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Your client doesn’t need everything from you today; she needs to know what’s next.
Renee Hribar breaks down why so many talented service providers and consultants freeze the moment they can see everything wrong in a client’s business. She walks through a coaching story about a woman she calls Sarah, who kept expanding her scope every time she thought about what to offer a client with a messy, bottlenecked business, until the proposal stopped being an offer and started being an attempt to fix the entire company before anyone had paid a dollar. Renee reframes the real problem as trust, not scope or pricing: can you trust that a client can need everything and still only buy one clear next step? She introduces the idea that a proposal is a ring in a box, not the whole marriage, the deliverable that follows all the listening and discovery that came before it, and argues that piling on more options isn’t generosity, it’s confusion.
Renee closes with three questions listeners can ask themselves before building their next offer, without turning client work into a guessing game. The parts of your expertise that feel obvious to you are usually the exact next step your client is waiting for you to recommend.
Transcript
you know what I mean. We're making a plan. Already in our head it's like, "allen then something really weird happens, right? And this is the part that I've had to train myself and keep working at for myself so that I don't fall into this problem.
en they make no offer at all [:Huh, right? Ugh. That's what we're talking about today. So if you've ever been on a call with someone or s- been speaking with someone under, you know, a different environment, whether it's at a mastermind or a program or a networking event, and you're hearing everything, and you're like, "Oh," or you're seeing things, and you're like, "Oh, I know all the problems you have," and you're like, "How do I possibly freaking contain my brain?"
I had to solve it for myself [:So welcome back to the Selling Your Expertise podcast. I'm Renee Hribar, sales coach for B2B service providers and consultants who have thought once or twice, possibly this weekend, about burning it all to the ground. But you know you've got something special if you could just get the right pieces to click into place because you see people every dang day in your newsfeed that have one-eighth of your IQ, and they are freaking flaunting whatever they've got.
Maybe. I don't know. And not everything on the internet's true, obviously. But you're like, "Why is this rigmarole Jackamo making it happen?" When you know you got it on lock. You know you've got the goods. And so I feel that way sometimes. I'm sure you do, too. If this feels familiar, this is who this podcast is for.
o protect your time, protect [:Like, that's the idea, right? So here's my permission slip for you today. Your client can need everything without needing to buy everything today. One of the tenets that I would... the hills I'll die on, the hill I'd plant this flag on, is lifetime customer value. Start with the problem they're already complaining about, and then allow them to continue to get support from you over time.
Sometimes this could mean months, years, and that's great. Don't you love great client relationships when they're clearly defined and they work over time, as opposed to trying to press one button and do everything all at once? Because- Giving your client something versus everything is very different. Let me give you an example.
ere's a lot of people that I [:So this one woman, um, is looking at a client who wants to grow her podcast, for example, right? And says, "Okay, it sounds simple, right?" No, except it's not, because now the expert brain turns on, right? So this person who's helping this other person grow, like grow their podcast, this person is good at what she does and has years and layers of experience.
So she's thinking about audience growth, authority, sponsorships, clients, downloads, content, distribution, maybe YouTube, maybe Patreon, maybe this, maybe that. And another woman is helping somebody who wants a promotion, right? So except she doesn't just want a promotion, she wants the title and the compensation, and she doesn't wanna be available 24/7, and she needs a stronger personal brand, and she wants to become, as we joked, fireproof.
s looking at a team problem. [:You've been to the mountain and back again. You know there are 10,115 billion ways to get there. That's the math. Don't fact check me. But because you can see the entire mountain, you start believing you have to put the entire mountain in the proposal You don't. But here's what happens when you believe you do.
You either create some gigantic Franken offer with everything you've ever learned since Clinton was in office, God help us, or you freeze. You stop talking. You give her another idea. You send another resource for free. You say, "Let me think about this." You promise yoursel- that you're gonna circle back.
[:So this particular woman, I'm gonna call her Sarah, quote unquote, for this story, not her real name. But she was looking at a client with a very messy business. The work was getting redone. Decisions were bottlenecked. People were not clear on who owned what. Uh, processes weren't documented. The team needed clearer responsibilities, clearer, and Sarah could see all of it, and which meant every time she thought about what to offer this client, her brain went, "Well, she needs this, but if we do this, we really need to do that.
s before anyone has paid you [:And underneath all of this, Sarah's thinking was something along the lines of, I can see constantly that, you know, like, this is what's happening." And I see this all the time. So if I know this client needs more, is it wrong for me to offer her less? So this is this thought that my clients have told me specifically.
If I know that they need all of these things, is it out of, like, moral alignment if I only offer them this one thing? And boom there it is. That's the real problem. It's not actually scope or packaging or pricing. Trust. Do I trust myself enough? This is what I recommend you do next, and not forever, not for everything.
marriage, ideally, you know, [:Like, um, maybe you've met Aunt Linda. You've got information about the family. Sorry, I'm laughing because I'm imagining the stories of the people that have, you know, gone... Like the, what is it? Ni- the show 90 Day Fiance, right? So like you have met some people in their family. You have a general understanding.
e we'll spend Thanksgiving in:body unders- understands the [:Even though you see the 72,000 problems they have, you don't need to deal with it today Right? So, like, there's no mystery here that's suddenly appearing on page four. Like, "Surprise, we're doing TikTok now." No. This is why I think we confuse knowledge with expertise. Knowledge says, "I can see 47 things."
brain into one engagement to [:She could recommend the next piece, and then let the relationship reveal what comes next. And the tangible result was a clearer, more contained offer that she actually could put in front of a client, not the whole marriage, the ring. So this matters because so many women, and I work with, think giving more is what makes them generous.
More ideas, more access, more deliverables, more possibilities, more of their brain, more of their time. But sometimes more is not generous. More is confusing. if you think about it, if you want to actually help the people that you're talking to who have not been to the mountain and back again, who have not gone through this before, maybe once, maybe twice, but you do it all the time.
the client might eventually [:You're deciding what's too much money for them. You're deciding what is too many steps for them. Or maybe you're deciding that, well, if we start here, well, they won't continue then. That's not your decision to make. Your job is to create a pathway. Clear the path for yes. That's what we're doing. What's the next step?
Your job is to decide whether she wants to, you know, walk with you or not. That's it. your job is to decide whether you want to invite her and whether walking with you is gonna be great for the next step. We've talked about another side of this before as well. Don't build your business around one-offs.
the first engagement did. If [:Because sometimes the next sale isn't sitting out there somewhere on planet internet waiting for you to find another stranger. It's sitting inside of a relationship you're already taking great care of. And actually, this is one of those things I think about a lot living here in Barcelona. This weekend, um, I was out at a festival because apparently Barcelona looked at the calendar and said, "You know what every neighborhood needs every weekend?
e things. that's part of the [:I want to make the recommendation, serve the client, make the money, close the computer, and go to the festival, and I want the same for you. And so if you're thinking about this right now, I really want you to consider what's next.
Because there's a deeper problem, right? So the deeper problem here is that your client needs too much. The deeper problem is that you also haven't decided what you believe she needs next, right? So this is real. I mean, I hope that you're really feeling this, right? 'Cause it can feel scary because a giant proposal lets you hide,
u to take a position, right? [:You saying that is you standing your ground as the expert, owning your authority, not letting the customer guide. They don't know. They are smart in their way, but they're not in your way. So you're not showing them the whole mountain. You don't need to. You're helping this person see the next place to put their foot.
e on retainer," and then you [:The question underneath all of this is often the same: Do I trust what I know is valuable enough without giving it all to them at once? Okay, so I love self-evaluation, right? I want you to ask yourself, am I making my offer bigger because my client genuinely needs all of this right now, or because I'm trying to prove how much I know?
use once you can answer that [:You stop thinking about your offers as these isolated things that you have to invent over and over again. You start seeing a path to clear the path for yes, right? This engagement leads here. This result reveals this. That conversation opens the next door, and that is where sales gets really interesting because now we're not talking about how to squeeze another sale out of somebody.
No, we were never talking about that. We're talking about how to build a client journey where the next offer makes sense because of the work you've already done together, and that is a big difference, and there's more to that than I can unpack here without turning this episode into Thanksgiving dinner with 19 side dishes.
e problem. We love the giant [:Check out all the freshest ways we can hang out after this podcast, and now I'm gonna go see what, you know, more about what festival's happening next weekend in Barcelona. All right. I'll talk to you soon.
