Don't Offer Free Audits To Prospective Clients (offer this instead)

It creates a bad perception, wastes everyone's time, and does more harm than good.

Some consultants offer visitors to their websites free audits or assessments.

In theory, this should be a win/win.

In practice, it’s a lose/lose.

If you’re doing this, I strongly recommend you stop.

Let’s explain why…

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Why You Should Stop Offering Free Audits

The idea is simple enough.

The consultant offers a free audit to get a ‘foot-in-the-door’ audit and the chance to build a relationship with someone interested in their services.

The prospect gets free information which might help them. They get to test the consultant out before committing any money. It’s a risk-free benefit to both. 

But in practice, it almost never works.

There are numerous reasons why this is a bad idea.

1. There are better ways to spend your time. Investing an hour or more of your time in someone who you haven’t qualified and who has only shown the slightest interest in your work is a terrible use of your time. There are many better ways to attract better clients and help them.

2. It attracts the wrong audience. Major buyers at major companies don’t want a free audit. It’s not how they purchase these services. Free audits don’t fit into their buying process. The people most likely to take you up on a free audit are those whose budget restricts them to a free audit. You don’t want those kinds of clients. Worse yet, people simply don’t value the things they get for free.

3. It creates a negative perception. I can’t think of a single top-tier consultant who offers free audits. Offering your time for free essentially highlights both how much time you have to spare and how low value it is. It sets the anchor for your services to $0.

4. The outcome is obvious. The outcome of the audit is always going to recommend the recipient should buy services from the consultant. That’s partly why no one wants them. If you disagree with this, here’s a question; “when did you last make use of a free audit?”

5. You can’t create much value in an hour. You really can’t create much value in an hour session. At least not enough to justify a major consulting service.

6. Organisations don’t want people to audition for work. They want someone that’s so good they don’t have to audition. There is a reason, to be blunt, none of the top consultants in any industry offer free audits. They don’t have the time (or the need) to do it.

7. You really can’t create much value in an hour. What can you recommend in just an hour? A few very vague tips? That’s hardly going to be enough value to move the decision needle. What if you later win the client and after a deeper dive you realise they need to take a different approach from the one you recommended?

In short, offering free audits to random people is a terrible idea.

But there are, thankfully, better things you can offer which achieve the same goal.

Offer Things With No Marginal Cost

This isn’t a tirade against offering something for free.

It’s a broadside against offering your time for free.

Time has a direct opportunity cost. Time spent on one activity is time you can’t spend on another. Giving your time away for free doesn’t cost the recipient anything, but it costs you a lot.

Instead of your time, offer tools and resources which will be useful. Help people to diagnose their own challenges. In exchange for an email address, people get immediate value.

Once someone is on your mailing list, you can continue to provide them with free resources and information. Over time, when they have a problem, they’re far more likely to reach out to you - the person whose material they’ve been reading and learning from all these years.

Our rule is simple. We give away tonnes of material for free. But the moment someone wants anything personalised to them (other than a proposal), they need to pay for our time.

Make Exceptions For Friends And Past Clients

We do make exceptions to the above rule for past clients and, frankly, people we like.

Past clients, we help simply because we want to see them thrive.

There are limits of course. If a client is requesting something that would take several hours of work, we’re likely to give a kind no or offer a quote. But, within reason, we’re more than happy to jump on a call, give opinions, or otherwise do whatever we can to help.

We may also make exceptions for the people we’ll call ‘friends of the company’. These are generally people who we’ve met at events throughout the years and interact with regularly.

Develop Great Resources Which Will Help People

The best solution then is to develop great resources which will help people.

Find the best, most pressing, problems people face and develop tools and guides that will help them make their start.

Once you’ve created it once, it helps people indefinitely.

If it’s really popular, you can even update it once a year.

Focus these resources on the areas where people spend the most time or money.

Some common examples include:

• Industry benchmarks

• Strategy planners and templates

• Blueprints

• Reviews and comparisons of industry tools.

• List of great examples

• Maturity and self-assessment tools etc…

I’d suggest avoiding the 50+ page ebook in favour of a simple tool that gives a more immediate result. Interactive tools which let people input information and give a result are especially popular.

When you have a good collection of useful resources, you’re offering people the opportunity to audit themselves and self-identify as potential clients.