with them, this person was going to be trouble.

Promise yourself that from now on you’re going to listen to your intuition, or your subconscious insight, or whatever you choose to call it… and you’re going to refuse to let those “problem children” inside your business.

You’ll be much better off without them messing up your employee morale, lowering your ROI, and costing you time and energy.

Spend the time you save on something much better – such as identifying, pursuing, and wooing your “perfect customers” instead.

The ones who are easy to work with, a joy to be around, most helped by your products and services, and produce the most profit for you in your business.

You’ll never be sorry you avoided a problem customer.

And every problem customer avoided makes room for a customer who is a delight.

Worth note: some of my best customers are members of the Writing Riches community. Just sayin’.

Maybe its time you begin excluding customers instead of chasing them. Let me explain.

So often, as business people and entrepreneurs, and especially as freelancers, we seem to be chasing customers. This gives us an air of desperation. If you look at a customer, and all you see is a bag of groceries or a paycheck, guess what? The customer knows. They can smell desperation on you just like a dog can smell your fear. What do you do?

Sit down with a pad and pen and write up a description of your ideal customer. You know, the kind that doesn’t get on your nerves, the kind that pays on time, the kind that doesn’t balk at your fees, the dream customer. Once you’ve written out a good description of what this customer looks like, set that as your target. Pretend that for the next week or so that’s the only kind of customer that you’re willing to accept.

State your criteria publicly.

You don’t have to be obnoxious, you don’t have to state your criteria in the negative (“I don’t want a whining complaining customer”, etc.). You can state your criteria in the positive:

“Looking for customers who is smart, with it, understand the value of what we do, and who is willing to pay a premium price for a job well done.” Change up the specifics to fit whatever your situation is.

But be very clear on the customers that you won’t accept and work to discourage them from doing business with you. This will serve to attract the kind of customers that you want.

My friend, Michael Port, in his book, Book Yourself Solid, calls this the “velvet rope strategy.” We all understand the analogy of the velvet rope. It’s a barrier that implies, “you must meet certain qualifications before you cross this rope”… and the presence of a velvet rope invariably makes us want to cross to the other side.

Is it time for you to put up your own “velvet rope”?

If you’re in business, you could learn a lot from farmers.

Farmers understand the “Law of the Harvest”.

This Law is simple: to reap a harvest, you must sow the seed and tend the crop.

In other words, first you do the work and then  you get the result.

And you understand the nature of seeds: they take time and tending in order to make them grow.

No “instant crop” – no “easy harvest”.

In business…

No “instant income”.

Not even easy.

But simple. And reliable.

Here’s a big secret that makes it easy to sell more of whatever you sell.

Communicate what it will cost your prospects if they don’t buy from you?

What will it cost them in time, money, and effort if they don’t solve their problem using your solution?

Just communicate clearly the cost of not buying from you today, and no “selling tricks” will be required.

What’s that you say? You’re not sure what it will cost them… or even if it will cost them anything at all?

If that’s the case, your problem is not a selling problem. It’s either a value problem or a value clarification problem.

Either way, you now know what to do next.

Imagine, just for a moment, that I had just parked two brand-new cars in your driveway.

I walk up to you holding out two sets of keys, one to the new Mercedes-Benz automobile on the left; the other, a brand spanking new, Honda accord on the right. Which car is the superior car? If I offer to give you one of them, which one will you choose?

Almost without exception, everyone answers, “The Mercedes!”

Forgetting the question of German engineering versus Japanese engineering, for just a moment, stop to ponder why we all respond the same way.

The confident, secure, intellectually steadfast among us will launch into an explanation of why we chose the superior German automobile.

The facts, however, are simple. Most of us are not engineers. Most of us are not expert judges of the mechanical suitability of automobiles. We use shortcuts to make such decisions. One such shortcut is price.

Let me present a different scenario to you. Let’s suppose that I pull up in your driveway in a brand-new Mercedes-Benz. I park, hop out, walk up to you and hand you the keys. I say, “This car is yours for only $5,000 cash, right now.”

What is your response?

If you’re like most of us, your response is, “What’s wrong with it? Is it stolen?”

You instinctively know the price is too low. Either there’s something mechanically wrong with the car, or it is stolen.

The tipoff is the price.

It’s no different in business; if you respond to marketplace pressures by lowering your prices, customers make a series of assumptions. They assume that you have somehow also lowered the value of your offering. Or, worse, they assume that the offering was never worth the original price you quoted to begin with.

Many studies have indicated it’s possible to increase sales, simply by increasing price. The explanation is simple: people assume that a higher price means higher quality.

In order to put this principle into practice, you must of course supply value for the dollar. In other words, after the transaction is complete and the customer has had the opportunity to experience or use your product, they must feel as though the benefits of the product outweighed the expense of the purchase.

This is actually easier to achieve than most of us believe.

Once you have accomplished building a product offering that is worth what you’re asking for it, and once you have set a price that indicates that your offer is a valuable one, you can be confident that your business is built on a solid foundation.

So the response that is appropriate in economic times like these – times when there is more pressure on businesses to provide value – is simple: provide more value, at a higher price.

In any economic circumstance, cutting your prices can be equal to cutting your throat.

Lucky for you, most businesses are pathetically and shamefully inadequate in the area of follow-up with prospects and customers.

This is fortunate for you because it means that even becoming adequate at follow-up places you leagues ahead of your so-called competition. If you actually become good follow-up, you can easily own the marketplace.

There is a momentum that builds with follow-up that is difficult to describe, but easy to identify once it begins to yield fruit.

It’s like the snowball effect; what begins as a tiny snowball rolling downhill, picks up more and more mass as it proceeds, and it also picks up speed, so that by the time the snow ball reaches the bottom of the mountain it is a massive, irresistible avalanche.

Promise yourself that you will begin to follow-up with every prospect and every customer.

While having an elaborate and sophisticated follow-up system is indeed the mark of a mature and highly profitable business, it isn’t necessary to build a complex follow-up monstrosity in the beginning. You simply have to identify what the next logical step is in any follow-up sequence.

Begin by speaking out loud, or writing on paper, a simple series of “if-then” statements about your interactions with prospects and customers.

“If a customer comes into the store but doesn’t buy, then follow-up with a phone call three days later.”

“If the initial follow-up call does not result in a visit to the store within three days, then follow up with a postcard making a special offer to the customer.”

“If the customer response to the offer on the postcard, then send a thank you gift to the customer’s office and make another offer.”

It never has to be more complex than figuring out the next logical step based on the action the prospect or customer just took. The key is to document these follow-up steps with each customer, and begin building a predetermined sequence that applies to all customers who meet those specific “if-then” conditions.

Before you know it, your follow-up sequence will become a massive, irresistible avalanche of profits.

One of the most powerfully persuasive communication techniques is best summed up in a single word: “because.”

In Dr. Robert Cialdini’s book, Influence, he cites a research study showing that simply adding the word “because” to a request multiplies the likelihood of compliance.

Interestingly, the study seems to indicate that the legitimacy of the reasons supplied did not seem as important to the outcome as you might suppose. In fact, it seems hardly necessary to have a real reason at all.

For example, you might ask to cut line at the post office, and be more likely to get a “yes” response from the person in front of you if you simply frame your question by saying something like, “Would it be possible for me to please cut a front of you in line, because I’m really in a hurry.”

That’s hardly persuasive salesmanship, yet having some reason seems to be better than having none.

I’m not suggesting that you engage in meaningless marketing. I am suggesting that you take the extra step that most people do not … and supply good reasons for your promotions and campaigns. Practically said, this means simply telling the truth about a situation.

If you own a retail store, for instance, and you need to sell your overstock of a certain line of kitchenware, it’s much better just come right out and say, “We thought these would sell better, they didn’t, and now we need to get rid of them. So we put them on sale to motivate you to buy them.”

While that may not seem like brilliant copy, and admittedly it isn’t, it is a legitimate reason why you’re lowering the price of your merchandise. People respond to such reasoning, and the result is usually more profits.

This is not a new concept. John E Kennedy wrote an entire book on the subject, called Reason Why Advertising. I highly recommend that you read this work, and apply its principles to your own marketing.

There is something about the ticking clock that makes people move.

It doesn’t matter if we know about the deadline far in advance-activity always increases as the last few minutes tick off the clock.

“Tax day” in the USA doesn’t sneak up on any of us-we all know it happens April 15th (or in the case of this year, the 18th). Yet year after year, tax preparers are deluged during the week before “tax day” — swamped by people who were only motivated to act when it looked as though the clock was about to run out.

There’s a reason why so much direct response advertising is filled with the words “for a limited time only”.

“Limited time marketing” gets results.

The trick, of course, is that it doesn’t work as well as it once did. People understand what’s happening, and are not as easily moved by those same old, tired words, “limited time only”. Now,  we must be more creative in communicating the scarcity of time to act.

Notice that I’m not commenting on whether there actually is a limited time or not. I’m assuming that if you say time is limited, that the offer is about to run out, that quantities are low, that this is the absolute truth. That these are real limits that you’re simply letting people know about.

No matter what you are marketing, there is always a limit. There are only so many units you can ship… there is only a certain amount of time you can maintain the sale price… there are only a certain number of days you can legitimately continue to offer an “end-of-the-year sale”.

I’m suggesting that you look carefully for the “ticking clocks” that are already present in every one of your offers, and make those time constraints explicit for your customers. In other words, talk about the limits.

The way to do this effectively is to talk about it in very specific terms.

Don’t take the lazy way out and simply say “for a limited time only”.

Talk about he exact time the sale ends, on what day.

Explain exactly how many units you have left, and why there won’t be any more.

Even if the reason is simply, “we’re tired of making it in this color”, tell that story. Truthful stories about real ticking clocks are powerful customer motivators.

Try it and see.

Here’s how to make all of your marketing and advertising more profitable instantly. You won’t need a calculator, you won’t need a spreadsheet, and you certainly won’t need a board meeting.

Now let me warn you.

You will be tempted to disregard the advice I’m about to give you as overly simplistic at best.

At worst, you will rationalize and begin to enumerate the reasons why doing what I’m about to suggest is not possible in your business.

You will have all sorts of excuses about why your business “is different”.

You will tell me that your customers are too sophisticated, too sensitive, too demanding.

You will be wrong.

No offense intended, but those are the facts.

All right, enough with the preamble already.

You’re probably thinking, what is this magical advice you’re about to dispense?

It is…

Always make an offer.

Put another way: always sell something. Always.

In every single ad.

In every billing statement.

In the Yellow Pages.

On your website, in your emails, during your presentations.

Always.

If your business is anything like most of the businesses I encounter,, your biggest marketing challenge is most likely the fact that you are not making enough offers.

Why is it that people who are called to be entrepreneurs, a high calling in life indeed, seem to have some sort of complex about asking people for money?

Perhaps it’s because as children most of us were taught some core values by our mothers. For almost everyone of us, those core values included these two:

1. Don’t talk to strangers.

2.   Don’t ask for money.

Can you see the potential conflict inherent in such values for the entrepreneurial business owner?

Our business life depends on talking to strangers, and then asking them for money.

Something to think about.

Something to change.

Start this way…

Always make an offer.

Don’t do any marketing or advertising that doesn’t make money for your business; that doesn’t make the cash register ring.

Here’s the sad news: “brand building” is a door that is pretty much closed to the small to medium-size company.

In today’s over-communicated, oversaturated marketplace, the sheer mass required to achieve brand awareness is quite simply out of financial reach for all but the biggest companies.

And one could argue that such strategies don’t always make sense for big companies either.

Here’s what does not fail: holding your advertising and marketing accountable for its own results. It doesn’t take a “rocket surgeon” to understand direct response marketing. In fact, the steps are simple:

1. Launch a marketing or advertising campaign that you can measure (phone calls completed, postcards returned, e-mails collected, sales made, etc.)

2. Observe whether this campaign results in actual dollars coming in the door.

3. If the answer to number two is “yes”, repeat the process as needed. If the answer is “no”, if dollars do not flow in the door, try something else!

Is this a bit oversimplified?

Yes, but not much.

In fact, if you were to just follow this “oversimplified” formula to the letter, you would still be a lot better off than most businesses in America.

Make this promise to yourself: I will not engage in any marketing or advertising activity unless the results of said marketing or advertising activity can be objectively measured.

Then follow through on that promise. This alone will bring you more profits.