Your manners are costing you clients

THE PROSPEROUS CONSULTANT

Turn your decades of expertise into a premium consulting practice built around the life you want.

Issue #28

I sent last week’s issue on Tuesday morning. By that afternoon, a reply came back.

A long one. This guy had found somebody right in his own network who needs exactly what he does. Same world he’s worked in for years. Same problem he’s fixed a hundred times. And he’d already presented a solution to him. Sort of. His words were that he “kind of proposed that he could probably maybe kind of someday” help the guy out.

That was a month ago. He hasn’t heard a word back since.

His question for me was whether it would be pushy to follow up.

To be honest, I read that and I wanted to reach through the screen. He isn’t lazy, and he sure isn’t a coward. I know the type, because he’s most of my readers... thirty-some years of doing hard things well. He’s just polite.

That reply has been on my mind for two days.

Wednesday I spent the entire day with a client named Lee. Just the two of us, one room, and we worked on exactly one thing from morning to evening: his sales process. Then this morning I got on our weekly call with a room full of clients, and every question in that hour circled back to the same place. Not how do I find people. Not what do I charge.

How do I lead a conversation with somebody who needs me... without feeling like a jerk?

Here’s what I want you to get from this one:

• Why the nicest man on the call is usually the one who loses the deal
• The question you don’t believe you have the right to ask, and why it’s the most valuable thing you own
• The one thing you should never hang up without

Let me start with what’s actually happening to you, because I don’t think you’ve ever had it put to you without a layer of varnish added to it.

You get on a call with a good prospect. He starts telling you about his business, and then about the business before that, and then about the partner who burned him in 2011. Twenty minutes gone. You don’t cut in, because your mother raised you not to interrupt a man who’s talking.

He tells you what’s wrong. You want to ask what it’s costing him... in money, in hours, in what it’s doing to him at home. You don’t ask, because that feels nosy, and you just met the man.

The clock runs out. You want the next meeting on the calendar. You say “let me follow up with you,” because asking him to commit right there feels like pressure.

You hang up forty-five minutes later knowing his whole life and holding nothing you can act on. And you tell yourself it was a good call. It felt good. He liked you.

Zig Ziglar used to say that timid salespeople have skinny kids. I heard that man speak more than once, and I never met anybody with higher integrity or a softer touch with people. He wasn’t telling anybody to be a shark. He was telling the truth about what timidity costs, and who ends up paying it.

Because here’s the part that ought to bother you. The man on the other end of that call still has the problem. He hung up and went right back to it. You were the one person on his calendar that week who could have fixed it, and you were too well-mannered to lead him there.

Politeness on a sales call isn’t kindness. It’s abdication.

I said something on the call this morning that I want to repeat here. If you don’t lead the conversation, he will. And he’ll grab you by the nose and lead you around, and that’s no fun for anybody.

Now, I’m not the guy to preach at you about this. My wife Tabbi will tell you I can be short. Curt, even. She’s quick about it, too. But the people who watch my blind spots in business have told me the same thing for years, and it isn’t that. I get accused of being too nice. Both things are true at once, which is exactly why nobody catches this in himself.

So here’s what we worked through this morning, and what Lee and I built into his process on Wednesday. Seven things.

1. Lead the call, or get led. Go in with the time frame in your head and treat it like a real constraint. When he wanders, don’t sit there being gracious about it. Cut in warm and cut in clean: “That’s great, and I’m glad you told me. Let’s set that on a sticky note for later, because what I need to know specifically is...” One of my clients had a prospect take him deep into flying an F-4 Phantom over the jungle. Wonderful story. Wrong forty minutes. The word “specifically” is the most polite tool you own.

2. Ask the question you don’t have the right to ask. “What’s it costing you to stay where you are?” Money, time, energy, what it’s doing to your marriage. That question feels like reaching into a man’s pocket. It isn’t. Picture a friend drinking himself under. Would you sit across from him and not ask what it’s costing him? Of course you would ask. You’d think you were a lousy friend if you didn’t. The stakes have to get said, and he’s not going to say them unless you ask.

3. When you get scared, you throw information. Stop. This is what we do instead of asking the hard thing. More strategy, more upside, another example, another idea, until the poor guy is gagging on value. You’re hoping he’ll finally cave and pull out a card. He won’t. Nobody ever bought because they ran out of reasons to say no.

4. Qualify for desire and ability before you go one inch further. He needs a pain he actually wants gone, or a better place he actually wants to get to, plus the money and the will to move. I’d rather sell a Chevy to a man who’s walking than a Ferrari to a man who’s already driving a Corvette. If there’s no desire to fix it, thank him and go find somebody who wants help.

5. Never leave a live prospect without the next meeting booked. If you know you’re not crossing the payoff today, you do not hang up until it’s on the calendar. Book a meeting from a meeting. No exceptions, ever. Let him go without a date and your odds of getting him back are single digits. Then you’re chasing him all over again, and you’ve thrown away the best hour you’ll ever have with him.

6. Never send your roadmap out for solo review. Build the bespoke version for him, absolutely. Then walk him through it live, in front of you. Send it ahead and you’ve handed him a document, a price, and a quiet room to talk himself out of it in. You get a stall instead of a decision, and you’ll never know which line lost him.

7. Sell once, not twice. If you’re doing an assessment, it is the first part of phase one of the engagement, and the money is a deposit toward the whole thing. Deposit. Say the word out of your own mouth until it’s natural. Frame it as a separate little project and you’ve just built yourself two sales where you needed one, and the second one is always harder. Sell the whole road, then show him the relief he gets in the first two weeks.

One more, and this is the one that pays. When he says “I need to talk to a few of your clients first,” don’t go running off to line up calls. Isolate it first: “If I set that up and it all sounds good, is there anything else on your list, or is that the last box?” Now you know whether you’re solving the real objection or just the one he said. Then you close the loop the same way: “If I get those two calls lined up, can I count on you to move forward?” Ask it, then stop talking and count to five Mississippi.

Here’s the payoff. I walk into every first call fully expecting to close it, and it happens about one time in five. If I walked in expecting two or three calls, it would happen zero times in five. Leading the conversation costs you nothing but the two seconds of discomfort it takes to cut in, ask the nosy question, and request the date.

And the man who needed help gets helped. That’s the whole business.

P.S. That mastermind call this morning? I ran it four minutes long. Spent a solid hour telling five people to watch the clock and lead the conversation, then blew right through my own stop time because we were onto something good. Life keeps life-ing, as they say. Hit reply and tell me the one question you know you ought to be asking on your calls and don’t. Just that one. I read every one of these myself, and I’ll write you back.

“Nothing is so strong as gentleness, nothing so gentle as real strength.”
— Francis de Sales

Want to dive deeper? Check out these related articles:

👉 The Prosperous Consultant | Issue #27
👉 The Prosperous Consultant | Issue #26

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