[dotemacs]

@dclaysmith:

"Be charitable with your time. Be willing to meet people for coffee and provide free advice. These sort of meetings often directly or indirectly turn into work."

This is so true.

In 'Smarter Selling' by Keith Dugdale & David Lambert, which is mostly aimed at sales people, I took away one nugget (I'm paraphrasing here):

"Don't position yourself on just trying to sell something to the customer, because, they might be pressured and they'll eventually buy it. But they'll wait until the end of the contract and then go to somebody else.

Instead position yourself as somebody who is helping them and give them a real solution. The relationships that you build that way will take longer, but they will be the ones that will last a long time, where the client will keep coming back to you."

When I thought about it, I was doing this anyway, this just made it obvious.