Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics for entrepreneurs with the guile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors Neil Patel and Eric Sue. All right, guys, before we start, we got a special message from our sponsor. If you want to rank higher on Google, you gotta look at your page speed time. The faster website loads, the better off you are with Google's Core Vital update. That makes it super super important to optimize your site for low time. And one easy way to do it is use the host that Eric and I use, dream Hosts. So just go to dream host or Google it, find it, check it out, and it's a great way to improve your low time. Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Sue and I'm Neil Patel, and today we are going to talk about how to avoid over servicing clients. So this is something that I can speak to because I'm in the services space. Neil not so much anymore, or I guess Neil kind of not really, but this is mainly all you. Yeah, so I'll talk Oh wow, look you try to throw it out to be okay, great, So I'll tell you what works. So we use a tool called hub staff and that allows us to track time and it allows us to see kind of which clients we're working on. It's basically a time tracking tool. So if you're in the services based business, it might seem like, oh, you don't want to track time. Whatever you are, it's important for you to track time internally to make sure that you're not over servicing a certain client. Especially let's say you have a client that's spent, you know, paying you a thousand dollars a month, versus a client that's paying you twenty thousand dollars a month. You're giving them the same time. That's a bad allocation of time. I'm not saying you should charge by the hour per se, but you know that's what you need to do. You need to make sure that you're auditing your time because you are in the service based business and you'll have so much time at the end of the day. So that's one thing that's important. Check out toggle that's t ogg l, there's hub staffs that's hub as taff, and there's a bunch of other tools out there like harvest as well, so you can start with that first. Neil, what are your thoughts because I know you do some consulting from time to time. Yeah, make sure you follow what's in the contract. A lot of people, just clients, ask you for more and more and more, and if it's not in the contract, you have to learn how to say no. If it's something small here, there no big deal. You don't want to be a penny pincher and you know, just be like, no, you need to give me more money for every little thing, because it's about building relationships and helping people as well. But the moment they're asking you for really big stuff that's out of the scope, you should say something about it. And you know what, that's a great time and opportunity to start upselling people. I'll give a recommendation here. There's actually another podcast called the Smart Agency podcast. Actually hired this guy, Jason Swank. He sold up an agency for I believe twenty million, maybe ten million, I don't know, but something like that. So he has a tactic called the zero dollar change order. So when you have a client that keeps asking you for more stuff, you say, hey, okay, that's fine, you know, happy to do it for you. What you do is you send them an invoice for zero dollars and in maps kind of the extra free stuff that you're doing, but it is it's basically a record that shows that you're doing this stuff for free. They'll come back to you again, Hey, can you do video ads for example? No, happy to do some video ads for you. Here, let me give you the second zero dollar change order. Going to come back to you again, Hey, third time? Can you do SEO? Sure, happy to do SEO. But we are going to have these two zero dollar change orders. Guess what, I think we're gonna have to start to charge for this, so you know how about that? And guess what, they're gonna feel weird because they're gonna feel bad because they already got two bits of free work for you. They're not gonna want to keep taking advantage of you, and if they are, they're probably not the right fit for you long term. So that's one way to avoid scope creep, because the problem with services sometimes is people are just gonna start asking for more and more. It's much easier to say yes than it is to say no, because no is actually really uncomfortable. So just keep that in mind, use the zero dollar change order. Check out Jason's links podcast around agencies. There's actually a lot that he can teach you. I don't really have anything online. You pretty much covered it at all. I even got a blog post published right now, and you even promoted it while you're talking. Oh wow, look at that all right, So I mean that's it. I mean, you know, think about scope creep, think about how you can protect yourself, and you know, if you need to charge more money, charge more money over and say hey, this is not not in scope right now. Sometimes you need to just stand up and say this is not in scope, and here's what we need to do, you know, to get you what you need. And then also it's the same thing. It's like Neil saying, it's an upsell opportunity, so you might launch into another kind of sales conversation and you know, find out what their needs are, asking them questions again, like we've discussed in one of our previous recent episodes. So before we go, we have a ninety day free trial of Crazy Egg to give away to each and every one of you. No credit card is required, and it's worth up to three thousand dollars. So To learn more, just go to single grain dot com slash and give away and we will see you tomorrow. This session of Marketing School has come to a close. Be sure to subscribe for more daily marketing strategies and tactics to help you find the success you've always dreamed of. And don't forget to rate and review so we can continue to bring you the best daily content possible. We'll see you in class tomorrow right here on the Marketing

Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics for entrepreneurs with the guile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors Neil Patel and Eric Sue. All right, guys, before we start, we got a special message from our sponsor. If you want to rank higher on Google, you gotta look at your page speed time. The faster website loads, the better off you are with Google's Core Vital update. That makes it super super important to optimize your site for low time. And one easy way to do it is use the host that Eric and I use, dream Hosts. So just go to dream host or Google it, find it, check it out, and it's a great way to improve your low time. Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Sue and I'm Neil Patel, and today we are going to talk about how to avoid over servicing clients. So this is something that I can speak to because I'm in the services space. Neil not so much anymore, or I guess Neil kind of not really, but this is mainly all you. Yeah, so I'll talk Oh wow, look you try to throw it out to be okay, great, So I'll tell you what works. So we use a tool called hub staff and that allows us to track time and it allows us to see kind of which clients we're working on. It's basically a time tracking tool. So if you're in the services based business, it might seem like, oh, you don't want to track time. Whatever you are, it's important for you to track time internally to make sure that you're not over servicing a certain client. Especially let's say you have a client that's spent, you know, paying you a thousand dollars a month, versus a client that's paying you twenty thousand dollars a month. You're giving them the same time. That's a bad allocation of time. I'm not saying you should charge by the hour per se, but you know that's what you need to do. You need to make sure that you're auditing your time because you are in the service based business and you'll have so much time at the end of the day. So that's one thing that's important. Check out toggle that's t ogg l, there's hub staffs that's hub as taff, and there's a bunch of other tools out there like harvest as well, so you can start with that first. Neil, what are your thoughts because I know you do some consulting from time to time. Yeah, make sure you follow what's in the contract. A lot of people, just clients, ask you for more and more and more, and if it's not in the contract, you have to learn how to say no. If it's something small here, there no big deal. You don't want to be a penny pincher and you know, just be like, no, you need to give me more money for every little thing, because it's about building relationships and helping people as well. But the moment they're asking you for really big stuff that's out of the scope, you should say something about it. And you know what, that's a great time and opportunity to start upselling people. I'll give a recommendation here. There's actually another podcast called the Smart Agency podcast. Actually hired this guy, Jason Swank. He sold up an agency for I believe twenty million, maybe ten million, I don't know, but something like that. So he has a tactic called the zero dollar change order. So when you have a client that keeps asking you for more stuff, you say, hey, okay, that's fine, you know, happy to do it for you. What you do is you send them an invoice for zero dollars and in maps kind of the extra free stuff that you're doing, but it is it's basically a record that shows that you're doing this stuff for free. They'll come back to you again, Hey, can you do video ads for example? No, happy to do some video ads for you. Here, let me give you the second zero dollar change order. Going to come back to you again, Hey, third time? Can you do SEO? Sure, happy to do SEO. But we are going to have these two zero dollar change orders. Guess what, I think we're gonna have to start to charge for this, so you know how about that? And guess what, they're gonna feel weird because they're gonna feel bad because they already got two bits of free work for you. They're not gonna want to keep taking advantage of you, and if they are, they're probably not the right fit for you long term. So that's one way to avoid scope creep, because the problem with services sometimes is people are just gonna start asking for more and more. It's much easier to say yes than it is to say no, because no is actually really uncomfortable. So just keep that in mind, use the zero dollar change order. Check out Jason's links podcast around agencies. There's actually a lot that he can teach you. I don't really have anything online. You pretty much covered it at all. I even got a blog post published right now, and you even promoted it while you're talking. Oh wow, look at that all right, So I mean that's it. I mean, you know, think about scope creep, think about how you can protect yourself, and you know, if you need to charge more money, charge more money over and say hey, this is not not in scope right now. Sometimes you need to just stand up and say this is not in scope, and here's what we need to do, you know, to get you what you need. And then also it's the same thing. It's like Neil saying, it's an upsell opportunity, so you might launch into another kind of sales conversation and you know, find out what their needs are, asking them questions again, like we've discussed in one of our previous recent episodes. So before we go, we have a ninety day free trial of Crazy Egg to give away to each and every one of you. No credit card is required, and it's worth up to three thousand dollars. So To learn more, just go to single grain dot com slash and give away and we will see you tomorrow. This session of Marketing School has come to a close. Be sure to subscribe for more daily marketing strategies and tactics to help you find the success you've always dreamed of. And don't forget to rate and review so we can continue to bring you the best daily content possible. We'll see you in class tomorrow right here on the Marketing