How to Weed Out Difficult Clients Before They Can Say “Refund” | by Rachel Greenberg | Oct, 2023

Offended prospects are all of your fault

It isn’t day by day {that a} hungry prospect is banging down your organization’s door, with a big wad of money (or verify, bank card, and so on.) in hand, begging you to take their cash. It’s even rarer once you — particularly should you’re a brand new, early-stage, sales-starved, or cash-strapped founder — dread the subsequent motion you already know it’s worthwhile to take: turning them away.

However why on earth would you probably flip away a stable buyer with cash in hand? Isn’t gross sales, curiosity, and proof of idea what we’re all after as entrepreneurs? Maybe, however profitable entrepreneurship and startup longevity require the discernment to know the distinction between a worthwhile consumer and a entice. On this case, I knew higher than to take the bait.

Why? There have been many causes; to call a couple of:

• This “keen prospect” had already bought from us earlier than — and so they’d confirmed to be among the many highest upkeep, asking for excess of they’d paid. Apparently, they’d appreciated the service sufficient to return, however that didn’t make it price our whereas to proceed to supply.
• Per their prior M.O., they have been once more requesting particular reductions and unorthodox fee plans, but demanding our most premium (and costly) service providing…
• And if these pink flags weren’t sufficient to provide us pause, I had an electronic mail in my inbox from an business peer CEO (at a non-competitive firm with which we accomplice), particularly warning us why they’d turned away this prospect as a “unhealthy match”…leaving 1000’s of unearned {dollars} on the desk.

It didn’t matter if it was our “down season” or if this consumer’s buy would add one other couple of months of runway to my startup’s reserves (if we have been in such dire monetary straights). The writing was on the wall, within the electronic mail, and clear as day: Accepting this prospect’s cash would probably value us greater than it was price, and the short-term monetary achieve wouldn’t outweigh the time loss, headache, or potential reputational injury to observe.

However let’s be trustworthy: Most problematic prospects don’t include such blatant pink flags warning us to promptly flip away their enterprise. Moreover, as a startup founder…