3 Reasons Why It Might Not Make Sense to Work Together

At Guide My Brand, we love working with all different types of clients with a broad range of expertise. Our sweet spot is working with entrepreneurs or business leaders to help build their thought leadership in their specific area of expertise. And if they have a book, or are planning on writing a book soon? Even better! 

Do we work with, and are we successful with clients outside these areas? Absolutely! But one thing we always do before we commit to a new client is make sure that we’re confident that we can be successful promoting them. Afterall, our #1 priority is to be successful and help our clients reach their goals.  

Here’s 3 Reasons Why It Might Not Make Sense to Work Together:

• Our expectations aren’t aligned. 

When we commit to working with a client, we like to set very clear goals and expectations from the beginning of our relationship so that we are set up for success. While I love goals and even reach goals, I once had a potential client tell me, “I’ll be happy if we can get 100 podcasts booked in the first three months,” which was a huge red flag. 

While I agree that sounds amazing, I’m not even sure we could pull that off if everyone on our team worked around the clock on that one client. And I’m not sure half of those would even be a good enough fit to be worth our clients’ time. 

While publicity is never guaranteed (there are just too many factors at play), we like to present case studies of past clients to show what has been successful and what we estimate is attainable (and at the same time, we also hope to blow that out of the water!)

• We don’t feel we can be successful pitching you.

From time to time, for a number of reasons, we’ll get a prospect that we just don’t think we’ll be successful pitching. It may be that their area of expertise is just way too technical or academic, we may have not been successful with a similar topic or client in the past, or we may just know that another publicist is going to be a better fit. 

For example, we don’t promote fiction. Promoting thought leaders and nonfiction authors is a completely different skill set. So when novelists come to us, we will always suggest they contact a publicist who specializes in promoting fiction. They are just going to know how to be more successful with that book than our team. \

At the end of the day, we want you to be successful. Sometimes that means that our team isn’t going to be the best fit. 

• You don’t have time to respond to our emails. 

Ideally, our team tries to take as much as possible off of your plate. It’s why you come to us – you don’t want to pitch yourself. However, we are the experts at pitching you. You are the expert in your field. So while we try to keep your time commitment low, we usually ask clients to set aside a couple hours a week to respond to our emails, write articles and/or do interviews with the media. 

As we kick off a campaign, we always check with clients to find out the best way to reach them for talking points and interviews, along with the best way to reach them if we need something ASAP. We’re flexible and can work through text, Voxer, WhatsApp, even Skype (yes, this has happened!).

While we know many of our clients are busy and even run their own businesses, they are busy people. But we need to know that we’ll hear from you to schedule interviews, etc., or it’s honestly a waste of your time and money to work with us. If we keep the media waiting too long, they often walk away or find another source. 

So while I’ve provided 3 reasons it might not make sense to work together, there are so many reasons why it would make sense! We can help you get exposure for your business, help add legitimacy to your programs or upcoming book, build your online presence, create media hits to share on social media, and so much more!

What are you waiting for? Schedule a free call with us. Let’s see if working together would be a great fit!