Sabri Suby explains when to walk away from a lead or client. Force a clear yes or no during follow-up instead of staying in maybe territory. Red flags in paying clients: they blame past vendors, won't take accountability, jump between courses and agencies, or don't execute consistently. Protect your business by declining the wrong fit.
Hey, guys. This week on HeySubree, I'm going to be answering Nguyen Thanh's question. Sorry, that butchered your name, homeboy. So you've written, hey, Sabri. We hear a lot about ways to handle objections. What are the signs that we should stop pursuing that lead or not taking them on, even if they throw money at us? Amazing content. I watch every single one of your videos. No problems. Thank you. So, first of all, there's two parts to this question, so I'm going to dissect it and answer it as such. The first thing is you've written here, how do I know when I should stop pursuing a lead, right. Or not taking them on, even if they're throwing money at us, Right? So there's one side, which is how do I know to stop following up on a lead whether or not they're just wasting my time and my spinning my wheels on it? And that just comes down to your ability to get into what I call the uncomfortable zone on a phone call and just letting them know, like, hey, I'm a grown man. I'm a grown woman. I can take a no as easy as I can take a yes. I don't want to keep following up on you. This is not a serious problem for you to solve. Right? When we initially spoke, you told me that you were experiencing insert XYZ problem and that you wanted to get to XYZ outcome and desired end state. Right? Is this still the case for you? Are you still serious about solving this problem? Right. And then if you get a yes there, then you continue. If they say no, then don't waste your time in pursuing them anymore. Right? Because if they can't say a resounding yes to them wanting to solve this problem and get to a more favorable outcome, you are going to have a very hard time, if not impossible time, to get them to commit to actually putting some financial resources at risk to solve that problem if they don't have a burning desire to solve that. Right? So that's the first part. You want to be friendly, but you want to be frank and straight to the point and let them know that you're going to continue to follow up, follow forever until you get to an answer. Either it's a yes or it's a no. Either or is fine with you, but you just won't remain in this maybe land for any longer. Cool. So then the next part is, you know, how do you know if you should keep on pursuing them if they're not the right fit, but they're still throwing money at you. So you want to look for what those red flags are in the sales cycle, right? How? Like if they're working with another provider or a vendor or an agency, how do they speak about that agency? If you're selling courses and they've done, there are multiple, they've got a course addiction and they've bought all these courses, how do those speak about those courses? Do they take any accountability for not being where they, where they want to be right now and hence why they're looking to invest in another course? Or are they just saying that the courses were shit, the vendor was shit, the agency was shit, and these guys were nightmares and they didn't know what they were doing. If they've been with two or three other companies before or they've gone to two or three other courses and they're not where they are, the chances are that it's not the vendor and it's not the course, it's the client and it's their expectations of what success looks like. So throughout your sales cycle, whatever it is that you happen to be selling, you want to get really crystal clear on where it is that they're trying to go. What have they done to try and get there in the past? And why do they believe that all of those things fell short from them being able to get to where it is that they want to go? And you want to pay very close attention to the language that they use, how much accountability that they take on? Right. Are they completely passing the blame on to everything outside of themselves and some external resource and a claim of a lack of resources when we all know that just a lack of actually being resourceful. And then if you're getting those red flags is just to double click and expand and go through those rabbit holes with them and saying like, hey, well, like when you ran ads with this agency, when you hired this personal trainer, when you did xyz, did you do what they told you to do? Yeah, I did. What did that look like? Right. Tell me a little bit more about that. Can you expand on that for me? And really starting to understand. And if there's somebody that does have those red flags, like look at any of the clients that you've sold in the past that have become a frickin nightmare and you've had to fire, Right? What are the tendencies, what are the, what were those signs of smoke on those onboarding calls or throughout the sales cycle that appeared that you can go back to in hindsight and go, I should have known because they did this on the first call or when I onboarded them, they got all buck wild, right? And I kind of just try to silence that because the money was coming. And be honest with yourself and identify some mental models and some heuristics in your sales cycle and your decision making to identify those people that are going to be nightmare clients. And just when you find out those red flags, pay attention to them, don't ignore them because it will be at your own peril and you go, cool. Look, just to be respectful, based on everything you told me, I just don't think that we're going to be a great fit for you right now. But I really do wish you all the best. If anything changes in your situation, please do let me know. But other than that, I hope that you get what it is that you want and then bon voyage and you send them on their way. It's one of those things where the short term benefit of you wanting to get that cash of coming in, just trust me, just ignore that because it's going to come back, bite you on the ass. It's going to make your life so much less enjoyable and you'd rather just focus on the clients that you can get great results for that you're going to have a great relationship, they're going to respect you, you can respect them and it will be long and prosperous into the future. Your lifetime of a value custom lifetime value of a customer will thank you because of that. Your team member will thank you and your whole wellbeing and stress levels will thank you as well. So I hope this serves you for wherever you are on your journey. Hey guys, if you're enjoying these videos, please like subscribe and hit the bell button as we're dropping a video like this every other day on YouTube. And if you've got any questions, just leave a comment below with heysubree and I will do my best to get to it.
