Ditching Hourly

Hello and welcome to Ditching Hourly. I'm Jonathan Stark. Today I've got an audio excerpt from an answer I provided on my YouTube channel. You can check it out at thejonathanstarkshow.com and it'll redirect you to YouTube if you're into watching videos. Otherwise, you can just listen to the audio here on the podcast. Enjoy. Hey, Jonathan here. I got a question from Squajum who asks, what do you do when you can't get a decent understanding of what a prospect's ideal outcome on a first call with them? I just had a weird initial consult with a very large nonprofit who showed up with 12 people on the call. I was only expecting one and I simply couldn't get simple answers from them as everyone kept jumping in with their thoughts and confused things. Got out of hand real fast. All right, definitely been there. The first thing to think, I'm just going to say right out, if you can't get an idea of the desired outcome and it's just chaos in that meeting and you get to the end and you hang up and you're like, I don't know what just happened there. I don't know what they want. There are a bunch of people in the room who appear to have competing goals. If I actually did all of the things they say, I'm pretty sure they wouldn't work because they're mutually exclusive. If you're in a situation like that, you can't write a proposal. It doesn't make any sense. It's just a bad sign. It's going to end in tears. I would really recommend against it. If you really can't get that desired outcome or even some kind of clarity about what direction they're going in, then I wouldn't write a proposal. You could perhaps follow up with them and say, thanks for your time, but I just don't see how to help you guys. There's too much going on. It seems really disorganized. If you'd like to have another phone call, maybe with a smaller group of decision makers, then let's make that happen because I think there might be a good fit here, but I can't get any clarity on what you're trying to achieve. If you get to the end of that phone call, maybe you can recover by having a new phone call and saying that you're not going to present a proposal until you get some clarity. Let's say you're in this situation again and you're in the room with the group. The thing you need to do is figure out who the highest ranking person is there. At some point in the chaos, since no one else is taking control of the meeting, you need to take control of the meeting. At some point where you feel like it's appropriate or there's a pause or you're coming to a dead end, just say, thank everyone for their input. You've probably been taking notes like crazy. You can say, I've got like 10 pages of notes here. This is very helpful. I need to get a sense of the context that this work would be taking place in. Could we just step back and could someone share with me the overall strategy for this year, for the organization for this year or for this quarter or for 2019, whatever it is. You want to ask for an overarching, long-term, probably annual or perhaps even more longer than annual strategy. Whoever can give me a sense of what the strategy is through 2020. The person who answers that is almost certainly going to be the highest ranking person. If the founder is sitting there or the CEO or the president or the chairman of the board, someone like that is going to pipe up and answer that question because everyone's going to look to them. Everybody else, the people who have been the departmental people or the advisors or all these random group of people, it's not really their job to constantly be thinking of the strategy. That really is the job of the leader. Whoever's the highest ranking leader in the room, they're going to take a shot at articulating the overall strategy. Then you're going to know who you're really talking to. You're going to want to go back to your notes and say, all right, so given this strategy, how do each one of these things that you're talking about, how do you see that aligning with this strategy? Because to me, from the outside, it's not obvious. So I just love to get it in your own words and try to get that, whoever the leader is, get them connecting the dots more so than the individual sort of department people or the whoever's in the lower ranking people who are in the room. Because at the end of the day, whoever's the highest ranking person there is going to be the one who decides whether or not they're satisfied with the outcome that you deliver. So if you don't know what that is and you're just running around putting out fires as each different department leader sends you some task to do, eventually it's going to come back to the CEO or the chairman of the board or whoever it is, whoever the most, the highest ranking official is who cares about this project, they're going to look at it. And if nobody came together and got clarity and alignment and you're just running around doing as you're told, that person is not going to be happy with the outcome. We paid you all this money and this just seems like a mess.

Well, you know, garbage in, garbage out, but as the professional in this situation, whether you're creating a marketing strategy or you're designing their new website or you're building some SaaS application for them, as the professional at that thing, when you see a giant red flag, which no agreement on the desired outcome is a giant red flag, turf wars, people having competing agendas, when you see that giant red flag, stop the presses, hold the phone, everybody, I can't do this 10 different ways, who's in charge here? What are you trying to achieve? And once I'm clear on that, I can take my expertise and it'll intersect with your organizational goals and we can create something amazing. But without that, I'm just driving around with a blindfold on. So, you know, with people in the back seat all yelling different directions. So, okay, so that's probably enough on that. To summarize, figure out who the leader is in the room by asking what the strategic goals for the next year or so or longer are. And then once that person has identified themselves, ask them to map all of these sort of individual tasks back to that overall strategy. All right, I hope that helps. If you, dear viewer or dear listener, have a question, just hashtag Ask Jonathan on LinkedIn, YouTube or Twitter, and I'll get to it as soon as I can. See ya. Would you like to learn how to get paid what you're worth? How about selling your expertise and not your labor? We work through all of this together in the Pricing Seminar. Pre-registration starts soon and you can sign up to be the first to know when early bird pricing is announced at thepricingseminar.com. That URL again is thepricingseminar.com. Hope to see you there. Hey, Jonathan again. Do you have questions about how to improve your business? Things like value pricing your work instead of billing for your time or positioning yourself as the go-to person in your space or maybe productizing your services so you never have to have another awkward sales call or spend hours writing another custom proposal. Book a one-on-one coaching call with me and get answers to these questions and others in the time it takes you to get ready for work in the morning. Best of all, you're covered by my 100% satisfaction guarantee. If at the end of the call you don't feel like it was worth it, just say the word and I'll refund your purchase in full. To book your one-on-one coaching call, go to jonathanstark.com slash call C-A-L-L. That URL again is jonathanstark.com slash call. Hope to see you there.