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’.
An about page is great place to turn people on or off to you.
If you craft it right, maybe even make it a "sticky" page on your blog, you can address the issue of "problem children" right from the get go. You can give people a lay of the land of what they can expect when in your presence.
What you stand for. What you believe in. What you will and will not tolerate.
Tony Robbins does a marvelous job of setting up the fact that he's gonna cuss during his seminars, at the very beginning. He manages expectations and gives you a reason why he's gonna use what some people consider "shocking" language. You can stay or you can go after that point but you know up front what's coming.
Anytime you can do this, it's going to serve you. Not everyone's gonna like you and better early than later you send the people away who won't be a good fit. Thanks Ray for reinforcing this concept in my mind as you can never be reminded to often of this!
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