Did this ONE question cost me an $84,000/year client?

I just got off a sales call with a new client that's worth potentially $84,000 a year to my firm, and I'm pretty sure I blew the opportunity. On the last question in the last minute of the sales call today, I'm going to walk you through exactly what happened on that sales call. I'm going to tell you the question that they asked, and I'm going to tell you why I gave them the answer that I did and why I would do it again so that you know how to handle these situations when they come up on your sales calls. Let's. Hey there. My name is Michael King. Welcome back to the Connected Accountant, where I talk about starting, scaling and optimizing fractional CFO firms. Like I said during the intro, I just got off a sales call with an amazing potential client. They reached out to me a few days ago through my website and applied to work with us. Now, this is kind of an ideal client for us. They're in the high seven figures in revenue. They're definitely going to be scaling into the eight figure range next year. It's an online business that offers like consulting, course creation, those kind of things. That's my sweet spot. I know all about that industry. The owners seem really energized. They're very engaged. They're asking a lot of great questions. So we get onto the sales call and everything's going great. I asked them some great questions. They're giving me some really meaningful answers. They're telling me about some of the challenges they have and why they need a fractional cfo. Everything's going great. I walk into the services that I offer, I walk into my pricing. There's no objections on pricing. Everything's going in the right direction. The energy is at like a 9.8 out of 10. And then they drop one question on me at the very end of the call, one of the ladies on the call says, hey, one of the things that we need help with is we're moving a lot of our 1099 subcontractors over to W2 employees. We really need some help figuring out how much we should compensate them as employees. Can you help? And I took a pause, thought about it for a second, and I said, hey, I just want to make sure I'm really clear on this. You've got maybe somebody named Susie that's doing some work for you. Now, as a 1099, you want her to become a W2 employee and you want to compensate her really well. You want my firm to help you figure out Based on her role, her experience, the value that she brings to the company, how much you should pay her as an employee. Is that accurate? And she's like, yes, that's exactly it. That's exactly what I'm looking for. And I said, unfortunately, I can't help you with that. Reason for that is because we don't have the experience or competency to really do a great job figuring out employee compensation. In fact, determining compensation packages is an entire skill in and of itself. And nobody on my team has that experience. In fact, there's people that. That's like all they do for a living. But what we can do is we can help you think through based on some of the cash flow goals that you have, based on some of the Prof. Ability goals that you have that are tied to some of those strategic objectives that we talked about earlier. We can help you figure out how much you can afford to pay in payroll expenses under SG&A. We can help you understand what the total labor burden is based on payroll taxes, 401k contributions, health care. We can help you think through all of those things. But what we can't do is help you determine how much you should pay Susie based on her experience, based on the value she adds to the company. That's just not something we can help with. So while it was hard to say that, it was actually an easy no for me. And the reason that it's an easy no for for me is because anytime somebody asks us to do something outside of our very tight scope of work, I kind of look through three different lenses to determine if I should say yes to that work or not. The first lens that I look through is experience. Do we have experience delivering that type of service? Do we have the background to be able to do it well? And in the case of compensation packages, we don't. Nobody on my team does that. The second lens that I look through is competency. Is it something that we're really good at? Is it something where I know that if we engage in that, we can deliver at a high level of excellence that I demand out of everything we do in my firm? Obviously, in this case, because we lack the experience, we're also lacking the competency. We don't have any education or training, any kind of experience or competency doing anything around compensation packages. The third lens that I look through is interest. Is this the kind of work we're even interested in helping with? And honestly, in this particular case, we would love to be able to help with compensation packages, but that's just not something we do. And honestly, we don't have the time or the bandwidth to invest in the training that we need to be able to do a great job with that. So while we definitely wanted to help them, we just don't have the experience or the competency to be able to do it at a high level. And so despite the fact that I really wanted to land this client and make it an easy yes for them, I had to be really honest with them and say no. That's not something we can help with. Now I do want to point out one really critical thing. Notice that when they asked if I could help, I didn't just say no and move on. What I did is I said no. Then I explained why it was that we can't help. And if you don't remember, rewind, go back to earlier in this episode and see. But I explained to them why we wouldn't be able to help. And then this is where so many people drop off. Then I explained how we could get involved in the process. I explained what we could do to help along with that, even though it wasn't exactly the thing we were asking for. So in this case, I said, hey, we can help you figure out total labor burden, you know, the all in cost of turning them into a W2 after considering payroll taxes and all the other perks that you might be offering. I talked about how we could help them develop some guardrails that would make sure that those W2 compensations still enabled them to hit the net profitability goals and the cash flow goals that they needed to have so that they could hit some of their strategic objectives. So it was the firm, no, the reason why, and then how we could get involved in that process. And I think those are three really important components so that you don't just kind of leave them feeling like you're leaving them in a lurch and that you just don't want to deal with it. When you get asked for help outside of your scope of work, I really want to encourage you. Ask yourself, do you have the interest, the competency, and the background? If you'd like more insight on exactly how I handle sales calls, I'd like to encourage you to check out my brand new free free training. I just launched it. I walk through the eight step process that I use to handle sales calls every single day. This is the same process, the same framework that I use to take my prices from $500 a month to over $5,000 a month. This is the same framework that I've taught to literally hundreds of people inside my paid community that they've been able to use to raise their prices by thousands of dollars a month as well. If you're ready to get another level of confidence on your sales call, then go to CFO salesframework.com again. It's a free training. I teach you for 60 minutes exactly how I handle sales calls. I give you all the insider tips and tricks on how to really show up for confidence, how to give yourself a performance edge. On those sales calls, once again, go to CFO salesframework.com register for free. In the meantime, I can't wait to see you right back next week right here on the Connected Accountant. See you then.