Peter Winick explains why thought leaders lose deals after initial excitement: the prospect never actually prioritizes the work. Ask potential clients upfront, "How will you make this a top priority?" to surface competing initiatives and gauge real commitment before you waste time.
Hi there, it's Peter Winick. I'm the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage. And today I wanted to share with you a fairly common struggle that I witness many, many authors, speakers, thought leaders, and such struggling from. And that is this: they work with a client, maybe it's delivering a keynote in person or virtually, having that client pick up their book, whatever the case may be. And someone inside the client organization is really, really excited. I mean, they're like a superfan. They love what you have to say. They love the way that you say it, your models, your frameworks, your methodologies, etc. You start engaging in conversations around how to bring your work inside that organization at a bigger level, maybe starting with a pilot, but the objective is clearly to immerse subsets of that organization into your, into your work, right? So this is a great opportunity. However, it tends to sort of fizzle out, right? There's lots and lots of conversations. There's interest, then there's ghosting, then there's interest, then there's quiet. And I think that one of the things I've learned over the years is if you have an opportunity, or should I say, you need to make the opportunity to say to that potential client, how are you going to make this a top priority in your organization? And what I mean by that is I'm sure we have competing initiatives and objectives going on for money, for time, for bandwidth, for space, et cetera. What do you have in place in order to make this, this thing that we're talking about, this thing that you're excited about, a top priority in your organization so that we can move forward collectively? And I think it's okay to put that welcome hurdle, that burden, if you will, back on the client or the prospect before diving in really deeply, because it's a lot of work and energy and effort. to nurture something that's gonna lead to a no, and I'd rather get to a no early and quickly if that individual on the other side of the table doesn't have the ability or the wherewithal or whatever the case may be to make it a top priority. So I think it's a good question to throw out there, and I'd love to hear how some of you have experimented with variations on that theme. Thank you so much. Thank you.
