11 Words That Eliminate Competition and Increase Budget

True story....

My client, a solo marketing agency owner asks me to help with a prospect.

The prospect has a Wordpress guy, an SEO guy, a $1000 retainer agreement with an agency that he's displeased with that ended today, and a business that was $400K but is now $200K. He's looking for my client to be a webmaster type that can execute the prospect's latest ideas.

I suggested that my client send the following email.

Thanks for trying to keep us in the game, but the world has changed and is changing more and faster every day and I have changed with it and will continue to change to keep ahead of the pack. Respectfully, I appreciate the kind thoughts that your friend has for me, but she continues to refer to me as her "webmaster", but that's a tiny part of what I've done. Additionally, you appear to prefer to hire people to execute tasks at your direction rather than look for one person to handle your entire web presence. Google changes their algorithm too often for the pros to stay ahead of them, let alone mere mortals. There's a lot more to life than Google rank. SEO/SEM, lead gen, views, unique visitors, conversion, yada, yada, yada is all irrelevant they aren't driven by revenues and profit. So, if you're looking for someone to execute tasks at your direction, I suggest that you go with what you have, but if you want to talk about revenue growth, profits and results that matter, I'm available. Schedule a call. Regardless of which direction you go, thank you for your consideration.

The prospect replied:

I understood that (marketing/SEO...),  the first time.  So that we're on the same page, I seem to be dealing with two issues here, there's some overlap, but I appreciate the differences.    1.  "Fixing things", (what you call "at my direction" such as getting two new blogs running, making several other none SEO specific tasks, some minor fixes, or things that improve the inherent design from a navigation standpoint.   Google/SEO, etc. notwithstanding, I have no suitable place to put general information "news" on (one service offering).  On the (other service offering) side, I have my blog, but none on that side.    The former is the area I'm expanding into but the setup on the current site is more blog oriented than suitable for proper reviews, and content management.   So, the point is, I do need some specific work done - to make the site suitable so I can actually publish some of the things I want to, in an intelligent way.     2.  Growing the site, revenues, and profits, via SEO, marketing, partnerships, opportunities. Yes, I understand that #2 is where you live!   The longer range stuff is in your area.  That's more big picture, and where I don't want to be micromanaging.   Through most of my online time with this and my previous company, I have tried to hire good people, or good companies, to run such things, so I can focus on the core parts of the business.   So let's figure out what that looks like - direction, cost, timelines   It sounds like the local guy I'm talking to may be the one to do some basic stuff - he wants to set up multi-site and add MaxCDN, (maxcdn to help with the site's speed issues) and get my "new" blogs working...   Since you said, you would have to bring in web / WP specialists to tackle that, it seems that if I can get the "local guy" to start asap, we can make some quick progress there, while you and I are focusing on making the site highly profitable again.     So, yes, let's talk asap.  I'll be talking with the "local web guy" later this afternoon.   Would you rather we chat before or after that?   thanks

I told my client to reply with:

What's it worth if I could get you back to $400k?

The prospect replied:

Now we're "talking".   God I love talking to business people rather than technical web people!

The result? A $60-100K retainer agreement.

I love it when my client's prospects help me coach! Wanna talk?

Click to schedule YOUR call with Rick!


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