Smart Agency Masterclass With Jason Swenk: Podcast For Digital Marketing Agencies

Why Giving Free Consultations is Actually Bad for Your Business In this episode, I talk with Troy Dean about Post Traumatic Client Syndrome and why giving free consultations is actually bad for your business. The struggle is real. One of the biggest struggles out there is wasting time on unqualified leads. You drop everything to drive across town for a meeting with a potential client, buy them lunch, only to find out they have no plan and no budget. An afternoon totally wasted.   What you need is better screening. Here’s how: Draw a line in the sand and say “I will not touch a project under X amount of dollars.” Stop doing free consults. Find out the budget before you meet. If you don’t want to be doing projects under $10,000, then find out the project’s budget before meeting with the client. When someone contacts you, reply with a survey of their project, asking things like budget and timeline. This will help you weed out those just casually browsing. Start charging for the initial meeting. This will help