Giving your ideas away
What if —instead of overservicing and overdelivering— you’d give your ideas for free? What if you open your methodologies? Your approaches? The way you see a particular problem and how you’d fix it? What would your answer to that be? 🙂
Aggressive. Interrupting. Annoying.
You get bombed by the same kind of ads from this one company. So much so that you see them here, there and everywhere. Aggressive. Interrupting. Annoying. Have you ever bumped into this kind of campaigns? When talking with a friend about workshops and was asked about a well-known guy, here was my reaction: “I fucking hate this guy” This guttural, from the deep-core-in-my-body reaction came out so quickly I didn’t even had time to react and think of the next things. The reason behind it? The…
Selling a personal brand
You can’t have a personal brand. A brand is an asset —a quantifiable one for a business. With that, you can value it and sell it for whatever you want. A brand can change hands and —at least for a moment— keep that same value. As well as it could go up (a VC-funded startup grows its value, as Figma) or absolutely way down (x/twitter). If you were to have a personal brand (aka “become” a brand), you’d turn into an asset. An asset, as a resource or capital… is a thing. If you were to sell…
Behind the math
If you see a bit further than underpromising, overdelivering, overservicing, you’ll find that most of it is linked with one question: “Will they accept my proposal?” When people don’t understand what they’re getting, the only thing they’ll get back to (and do understand) is price. So your default to answer this questions revolves around, yup: price. In this context, it’s (hopefully) a set price (and not an estimate/rate) and about how (if) delight could happen —only after the acceptance of…
The math in overservicing
Today, it’s about how overservicing can also hurt you. In Paul’s head, overservicing will delight his customer, Marie. It’ll get Marie to always work with him. Unfortunately, what’s actually happening is that Paul’s training Marie to expect way more than what they pay for —at Paul’s own expense. → The promise Paul makes: X → But Paul also works extra on things that are nice-to-haves to Marie, or are out of scope —without previously thinking and/or budgeting for them.The promise to Marie: XThe…
The math behind overdelivering
Here’s why overdelivering hurts your business. In a math edition. Paul is about to work on a project for Marie. In Paul’s head, underpromising and overdelivering will make a sweet deal in Marie’s eyes to: Close the sale Build a good reputation The opportunity to raise prices next time. [Because great work, right?] It’s the perfect formula… to unprofitability. → The promise in Paul’s head: X BUT → The promise in Paul’s mouth: Y → Paul tells Marie he’ll deliver Y, which is “10” less of what…
Another day in paradise
3 chords. No effort. Just a warm up. A world, epic riff that makes it stand out and recognizable all over the world (and time). That’s how this song was made. However, Dominic Miller’s first intention was to make it about the song and himself until he heard: – “That’s the riff!” – “Wait. Hang on a minute, mate. I’m gonna do something really epic that’s gonna show not only great your song is, but how great i am” (I’m just warming up!) When he understood it was not about him or about how epic…
That dark place of doubting yourself
Writing a proposal and sending it with 3 options. Commenting on it with friends and getting back “But this is not how things usually work here. You need to give a (daily/hourly) rate.” It makes you think if you approached it right. If the price was too high. If you need to show more value. If you need to prove it. if you need to keep giving freebies (and free advice). If the prospect will walk away because you’re too expensive. If —maybe— you thought too high of yourself and shot too high….
Prep the room
So, you’ve got a gig, quickly got to see the patterns that are holding your clients back and you are ready to move on. You make things happen. You know what to change, how to pivot the approach, how to implement actions, put a plan in motion and so on. You make shit happen. And you hit resistance. Intellectually, your client is following your arguments and understands them. In principle, it’s only logical to implement your advice IF they want to get to the results they want. But they don’t…
It’s some kind of emo thing
That was Chad Smith, drummer of Red Hot Chili Peppers, after hearing (and playing) “The Kill” by 30 Seconds To Mars in one take —listening to it for the very first time. If you like music, you might enjoy this vid (if you haven’t already seen it bc it’s gone crazy viral). [My recommendation: If you’ve never heard the song before, check it out here.(3:51) Short version of the jam (3:46) here Long version (8:45) here ] Chad’s level of expertise is such that he goes into an unknown situation and…
