In your business, how do you handle the sales and price and T&C parts of the sales?

Specifically, when clients try to haggle, or try to make you play by their rules - what do you do?

It’s very common to then start to appease the buyer - and it's a grave mistake.

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When you start to reduce your price, or you agree tot terms you’re not happy with, you’re setting up for an experience that will disappoint your buyer and you as well.
In fact, the more you let go of your own rules, the lower level of customer satisfaction, no matter how good of a job you do.

Saw this tweet the other day:
“Just said goodbye to a potential client because they wanted me to go against everything I've learned and start work without a deposit payment.

"But we're BIG and you're small. You can be flexible."

"No. It's because I'm small that I can't be."
Now this is a correct and true response - but it’s also the wrong one.

Because how big a client is doesn’t have to affect your terms and conditions, and shouldn’t.

Because with that reply, the client heard ‘you’re right, you’re bigger and therefore dominant.
In other words, the client shows up with a big social ‘frame’, and says:

‘And you are small, so you do what we say’.

If you then agree with the first part of the statement, nothing you’ll say afterwards will change things for the better.

It’s a lost case.
But if you’d ‘break their frame’, and show your own, bigger, authority frame (which is rightfully yours, as the business owner), you might have a chance.

So a good and useful reply would be:

[...]“Size doesn’t matter.
"You are asking me to sell you this work, which means I also need to tell you my terms and conditions - which I've just done".

With two sentences, you can turn the tables, and position yourself back where you belong, meaning:

The owner and protector of the buying process.
As the business owner, state your terms and conditions, that a client may refuse or reject - and which they certainly may complain about if they want, but which is your prerogative, and duty, to protect.
I know it’s cool and scary and exciting when a big company wants to buy your work.

But don’t be intimidated, and never let them bully you just because they’re bigger.

You run the business, you get to define your terms and conditions.
You get to decide whether or not business is 'your way, or no way'.

This element of social frames is a big part of the ethical selling framework I'm teaching this Friday.

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The emergence of many new hypocrisies typically heralds an emerging new cultural synthesis.

Are you disturbed that you agree with one of those viewpoints? Or perhaps that other people you respect do?

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Let me offer a framework for thinking about things like this, something called an “Omega Event.”

It was first described to me by Erik Martin, one of Reddit's first community managers:

In governance, Omega Events exist due to the fact that no system of beliefs, no worldview, no set of rules, can account for everything that will ever happen.

Eventually someone (or some group) will do something that lies outside the scope of all existing rules, and you will have to make decisions again from first principles.

Sometimes the Omega Event emerges from the confluence of many unrelated factors. When it does, it is wholly different from anything you’ve encountered.
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I get DM's from founders with the same specific problems.

Here's a public list of marketing tools I recommend:



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H/T @Julian for this

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