You had me at percentages!!

Yo! There is like 10 different posts in this one response! Love the part about the children and I am sure I have seen books on the subject of marketing to small people, or everything I learned was from such and such…

I try not to do business with ‘friends’. This is someone I am friendly with since we work together.

Have a great weekend

I would be careful though with any deal that involves taking a percentage. I am not sure of the particulars of the deal you are trying to make now, but in general it’s something to be careful with for several reasons…
(1) Paying an hourly rate is short term – the client can get out of it whenever he wants. Percentage means a long term commitment. Is the person you are trying to negotiate with ready for a long term commitment yet? Like the old expression – ‘trying to get someone to commit to marry you before you’ve gone on the first date’. The percentage can scare him off if done too early on.

(2) If you are talking about a friend, as you know, mixing business and friendship is “tricky business”. If you take an hourly rate, if you see that the business relationship is getting tense, you can break off at anytime before your friendship suffers. Once you start with percentages, you are in a long term commitment that you might have to go through with even if your friendship is at stake.

(3) It is often hard to differenciate between your idea and a client’s idea that you just “shined up”. It’s also hard to define what ideas are worthy of getting a percentage. Like if you tell a web newbie that he could make money from joining affiliate programs – does that mean you’d make a percentage on every affiliate program he joins because you gave him the idea to join affiliate programs? On top of that, it’s difficult to determine what you get a percentage of, how long you should get a percentage for, what limitations are there, etc. If you don’t want to get into problems later, you really need to work out tons of details and get a contract written up, which may not be worth your time.

As far as my negotiating tips… yeah – I send my husband (ha ha!)

One tip a veteran marketer taught me when negotiating is to offer choices. If you are trying to get someone to buy something, instead of the negotiations being about “do you want to buy this or not”, switch the negotiations to “do you want to buy package A or package B”? This way, your customer’s mind switches from thinking “should I or shouldn’t I” to asking himself “which one?” and then, either way, you win.

Marketing gurus all the time use this trick…
Do you want to buy our full package at $297 or do you want the lite version for only $97? He knew most people weren’t going to buy the $297 one anyway, but just gave it as a choice to make people choose the $97 one.

Interestingly enough, this is also a method my son’s kindergarden teacher taught me years ago when dealing with kids. My son didn’t want to particapate in certain activities so the teacher would give him choices to get him to change his mind set. Like if she’d want him to make a picture, she wouldn’t say “It’s time to color in the picture” (because then he’d get defensive and say ‘no’). Instead she’d ask “do you want to use the blue crayon or the red one?” Which, either choice he’d make, would be fine with her…
Lesson learned: Raising kids is simply marketing to small people.
Seriously this is true…
Ever tell your child he’ll get dessert if he eats his dinner? This is giving your “customer” a “sign up bonus”.
Ever have a child who doesn’t like eating bread crusts and you cut off the crust for him? This is simply modifying your product to fit a target market…

Sorry Andrea for the long post. I tend to get carried away sometimes…

Good luck!
Ady