Too Much Work

“Too much work” is like “too expensive”, and it’s like “too complicated”. It’s an objection in buying your offering (it will take too much work to implement what you’re offering), and you have three options.

If you decide to address the objection head on, and reduce the anxiety at all costs, you might find that it’s a bit of an impossible task. You might find that you’d have to make a compromise, that you’d create a commodity, where there would be no difference with your competition, and lose something special.

If you decide to not address the objection at all, and confidently say “it’s not for them”, you’d be on the right track in some sense. That’s because hidden beneath the “it’s too much work” would be an unsaid “for now”. In a lot of times, it’s just not the right time. Eventually, the prospect will become in a hurry for progress, and they’ll be making the mental space to make a move, and invest the effort. Maybe you don’t have to change a thing after all.

If you decide to be more empathetic to the underlying feeling of “too much work”, you might discover a third option. You can make a smaller offering, a different one, which helps the person where they’re at. An offering that competes with the main offer, in that if viewed side-by-side, the prospect would be tempted to choose one or the other. The “too much work” objection will make them look to your other offering, which solves the objection. Maybe it’s a free thing, even, or maybe it’s a smaller engagement to start, maybe it’s a piece of purchasable content. And then maybe create a third offering to address another objection, like “too expensive”.

It’s funny how you might, at this moment, be thinking this: “this is all too much work”. But if you’re really in the service of the person who wants to make progress, you’ll always be winning by developing a deeper sense of their internal objections, pushbacks, drivers and enthusiasms. That’s because there are more people like them somewhere, and anyway, everyone wants progress, eventually.