The Real Deal Offline Series: "Telling The Business Owner About My Monthly Fee Lost My Deal!"

Hi Offliners,

One of the biggest mistakes I made when I was struggling in a bad way, was to go into a meeting with a prospect, make a great connection and then completely screw up when it was time to bring up the monthly investment required.

When I say bringing it up the wrong way, here's what I mean:

I would do the initial question meeting to gather information about the prospect.

Then, I would set a meeting for about a week out to meet and go over my "customized" marketing plan for that client.

At that second meeting, I would start by going through my findings and present them to the prospect. At the end of the presentation I would reveal the monthly retainer fee and wait for the business owner to say something.

And I would wait...and wait....and wait...and finally I would cave in and start talking again and subtly try to justify my pricing.

However, that was a HUGE mistake.

If I could go back in time (and what I do now), I would spend the bulk of time at the end of my presentation conservatively reviewing the amount of leads each strategy should generate.

Next I would go over the amount of customers and revenue each marketing action should bring in based on the business owner's current closing ratio.

I would either write those numbers next to the marketing strategy on the presentation report or have the numbers prepared prior.

Then, I would ask the business owner to tell me which results he would want and based on his experience, which marketing strategy he believed would make the biggest difference to him right away in his business.

Then, only after he had told me what he thought would make the biggest difference AND what type of revenue results he wanted, would I present the monthly retainer.

And immediately afterward, I would compare the amount of my monthly retainer to the results expected.

Finally my close would be something like this, "Based on what you're seeing here, do you think you would want to scale it up, keep it where it is or scale it down?"

(By the way, this is what I use in my business now.)

Using phrasing like this minimizes the buying pressure on the prospect and allows me to keep the conversation flowing and simple.

From his perspective, I wasn't asking him to spend $2,000 right then, I was only asking him to let me know if he wanted to go bigger, smaller or if I was inside his comfort zone.

However, in reality I was finding out if the price was too high, too low or just right. Now, this is just one of several little nuances that I now use to correct my early mistakes, but I'll give you some more later.

So, if you're meeting prospect's and can't close the deal, then try this the next time you're meeting with a prospect and it will do wonders to release the closing tension and you'll get some great feedback from your prospects.

Hope this helps,

Chris