When companies engage you with tons of questions regarding their marketing without a signed contract, beware. There are many brands out there that continually reach out to others looking for free advice. This should definitely be a red flag for you and your team. The truth is, free advice is never actually free.
Think about the true cost behind giving someone your time. When you put value on what you do, you begin to realize how crucial your time really is.
Free advice always comes with a cost. Whether it’s your time or value, giving away knowledge without a price attached is risky and frankly unnecessary.
[Transcript]
Hey everybody, welcome to another bonus episode of the new Marketing Show. catch us on Instagram, TV, YouTube, our website, wherever you’re getting us. Thank you, we definitely appreciate you. So, today we want to talk about free advice picking your brain. And hey, will you show us a strategy before we go ahead and engage working with your company, your brand, you know, this is one of the most frustrating things when it comes to, you know, our business as marketers, our businesses, web developers. And the light is when somebody will call you or email us, like, here’s my website, tell me everything that you think about it, and what you would do to make it better.
You know, there’s a balance there where you have to tell people like yes, we do have some ideas, how to make things better, how to increase conversion, how to move you towards your goals. But there’s also another thing where people are looking for free advice always from professionals.
And it’s one of those balances like how do Do it and get busy and win business and to keep your company moving on your brand new before and also how do you do it to show the customer the client that you’re willing to play ball and you do have some new ideas for the table. So the one thing that I hate and I got this from my buddy Chuck Reynolds is people saying hey, can I buy you lunch? Can I pick your brain?
Can you give me some advice about this varies very rarely will I engage anybody, the typically the people that I do engage and I do help on that level are people who have helped me in the past or people who really really need to help or people who I think that can contribute something to the greater good not just taking, you know, they have something also to offer and when I say offer not necessarily me, but the industry, their clients, etc, etc. So that’s one thing.
The one thing that I never do is when somebody says I’d love to buy you a cup of coffee and pick your brain about this, this and this My answer is always No. cup of coffee is how much? Five bucks, maybe eight. If you go to blue bottle, an hour, my time is how much way more than that.
So you gotta balance the two. And you really, really put things into perspective. You know, this morning I received an email, or somebody management team wants us to come to them and propose all of our ideas to make your existing site better. When yesterday we had a great meeting about a rebuild and doing wireframe.
So, I’m in the middle here, where I’m going to politely answer saying, we do have a lot of ideas, you know, we will bring those to the table. If you’d like to engage us to do an audit of what you have for us and dive in deeper, we definitely will do so. If you would like to engage us to go through a whole you know, deep dive and discovery phase, no problem. But the thing is, is like you know, in order to give to do work, to win work does not make sense. The quickest way to go out of business is by not charging for what you do.
And my great friend and mentor Francine Hardaway always said the things that you need to do is know your value. understand and be comfortable with your value and charge accordingly. To me free is not charging accordingly. Hey, thanks for checking us out.
For more episodes and topics like this catch us on a New Marketing Show at trinitywebmedia.com/Apple-podcasts and or wherever you do podcasts. We listen to cereal or Joe Rogan or any of those things, just type the New Marketing Show in the search bar. You’re going to find it. So hey, thanks for watching.
I have hired Greg and the Trinity team multiple times for work on my own websites, and have also hired them to work on behalf of multiple clients. He is simply a pleasure to work with, in every respect. Smart but without the giant ego of some developers, Trinity Web Media works with his clients to achieve their vision in the best way possible — with careful attention to their interests, and thoughtful recommendations based on his expertise. • Susan Baier – Founding Marketing Strategist – Audience Audit