Why Clients Shop Your Ideas — and How to Fix It

It’s no fun when clients shop your ideas. If you ever came up with a brilliant idea for a promotion, only to have a prospect think it over, say they’d get back to you, but then ghost you and buy it from someone cheaper, you know the pain of being the unpaid consultant in the room. Being the brains behind a competitor’s sale is not ideal. You’re the one who did the work, thought it through, created the ideas, sourced the products, and made the recommendations only to have someone else place the order and cash the check. What’s up with that? Why are some ideas purchased immediately, while others are stolen, ghosted, shopped around, or just ignored completely? That’s what we’ll explore in today’s episode. If your best ideas keep ending up on someone else’s commission report, you may think you have a pricing problem. But it’s more likely you have a positioning problem. And it starts with the way you build out the experience of doing business with you. You're Not Just Selling Products—You're Selling a Process and an Experience You already know that prospects and clients can buy promotional products from ANY of a never-ending lineup of distributors, both online and off. That’s not what sets you apart. What sets you apart is the experience you create for them, from your First Contact through every other aspect of dealing with you and your organization. This includes: The clarity you bring to the project The confidence they feel in your guidance and The relief of not having to think through all the moving parts themselves Those are just a few of the differentiators, and none of them happen by accident. Instead, they’re the result of: The Messaging you use to position yourself as a valued resource, instead of just another product peddler. The marketing Vehicles you use to reach, impact and motivate recipients to get the desired response from them, and of course… The People you are proactively choosing to engage with. Not just anyone, but those who are less likely to shop and more likely to buy. If you don’t have those three pieces firmly dialed in: Your Messaging, your Vehicles, and your People, then the right experiences are far less likely to happen. Why the Experience You Create Beats Product Alone Every Time Let me ask you this. What does it feel like to work with you? Years ago, salespeople had a much easier time getting away with selling features and benefits. “Here are the features of what the product is, and here are the benefits of what the product does for you.” But in the information age, that doesn’t begin to cover it. A spec sheet can do it adequately. They don’t need you for that. So what are your best clients actually buying from you? More often than not, it goes way beyond features and benefits. It also goes way beyond branded merchandise. It’s: The confidence they get from the recommendations you make The trust they have in your ability to deliver what you promise The experience they have when interacting with you Ultimately, it’s the emotion they feel as you bring all that together for them, taking the stress off their plate and knowing you’ll make them look like a star to their target audience. It’s very difficult to shop that, because so few businesses deliver it consistently. But that’s what they’re buying from you. Clarity. Confidence, and Certainty. If your messaging doesn’t communicate that, then your value is invisible. Without that, you end up with people asking for ideas, shopping them around, and awarding the business to the lowest bidder. Not Every Prospect Wants or Needs Your Full Process, and That’s OK Of course, not every prospect needs a full consulting experience. Some just want a quote on a pen. Others want pricing on 50 business cards. Still others will just ask you to put together your best ideas and tell you they’ll get back to you. All of that comes with the territory.