By Alan Weiss, PhD, CPAE, CSP, CMC and Patricia Fripp’s partner in The Odd Couple Marketing Seminar for Speakers & Consultants

I’m constantly surprised at the amount of mail and calls I receive asking advice on how to deal with clients who constantly want to bargain. I’m surprised because many consultants apparently don’t understand that once you make a single concession on price, you’ve enabled a behavior which will inevitably cost you money and probably drive you crazy. Requests for price concessions generally emanate from the owners of small companies who are accustomed to haggling with everyone from the coffee vendor to the hourly employees (and who, themselves, are constantly asked to lower price from their customers); and from larger company purchasing departments and low-level feasibility buyers, who see their way to fame and fortune and cutting back on the fame and fortune of suppliers.

There are several keys here:

1. Never offer a (more…)

Posted With Permission from Jeff Magee

1. “Thank You” for personally investing your time and affording me the privilege to share with you some of our ideas and skill technologies for increased productivity and profitability in the business place!

2. By way of saying “Thank You” here are some ideas I have crafted as a professional courtesy for your consideration. Take a moment and insure what we developed together keeps you moving forward … please consider:

3. CONSIDER THESE IDEAS:
(ONE) Take your Personal DayPlanner Instrument (PDA/Franklin Planner/Desk Calendar/Etc.) and log a note in your system on any arbitrary date once a week for the next six consecutive weeks to review the notes you took during our time together. Then DO IT and see if there are any notations that you have implemented or need to be implementing;

(TWO) Make a regular part of your daily Self Affirmations, that of referencing one of the personal or professional KEEPER IDEAS from your notes and written on the wallet business card;

(THREE) Make it a regular part of your daily or weekly business meeting AGENDAS to review one action item from your notes for implementation and/or review of outcome of anything implemented for lesson’s learned and greater enhancement of continued application;

(FOUR) Write a LETTER TO YOURSELF and do the same drill with your colleagues in attendance if appropriate, detailing that item of greatest relevance and how you plan to implement it within the next 30 days….then address that letter to yourself, and mail it to yourself one week from now…when it arrives hold yourself accountable!;

(FIVE) Make and post a Poster of the Single Greatest Take-Away from our time together that you want to make an auto-pilot behavior and post it where you can see and others will ask you what it means;

(SIX) Make it a to-do to pull off your self development shelf at least three Other Books with parallel ideas to what we experienced together, and then make it a commitment to skim back through those over the next week and re-expose yourself to the notes you have within them to further push the application of this new learning;

(SEVEN) If you attended this MAGEE Performance Program with colleagues, make it a 360 Degree Accountability Play that you each identify the action items that can have the greatest positive impact on your business and allow one another to push each other to execute that act … and have each in future meetings share success stories of action items applied in the previous work week;

(EIGHT) Make it a Date On Your calendar, just as any special occasion or critical must attend meeting, to make soft skill educational development a one day a month minimum engagement for yourself – and others. TRAINING magazine reports that those people that participate in regular soft skill training earn nearly 25 percent more than their peers throughout their career … raise your stock value to your organization and thus your organizations stock value with value added abilities!;

(NINE) Make An Immediate Top-Ten-List of Action Items You Are Willing To Commit To And Implement Tomorrow…write those down NOW on your calendar onto the specific date(s) on your calendar with what you are going to do from the program with MAGEE. Also write specific action items that you need to task others with from the MAGEE program … it is from successful implementation that you will increase your take-away value and increase your desire to make the new acts common behavior in your life!;

(TEN) If appropriate, benchmark your daily efforts off of the CSP Application model …;

(ELEVEN) If you don’t presently Subscribe To A Content Rich Weekly eZine (email article, newsletter) on self improvement or leadership, do so … then perform the same drill with that weekly content information as detailed above in action items one-through ten…also, share liberally with all stake holders within your circle of influence;

(TWELVE) Turbo-charge your daily efforts by posting a visual of the Sales Funnel and track your marketing efforts weekly with a Quadrant Manager Marketing matrix to ensure you consistently and constantly feed into your funnel high impact leads … then track monthly your leads through the funnel;

(THIRTEEN) It is time to start planting seeds that you can gain positive results from … to do this work through the Target Rich Environment (TRE) exercise we developed in our Program and create a minimum of 50 leads in your Primary Markets, and do the same drill for Secondary and Tertiary Markets, and for your COIs … Remember to deploy Rule 1-12-50 as you engage your market and groups to attain greater yield;

Best wishes and THANK YOU for what you do!!!

Dr. Jeffrey L. Magee, PDM, CSP, CMC
Founder/JEFF MAGEE INTERNATIONAL – Publisher/PERFORMANCE Magazine
www.JeffreyMagee.com and www.ThePerformanceMagazine.com or Toll free 1-877-90-MAGEE
MANAGERIAL-LEADERSHIP & SALES TRAINING WITHOUT LIMITS!

* Check out our newest books and audio releases at,  www.JeffreyMagee.com/library.asp! And for a weekly skill tune-up, read our syndicated leadership column in your local Business newspaper or subscribe for the eVersion in your email box every Thursday at www.JeffreyMagee.com!

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