Image: Charles Deluvio

A lot of service providers offer free initial consultations as a way to attract new clients. However, it’s one of the most dangerous things they can do.

Here are just 3 of the major problems caused by free consultations.

1. Free consultations make you look desperate

By giving your time away for free, you give the impression that you’re sat in a quiet office, with no clients. And nothing to do.

You’re literally (not figuratively) placing zero value on your time. That’s a very negative image to create in the mind of your prospective clients.

It paints all the wrong pictures. It damages your reputation, because looking desperate isn’t a good look! As such, it totally devalues your services. It also acts as a warning sign to genuine prospective clients, who will not hire what looks like a failing service provider.

It’s a toxic soup. Pure poison.

2. Free consultations attract time wasters like a magnet

Whilst high quality prospective clients are put off by needy looking service providers, free consultations are super-attractive to freebie hunters. These never-to-be clients flock to them.

Freebie hunters are time wasters who refuse to pay for professional help. Instead, they sign up for everything they can get for free, then try and do it themselves.

It looks something like this:

• The freebie hunter searches the internet for service providers who offer free consultations.
• They then contact the provider and request a free consultation, pretending to be a prospective client.
• They know the service provider will try and impress them with their knowledge.
• So, they ask for advice on their specific problems.

Don’t become a target for freebie hunters. Just don’t. Seriously.

3. Free consultations trap you in a dangerous cycle

Giving your time away for free to strangers can’t solve your marketing problems. It will simply guarantee that you stay stuck. That’s because it locks you inside a negative cycle.

The cycle looks something like this:

1. You need more, paying clients.
2. So, you offer free initial consultations, placing zero value on your time.
3. This makes you look needy (at best).
4. Any genuine prospective clients who see this are presented with a desperate looking image, which damages your reputation.
5. This obviously repels the exact clients you want (and need) to attract.
6. And this is on top of whatever your previous marketing problem was, which led you to giving your time away.
7. You remain stuck.
8. So, it’s back to step 1 again.

Thankfully, there are proven ways to make your business succeed. Strategies that attract the right clients or customers. Strategies that are perfect for you and what you want to achieve. This is where you need to focus. Anything else is unsustainable, totally avoidable and less than you deserve.

Today’s post is all about attracting more, high quality enquiries from eager prospective clients.

There are 2 important questions, which very few business owners ask of themselves. However, they contain the seeds of a massively valuable marketing insight. And by asking and answering them, you’ll avoid an extremely common and damaging mistake.

Here are the questions.

1. What does my ideal client (or customer) look like?
2. What am I doing, to make sure my marketing is exclusively, directly relevant to this super-valuable niche?

Here’s why these questions, and your answers, are so important.

Something for everyone?

One of the most common marketing mistakes, especially with small and medium-sized businesses, is to try and appeal to the widest possible range of people.

On one level, it seems to make sense. The thinking looks like this: The more people you try and appeal to, the more prospective clients you’ll have.

However, that’s not how it works. Not even close. In reality, using that approach guarantees you will actually attract far fewer clients or sales. And there’s a very good reason why.

It’s simply this. To motivate someone to switch brands or switch providers, your marketing needs to motivate them to take action. And in order to motivate them, it has to be directly relevant to them. It has to talk to their wants. Their needs. Their values.

Narrow and deep

Every time you decide to widen the appeal of your marketing, beyond your ideal client, you weaken its effectiveness. Your marketing shifts from being:

• Directly relevant (powerful and compelling).
• To vaguely relevant (feeble and weak).

If you haven’t already, I recommend you get intentional about exactly who you want to do business with. Then focus all your marketing, so that it speaks exclusively to that high value group.

Go narrow and deep. Not wide and shallow.

Get it right my friend, and it’s a game changer.

Today’s post offers you a wide-open opportunity for your business to thrive in the months ahead.

Yes, you read that correctly.

No, it’s not a play on words.

Allow me to explain

As we all know, these are very uncertain times. Yet there are some really important things we can have a high degree of certainty about. Here are just a few of them.

• We’re looking at a period of months (or longer), before the world population can safely return to a pre pandemic way of life.
• It will take years for world economies to recover.
• Previous periods of long-term economic crisis have simultaneously seen some businesses thrive, whilst others vanish.

By focusing on the things we can be almost certain of, we give ourselves a much steadier foundation from which to make our decisions. Acknowledging the long-term nature of the situation also helps us avoid going broke, as we can see it isn’t viable to wait for things to return to normal again.

Your wide-open opportunity

Back in March and April I offered a ‘Thrive” service, exclusively to help my former clients not just survive the pandemic, but thrive. I mentioned it at the time 1, 2 and 3. In every case, by focusing on the things they can be almost certain of, my clients were able to do spectacularly well.

We found that they had almost no competition. That’s because the vast majority of their competitors were scared stiff. Frozen with fear. Waiting for things to return to normal. Doing zero or minimal marketing. I found that my former clients had uncontested access to the marketplace, which made our marketing more effective than ever. And they have even less competition now, than they did back then, as their competitors now have even fewer financial resources and are even more scared. The competition have left the doors wide-open for my clients.

As I write this, that same wide-open opportunity to thrive is available to you.

That’s to say, your competition will largely be operating from a mindset of fear and doing the absolute minimum. To thrive you’ll need to be willing to do what your competitors won’t do. This includes things like focusing on what you want rather than what you fear. It means adapting your business to the new needs of your marketplace. It also means looking for opportunities to grow and having a commitment to being agile.

With 24/7 news coverage pumping fear and uncertainty at us, it’s way too easy to focus on the confusion and fear, which uncertainty brings. That’s a wholly ineffective mindset for any business owner.

Focus on the things that are under your control. Shift from a survive mindset to a thrive mindset. Do everything you can, with everything you have.

It beats the alternative and allows you to be justifiably excited about your future.