I had a business owner contact me through my consultation request form last week. She didn’t want a consultation, however. Instead, she gave me a laundry list of questions she wanted answered via email, indicating she "didn’t have time" to go through my telephone consultation process.
I had news for this client… If you don’t have time for my processes, I don’t have time for you as a client.
Of course, I didn’t put it quite like that… I’m actually not accepting new clients right now, but before referring her to my members at the Virtual Assistance Chamber of Commerce, I did explain to her the reasons and necessity for talking with Virtual Assistants in a consultation.
No good generally comes from allowing prospective clients to take shortcuts with your processes.
First, as a Virtual Assistant business owner, you have processes and systems in place for a reason: to help you find your right, ideal clients, and to operate your business in the most sustainable, profitable way possible. And that’s to their their benefit, as well as yours. It’s a model and standard that has quality and integrity at its core.
But even more importantly, it’s a bad precedent to set in the relationship. It tells the prosepctive client that your standards and processes are unimportant and to be disregarded. This instills disrespect, and clients who try to shortcut everything tend to be non-participants, and don’t do their equal part in the back-and-forth/give-and-take dynamic that is vital and necessary to your work together.
Clients need to do their homework and research; it is going to take time. Finding the right Virtual Assistant is an investment. They should be reading your website fully in order to determine if the next step is to talk with you.
Of course, your job is to make sure your website has lots of relevant, substantive information to help them make that decision.
But it’s all just gonna take what it’s gonna take. And that’s as it should be.
Save your time, energy and consideration only for those clients who show they’ve done the necessary legwork, are happy to go through your processes and who best demonstrate they are a fit. Deviate from that standard and you hammer nails in the coffin of your success.
