Are You an Expense or a Paycheck? Why Clients Haggle With You

If every sales conversation turns into a negotiation, the problem usually isn't your price. It's where you sit on the other person's balance sheet.

When you sell your time or a service, you land in the expense column. Expenses get compared against cheaper options, trimmed when money is tight, and cut the moment someone offers to do it for less. That's why so many coaches, consultants and freelancers feel like they're begging for work, even when they're good at what they do.

One of the most useful ideas I've picked up from Travis Sago is a simple swap. Instead of asking "what can I sell this business?", ask "what is this business already sitting on that it isn't using?"

Almost every business has something: a customer list that hasn't been emailed in a year, a product that only sells in one place, a slow day every week, or know-how the owner has never packaged. When you show up with a way to turn one of those into new customers, you aren't another cost. You're a source of money they didn't have before.

An expense says: pay me $2,000 a month and I'll run your ads. A paycheck says: you have 4,000 past customers who haven't heard from you since last spring. Let me build an offer for them, and we'll split what comes in. The skill is the same. The position is completely different, and so is how the owner feels when you walk in.

After 18 years in marketing and about $19 million in ad spend managed, I can tell you the paycheck conversations were always the easy ones. Nobody haggles with money they weren't going to have otherwise.

Pick one business you know well, maybe your own. Write down one thing it owns but isn't using. That single item is the starting point for everything else in this series.

This is the first of seven ideas I've learned from Travis Sago about leveraging digital assets and licensing IP. Get the full series by email, one short lesson a day.