A Story About Disqualifying Bad Prospects

If you’ve seen the movie Sideways, about two middle-aged guys who take a week long road trip through California’s wine country, (and you like wine) it probably inspired you to take a trip to become a wine connoisseur and take a similar pilgrimage.  And if you looked at the movie from a businessperson’s perspective, you might have thought it was a great bit of free marketing and great exposure for the vintners.

I was talking to someone recently about the “Sideways Effect”.  When he visited wine country, he asked some workers in a few of the wineries if the movie really helped their business.  To a person, they hated the effect that the movie had.  Their business is focused on catering to a discriminating clientele but what happened is that they started getting a tourist crowd.  Big tour buses would pull up of uneducated wine drinkers who just wanted to experience wine country and not buy anything. 

They spent so much time with these customers and got no return for it since these were not the customers who might buy a case or two of good reserve wine.  In fact, one owner of a smaller winery said that on one occasion when they saw several tour buses pulling into the parking lot, they literally locked the doors, turned out the lights, and snuck out the back door.  They would rather shut down their business than waste their time dealing with these prospective clients.

Finding Good Prospects - Disqualifying Bad Prospects

I loved that story and could totally relate because they were just being Lazy Business Owners.  Being a Lazy Business Owners isn’t about getting rich quick with no effort.  It’s about spending your time where it is most valuable and not wasting it chasing “scraps”.  Focus energy on the efforts that bring the greatest return.

In the past, I wrote that all publicity is good publicity and I still stand by that, even in a case like this.  A Lazy Business Owner needs to be able to “disqualify” those potential clients that would just be wasting both of their times - the “Sideways Effect” customers.  This doesn’t necessarily mean being rude to these potential clients but be up-front with them on what you are offering.  Here are some ways that you can find the good clients and disqualify the bad clients:

• Set Higher Prices - If you don’t want to be working with clients that don’t provide a good enough return, raise your prices.  There is absolutely nothing wrong with this.  In fact, if you can charge higher prices and have less customers, I strongly encourage it.
• Be Up-Front About Your Prices - Let the prospect now very early in the process what your prices are.  They might not have any idea and you could be saving both your time and theirs if you let them know that they will be paying a lot for your services
• Don’t Give Away Samples - This is the problem that the “Sideways Effect” businesses had.  Samples are a key to their business (and it’s really just an example of the Ascension Model) but it is very hard to discriminate against the tour bus crowd.  If you give away free consultations or assessments, maybe you need to charge a token price to eliminate the tire-kickers.

However you manage to filter out the bad clients, make sure it takes up the least amount of effort possible.  We have never ran into too many problems with providing free assessments of our clients’ online marketing efforts, but we have considered on multiple occasions if we want to start charging a consulting fee.  If we get too overloaded with assessments or start getting too many of the “Sideways Effect” prospects, we will institute this procedure.

Having too many prospects is not a bad problem to have.  However, it can seriously drain your business if you don’t know how to handle it.  Just make sure you have a backdoor set up so you can flee out the back door when the tour buses start showing up at your front door.