#298: Two Important Clues of a Good Opportunity

Welcome to the High Income Business Writing Podcast, helping you propel your writing business to a whole new level. And now, here's your host, Ed Gandia. Hey there. Welcome to another episode of the High Income Business Writing Podcast, the number one podcast for business writers and copywriters who want to earn more and less time doing work they love for better clients. With over 1 million downloads from listeners just like you across 101 countries, this episode is much shorter than usual. Rather than my typical 45 minute format. Today I'm sharing a quick tip with you. This is part of the audio insights I publish for my private coaching clients every weekday and I thought you'd find it helpful. So here we go. Hope you enjoy it. Very often we'll come across an opportunity that sounds really good on the surface, typically because the work maybe sounds exciting, or maybe the client sounds like someone who'd be great to work with. Maybe they're a big brand or a very well known player in their target market. But the problem is that this excitement we feel tends to cloud our judgment. And we start the process by asking ourselves the wrong question, which is typically, how can I win this deal? Instead of the right question, the better question, which is, is this a deal that makes sense to pursue? Is this a winnable opportunity? Over the years, I've learned the hard way to approach every opportunity with that kind of thinking, is this a deal that makes sense to pursue? So rather than let the excitement cloud my judgment, I approach it with a default level of skepticism and then I let the prospect give me reasons why I should pursue them. Now, bear with me, because I know that sounds a bit could come across a bit arrogant, but it's not at all. And today I'd like to share the two factors I look for. The first factor is how the prospect learned about me and why they decided to reach out to me. Now this is very telling because it just shows me how they're approaching their search. So if how they learned about me was something like a Google search, at least from my business, and I suspect that it's probably the same for you, I found that this is nowhere near as strong as it would be if they were referred to me by a current or past client, for example, just to give you kind of the opposite extreme situation. So I take note of how they approach the search because it tells me a lot about the prospect and their thinking. It's the same thing with how they decided or why they decided to reach out, which is actually a very different question. So I'm basically trying to figure out, okay, what caught their eye in, let's say my LinkedIn profile or my website. Because I really want to know. The more specific they are about this, the better a prospect they are. The more generic or clueless they sound, the lower the probability. This is a good opportunity for me. So somebody who's telling me, well, I saw this about your background and this about your experience and I read a couple of these samples and this is what I like. That is a very different prospect. Who said, well, I don't know, I just did a Google search for technology copywriter and you came up, okay, so anyway, that's the first factor. How they found out about me and what caused them to take the time to reach out to me. Specifically. The second factor is the hoops the prospect expects me to jump through. Someone who gets right to questions about hourly rates. What do I charge by the hour? Or maybe they want to set up a long meeting to discuss their entire company's history and then pick my brain for ideas. Or they want me to respond to a formal request for a proposal and that doesn't happen often, but it has happened. Or maybe they want me to send them a resume or something unusual like this. That is not a good prospect. Good prospects find someone they like. They know why they like that professional and why they took the time to reach out and they openly share their challenges and objectives with that professional. Good prospects treat the creative professional as just that, a professional. A peer. Not a vendor, not a worker, not someone they get to order around. So I look for prospects who seem to have enough trust in me by the time we get to this conversation that they're willing to open up a bit about their problems and goals and we can have a grown up conversation that will be productive even if at the end we end up not working together. Well, that's it for today. I hope you enjoyed the episode. And just a quick reminder to grab your free copy of my latest book, Earn More in Less Time. The Proven Mindset, Strategies and Actions to Prosper as a Freelance writer. You can get your free copy@b2b launcher.com or you will also find the detailed show notes to this and all my other episodes. Enjoy and have a great day. Sam.