The 5 best ways to alienate your clients

Learn from your mistakes, examine your failures, and begin with your blunders. 

We all know the importance of doing things incorrectly, as a way to learn to do them correctly. Thomas Edison is credited with saying: “I didn’t fail. I just found 2,000 ways not to make a lightbulb”. 

Let’s embrace the value of finding the wrong way to do things and consider these 5 great ways to alienate your clients. 

Sell the features

This pen writes. 

These shoes go on your feet. 

This attorney has passed the bar exam. 

Only talk about the simple facts about your product or service. Never the benefits. 

Never tell them your prices. 

When they ask, the answer is: “it depends”. It always depends. There is never a number. 

Trash the competition

Don’t talk about yourself. Talk about them. 

Everybody else who does what you do does it badly. They are careless, uninterested, overpriced, unreliable, and more. Tell your clients just how awful everybody else is. 

Don’t train your employees

Make sure they can’t answer questions, can’t solve any problems, are giving different information depending on who is asking and when, and generally don’t know what is going on. 

Always be selling

Whatever a prospect or client says, answer with a pitch

BONUS: keep the jargon. 

Impact your clients holistically and empower them to give 110%, so you don’t boil the ocean when you reach out to leverage your core competencies creating synergies with their low-hanging fruit with your SWAT team that moves the needle towards a scalable best practice that thinks outside the box. Utilize visionary strategic planning. Take it offline. It is what it is. 

What next

Grab paper and a pen and jot down how you do the opposite of what I have listed above. Schedule a 30-minute call with me so we can talk about your main challenges.