My colleague and I got an email response from our marketing client yesterday. She says she has started working with a different marketing expert, is frustrated that we spent the entire meeting doing a sales pitch, and thinks we really need to regroup to see how we can help her better. This was a surprise.
She had not yet paid my latest invoice so I cancelled that and decided for myself that there is no more need to work with this client. Since, after all, she is working with someone else. And there were some red-flags up to this point.
My colleague thinks she owes her one more meeting so we’ll treat that as a wrap up session. Our client seems to imply expecting we’ll get back to her and I advised silence until getting closer to the next (final) meeting in a couple weeks.
Red flags were her seeming to keep looking for different courses to take and free webinars to watch rather than actually doing the work we were suggesting. Getting offended that one of my marketing emails didn’t have the “right tone” and felt impersonal to her. And a subtle inappropriateness in communication that is hard to quantify but felt slightly off.
There was some small amount of money involved so I was willing to go along with things for a while. However I’m pleased with this outcome. And we had a sense she might not go for our offer of more intensive help. We didn’t anticipate this response. Again, it’s a good outcome.