The cost of engaging you needs to be less than the cost of not working with you!

Transcript

Hi there, it’s Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage. And here’s the idea I’d like to share with you today, and that’s this: when you’re engaging with a potential client and you’re walking through what you can do, and what their problems are, and their pain points are, and how you fix them, and all the things that we know how to do as thought leaders, right? It all comes down to this with regards to whether they’re going to move forward or not—and that’s: is the cost of engaging you, of working with you (hard cost and soft cost), less than the cost of doing nothing?

And doing nothing is everybody’s sort of default mechanism—default switch, right? It’s easier to do today what we did yesterday. It’s harder to advocate for change, especially when there’s dollars involved and all that sort of stuff. You’ve got to make it really clear to them that the cost of engaging you ultimately is less than the cost of the status quo—of doing nothing.

How do you do that? Well, you have to make it clear that if you’re in the business of developing capabilities in their people, that those capabilities, once developed, will drive a business outcome that they can quantify. That if you go in and do some consulting, that the outputs—the outcomes—of that consulting engagement yield a benefit greater than the cost of not doing that work.

So anyway, start thinking about that a little bit, and maybe there’s some recalibration you need to do on the front end of your conversations with potential clients. Maybe you need to be more direct about the outcomes and the outputs—whatever that might be.

But again, cost of engaging you needs to be less than the cost of doing nothing.

Love to hear your thoughts.