They liked the whole thing right up until the number. Then came “I can’t afford it,” and the first instinct is to apologize for the price and start cutting. Don’t. That sentence usually means one of two things, and there are two questions that tell you which one you’re dealing with. Today: those two questions, five ways to save the deal without giving up your profit, and how to walk away clean when it really is a no. Plus the Idea Slam mailbag on following up after a prospect goes quiet, and the fight between Meta and Amazon over who owns the recommendation.
Businessing is the daily live show where small business owners figure out what to do next. Hosted by Pat Miller, founder of the Small Business Owners Community: owners only, nobody pitching, $9 a month.
In this episode
- 00:00 Open and what’s on the show today
- 01:55 Big Story, they just told you they can’t afford it
- 02:46 What “I can’t afford it” actually means
- 03:27 The two questions that tell you which problem you have
- 05:41 Five ways to save the deal without cutting your price
- 09:28 When to walk away from a client who can’t pay
- 10:58 Idea Slam, how many follow-ups before you look desperate
- 16:03 AI story, Meta’s Muse agent and Amazon blocking it
- 23:31 Vegas, new members, and what’s on this week in the SBOC
Resources mentioned
Full transcript
Pat Miller: Hey, good morning. It is Tuesday, September 22nd, and we are businessing. This is the daily show where small business owners get the answers that you need because nobody ever showed you how to run a business. Here, we figure it out together. I’m Pat Miller, founder of the Small Business Owners Community and the host of the show.
Three things on today’s show as always. We have a fight. Remember back in junior high school, there’d be a fight, and everyone would yell, “Fight, fight, fight!” Remember that? Well, we have that going on right now in the AI world, and this isn’t two little pipsqueaks. These are two heavyweight champions of the world.
Meta and Amazon are fighting big time, and it’s really about what’s the future of the Internet going to be. It’s that massive. I will explain in a moment. We also have our AI story of the day coming up. It has to do with money. It has to do with follow-up. It has to do with when you pitch someone on a sale and they love it, and they’re ready to close, and then they ghost you. How do you handle that? And we’ll get to the businessing big story of the day in a moment. Good morning. Teresa’s here. Barbara’s here. Rebecca’s here. Alex is here.
Good morning, Alex. Great to see you as well. Businessing big story of the day is something that you’ve had happen to you, I guarantee it. You get all the way down to the end of the sales pitch, and you say, “Here it is,” and they go, “Oh, I can’t afford it.” What? Excuse me? What? Things were going so well. You love this, and now you tell me you can’t afford it?
What do you mean you can’t afford it? And when I’m not having a good day, I will apologize for the number. I’ll backtrack. I’ll slash the price. I’ll try and save the deal, and that’s, like, the worst thing that you can do. So I’m gonna give you two questions so you can figure out what’s actually going on, and then five ways to save the deal without just giving up the profit inside.
So when someone says, “I can’t afford it,” what are they actually saying to you? They’re saying one of two things. Either they’re saying, “I can’t justify the value of this transformation. You claim you’re going to do this. It’s not worth the amount of money that you’re asking me to pay.” So they don’t see or they can’t justify the value.
Good morning, Audrey. Welcome on Instagram. The other thing they might be saying is that, “Well, the money doesn’t work. Not that I don’t have the money, but the way that you’re asking me for the money doesn’t work for me.” Now, those are completely different problems. So how do we know which one we’re dealing with?
And then how do we try and save the deal? So the first question is, if they say, “I can’t afford it,” the first question is, “Okay, help me understand.” It’s a great objection question. Help me understand. “Help me understand you can’t afford it compared to what? How else were you going to solve this problem?” And then they may share, “Oh, well, I’ve got a competitor’s offer,” or, “I don’t really see the value of the transformation.”
You help them describe what is going on. And if there’s a cheaper quote, then you get a choice of whether or not you want to compete. If it’s a clarity issue, well, you can just help clarify and demonstrate what the transformation is worth, and then you can go to town on that side of the fence. But sometimes when they say, “I can’t afford it,” it’s the shape that the money is in.
Maybe you were asking for fifty percent down and fifty percent in two weeks. Morning, Steve. Great to see you. It could be however you were asking them to pay. So if it gets to be question two, you would ask this question: “If the money were there, would you do this?”
Do you see the transformation? If you had the money, would you do this? And if they say yes to that, then you know you’ve sold them on the transformation. It literally is a math and numbers problem. So let’s talk about five ways to get around the shape of the money issue without giving up the profit.
Because if I said to you, “Hey, Steve, I want you to buy this thing.” “How much is it?” “Two thousand dollars, and it costs me a thousand dollars to make it.” That means I have a thousand dollars in profit. But Steve says, “I can’t afford it.” So I immediately retreat and say, “Okay, I’ll do it for fifteen hundred,” and he says, “Sold.”
What that means is I gave up half of my profit, and now I’m doing all the work that I promised Steve for only five hundred dollars. That’s how painful this is when you start discounting on price, ’cause you always have a hard cost to what you’re doing. So here are five ways to change the deal without losing all of your profit.
The first one is just a payment plan. If you’ve been working with someone for a while, you can let them do monthly installments until it’s all done. Always make them pay a deposit first. Never do money or work with no money in the bank at all. But hey, make a deposit, and then we’ll do six monthly installments until we’re done.
“Oh, you mean six monthly installments of three hundred and thirty-three dollars?” “Yeah, that’s it.” “Oh, well, that’s a lot easier for me to do than two thousand upfront.” Deal is saved. No extra cash going out the door. The second way you can do it is financing. If you run into this repeatedly, there are companies out there that will do microloans or microfinancing for you.
You will end up losing some percentage points on the deal, but you now have a financing partner. These are the people like when you buy windows for your house. The window company has a financing company that you can just finance with, and it’s zero down for twelve months or zero percent interest for twelve months, but if you don’t pay it off in twelve months, the big cartoon hammer comes down on your head with the interest.
One of those deals. They’re out there if you wanna look into it. The third way is their own financing. This is why God made credit cards. Use them. Use them. Now, you gotta be gentle in the way you suggest it, but use them. Your business has a credit card if you wanna do this. Let’s just ring it up. Easy peasy.
The fourth way you can do this. Now, this is where you start to lose some cash, but not necessarily the profit. Let’s say I was doing something with Barbara, the bookkeeper. Barbara’s here this morning. Good morning, Barbara. And I said, “You know what, Barbara? Why don’t we make this a non-cash deal, and we’ll trade services? ‘Cause I’m paying for bookkeeping. You could do bookkeeping at no cost, I could do my thing, and we both win.”
So while I’m not getting profit directly from Barbara ’cause she’s not paying me, I’m now not paying for my bookkeeping, which is retained cash in the business ’cause I’m not writing a check to the bookkeeper. I get to keep that cash while I perform the service for Barbara. So if the person you wanna work with has a valuable product or service, ideally something you’re paying for in another way, you could trade with them to lower your expense while saving the deal. That’s the fourth way.
And then the fifth way is, are they a valuable partner short or long term, or do you need their endorsement, blessing, or recommendation to power up your own sales? You could go to them and say, “Okay, Steve, I’ll do it for fifteen hundred, but when it goes great, you will give me an endorsement that I can use, a testimonial. You’ll share it on your social media that I’m good at doing this, and I can use our work as a case study because I need demonstrations of what I’m doing and how valuable this is. So if you’d be willing to be my marketing partner, I’d be happy to perform it at fifteen hundred instead of two thousand. What do you say?”
You are hurting your profit when you do this, but if you need those promotional or marketing assets, it would be valuable to get them. I think of Alex, who’s a wedding DJ. He’s on the show today. He may need the example of a wedding in a certain area of town that he’s breaking into, or a certain style of event he’s never done before. He could offer them a discount for the case study, and he now has the principal of the school saying that he’s a great DJ for a high school dance. Something like that.
So that would be the fifth way that you could get around the objection of “I can’t afford you.” Last but not least, if they really can’t afford it, walk away. I will tell you, after doing this for years and seeing people do business for years, the people that really stretch to afford you and the people that are counting every single penny coming into a relationship, those are generally the people that ask for too much, they’re nagging. This is the biggest decision that they’ve made.
They can be somewhat difficult to work with. And you wanna take care of everybody. You wanna do a good job. It’s not about that. But you don’t wanna back someone into a corner to make a deal, ’cause it usually doesn’t go well. So when someone says, “I can’t afford you,” you have options. You have to remember, do they see the transformation, and if they had the money, would they do it? If they did have the money and they would do it, use one of those five ways and try and win the deal anyway.
Good morning, Barbara. Great to see you. And Tim, great to see you, bud. Thanks for tuning in. Got an Idea Slam to do and then this AI story of the day. We have a big time fight brewing between Meta and Amazon, and I will explain in a minute.
The Idea Slam question of the day is kinda similar to the first question that we just did. It has to do with selling things. And the question is: My potential client loved the proposal. They said they’d get back to me. Now they’ve gone silent, and I followed up. How many times do I follow up until I look desperate?
Great question, and it happens all the time. You think you get all the way down to a deal and things look great, and you just can’t get ’em over the line. And you hear people talk about follow-up all the time. “Well, I sent a follow-up, then I followed up again, then I don’t wanna bother him.” No, no, no, no, no.
If you got them all the way down to the end of the funnel, they loved the proposal, and they just haven’t said yes yet, now is not the time to give up. This is the hottest lead you could possibly have. This is hotter than meeting someone at an event. This is hotter than someone clicking on your Facebook ad and filling out the form, hotter than a webinar person that watched you do your thing.
This is someone that went through the entire sales process, heard the numbers, said they loved it. Now is not the time to give up. You need to stay on it. And you need to remember, and we should have a little sign on our desk, maybe this is a Stephanie Kern sticker that we could all make, that just because it went cold doesn’t mean it’s dead.
I want you to think about how you run your business and you run your life. They raise their hand, they ask for your services, they listen to your pitch. And if you think about how you run your life, don’t you have people in your email box that you need to reply to and you just haven’t? People that you really care about and you know you need to get back to them, but you haven’t?
And yes, they may email you every once in a while, and you’re like, “Yes, I know, bro, I know I gotta get back to you. I know.” You just don’t have the free brain space. It’s not a judgment on you, it’s a judgment on their day. It’s a judgment on their life. I’ve got stuff in my email box that has been sitting there for two weeks because I had the conference last week, and I love these people, and I can’t wait to partner with these people, but I’ve got bigger fish to fry right now.
And I see them emailing me, and every time they email me, I’m like, “Yes, I know I need to get back to you.” That’s what happens in business. The second part of this is: how many times do I email without looking desperate? I think that’s a bad question because I don’t care if I look desperate. Now, you don’t wanna follow up and say the same thing every time, and you don’t wanna beg, and you don’t wanna be obnoxious, but showing up in their email box every week or ten days if they loved your proposal, that’s not desperate.
That’s doing good business. “Hey, Bob, I was really excited for our conversation we had last week. When can we get started?” And don’t stop, ever. Again, turn the tables. Let’s say you really wanted to come to the SBOC conference, and we had a great conversation about it, and you just hadn’t purchased your ticket. What if I stopped following up? How would that make you feel? “Oh, I guess Pat really doesn’t want me to come.” No. I’d love for you to buy your ticket.
You’re showing that you care. You’re showing you’re auditioning for the job by doing good follow-up. If I was doing work for Barbara and Barbara hadn’t said yes yet, and I just quit following up, Barbara may think, “Well, I guess Pat’s not really on top of it. Attention to detail isn’t quite there.”
And sometimes it’s not. Newsflash, it’s not. That’s my own fatal flaw. But Barbara might think that I don’t have my act together if I don’t have the discipline to keep following up, and I’m not suggesting that clients are playing games with you. But never stop following up, ever. And then one day, when you least expect it, you’re sitting here having a bagel or your comically little small cup of espresso, and ding, here comes Barbara that says, “Yep, I’m in for 2027.”
And you go, “Yes,” because you never stopped follow-up. Don’t stop. That’s where the money’s at. Good morning, Michael. Great to see you from Las Vegas, Nevada. Oh, Michael, my friend, I’m four days out, brother. Four days. I will see you soon. Landing Saturday morning. Good times until Wednesday afternoon. Can’t wait. Thanks for tuning in this morning.
Okay, we have a major league story going on. We have a fight brewing with two of the biggest companies on the planet, and their fight is over something that literally just happened in the tech space. It’s our AI story of the day. Raise your hand if you’ve played with Meta’s new personal assistant called Muse. They have a new AI bot called Muse, M-U-S-E dot A-I, and I gotta admit, it’s really fun and it’s pretty clever and it works. I’ve seen the scuttlebutt online that Muse is basically AI agents for normal people. This will be your mom’s first AI agent because it’s connected to your Facebook and Instagram.
So Muse will do anything. I gave you an example, and it’s funny that Michael’s here this morning. So I’m going to Las Vegas on Saturday. I want a steakhouse near Circa Las Vegas. That’s my home base, by the way, Michael. And I wanna have a great old fashioned with a steak. What would you recommend? So now up here in the corner, first of all, look at that cute little robot guy doing his thing, and then boom, look at how fast those answers came in. Barry’s Downtown Prime. Love that place. It’s in the Circa Hotel that we go to. Oscar’s right across the street where they shot Casino, of course. And El Cortez has got a new steakhouse that’s opening, but it won’t be open in time.
So that’s just an example, and it works with you in real time, and it’s fast. Now, this is just like Claude’s Cowork, which is now just Claude. You will connect it to your email, you’ll connect it to your calendar, to your drive. Eva Barber, good morning on Instagram. Great to see you, dear. It would be everything all in one place, and it will work for you just like Claude Cowork does. But the thing that Muse does is it does this kind of thing. I wonder if you could get me a reservation at Barry’s for Saturday night at five thirty PM.
I know that’s early. I can explain why, but let’s just see if it does it. I don’t know if it can do this, but this is the kind of thing it can reportedly do. Airline reservations, hotel reservations, anything you ask it to. It’s got a personal agency to it, and it’s doing really well. Now, Steve, I’m interested in connecting it to LinkedIn because LinkedIn, I heard, is very allergic to AI tools, and you shouldn’t use your AI tools on it. So I would love to hear your experience on that.
So while we have Muse doing its thing, let’s talk about the big conflict. The big conflict is people were taking their Muse agents and pointing them at Amazon. “Hey, Muse, look on Amazon for the comically small coffee cups ’cause one of them broke and I need to get a new set of four.” And Muse, “On it, boss,” and it goes to Amazon, and it would find the recommendation. Well, people were using that, and Amazon’s not having it. Amazon has blocked Muse from scrolling and interacting on the site.
So what that means is there’s a giant fight between these two companies. Amazon’s quote was, “Continued access by an unauthorized AI agent violates Amazon’s conditions of use.” This is gonna happen more and more. You would think Amazon would be all about this. I can ask my agent, it’ll go buy some stuff. This is great. More sales. But the conversation in the story that I read is that Amazon doesn’t want this because this is a fight about who owns the recommendation, who owns the data, and that has been Amazon’s calling card this whole time.
And Alex is right, AI turf wars. Because if you look at Amazon, what it’s really good at is saying, “Oh, you don’t want these coffee mugs. You want these coffee mugs. This is a sponsored result.” It wants to know everything about you. And if someone else’s AI tool is making the recommendations, then Amazon loses control. Amazon becomes Walmart, like an in-person Walmart, where you’re just walking down the aisles and you can pick anything. Amazon doesn’t like that. Amazon likes when you hit the website, it will tell you what it is. It will skew the search results. It’ll put the sponsored stuff in front of you.
And you know that Amazon is gonna have one of these things in 10 seconds. The fact that they don’t already have one, like how do they not have a personal shopper AI tool that you talk to just like this? “Hey, Amazon personal shopper, refill my fridge.” Boop, and here comes all the groceries for the week. Like, why doesn’t that exist? You know that they’re working on it.
So this is the future. These kinds of conversational tools, which we’ve all been experimenting with with ChatGPT and Cowork and Gemini and all those different tools, now that Meta is in the game. Meta’s interesting ’cause it’s where normal people are, and they know literally everything about you. And when you turn over the last bits about you that they don’t already know, if this tool turns out to be the real thing, there is a world, and I saw an entire tweet storm about this, where it’s possible that Facebook’s going to win the AI race just because they’re the platform that everybody has. And that’s where the bulk of the world is, Facebook and Instagram.
So will they end up winning simply because of their own gravity? We don’t know. But the reason why this is the AI story of the day is now the big boys are starting to fight. These turf wars are real. What we know is that on the whole, when big companies fight one another, our products get better. When big companies make deals with one another is when our products get worse. Okay, you have that, and we’ll have this, and we’ll be cool. I don’t want to be cool. I want you two to fight to the death so the product gets better. And now that these two are fighting, that’s gonna prompt Amazon to make their own AI shopping agent, and Meta is gonna have to find a way around that because it’s the biggest shopping site in the world, and competition is generally good for everybody.
And back to what I was talking with Michael about, this weekend is gonna be fantastic. The Vegas trip, the annual Vegas trip. Oh man, it’s so good. Go out there with my father and my brother-in-law, take all of the stress and work of the conference and set it aside, put my brain on the charger for a couple of days. Man, can’t wait. It’s gonna be something really special. So we leave Saturday morning. We’ll be back on Wednesday.
Let’s talk about the SBOC before we sign off. Another new member, Ray, joined this morning, came to the conference, now has joined the community. Five new members in the last week. Many of them came from the conference, so it’s great to see Ray now in the community. Also, on Thursday, we’re gonna do our weekly Idea Slam, where the community comes together to solve problems and capture opportunities. And then on Friday, we’re going to do the Friday Finish Line and celebrate our wins of the week. Two of the weekly meetings that we have inside the community to help you figure out how to run your small business.
Okay, look, I got this back. It searched Barry’s reservations. Good news, five thirty is open. Nothing to hold it. Worth knowing, fifteen-minute grace period. To place the reservation, they need a name, email, and phone number. Perfect. I’ll do all of that, and we will be good to go.
Thanks for tuning in this morning. I appreciate it. Doing the show is such a joy, and I hope it’s helpful for you as well. Coming up tomorrow, we are gonna talk about getting you on stage. You want to do more stages? You want to be known by more people? You want to become a speaker? We can help you with that. We’ll talk about what it takes to get the stages that you want tomorrow at eleven AM Central. I’m Pat Miller, founder of the SBOC, host of the show. Thanks for tuning in. We’ll talk to you tomorrow. But now, go sell something. See you then.