Don’t serve rabbit food to an elephant and ask if he’s full

I love the show Billions, there are so many real life take aways and some I’ve applied to my business but, BUT, the key is knowing what approach to use, with whom and when. The subtle art of distinction. A few years a go I was trying hard enough to make headway with this abstract business owner who didn’t particularly leave me with too many clues as to how receptive he was about the idea I was presenting. I could tell there was some genuine interest but barely enough so I could move on implied consent. I was stuck. The premium we were looking at was about 100K/year which would have provided him a decent estate benefit at life expectancy and some modest diversification relative to his overall networth. It got to the point where I just walked away from this case for a while and barely kept in touch. I went back to him a couple years later with a proposal that was approximately 4-5 times larger than the original plan. In the interim I became more comfortable presenting larger cases and I thought why not? All of the sudden, he was genuinely interested and curious. The numbers spoke to him. We talked about how he could use the excess value beyond his estate need such as philanthropy and access the CSV during retirement for tax efficiency purposes. He said you know this is something that’s actually probably worth my time. We did some great business shortly thereafter.

What’s the lesson here? Don’t under estimate your prospect or client’s economic scope. Not because you can’t fathom setting aside 500K/year for estate planning purposes that someone else can’t. You can always scale down the idea afterwards but chances are if the idea is large enough, you’ll be taken seriously. However, you should at least be 200% sold on the product you’re recommending and own it yourself to your maximum capacity. Presenting a solution or trying to sell a product you don’t absolutely believe in yourself is as worthless as a hundred dollar bill to a rooster with a hard on. The biggest sale you’ll ever make is the one that you make to yourself.