Why I Often Tell Clients NOT To Hire Me
Sometimes the best thing you can say on a sales call is don't hire me.
I hate selling. I always have. The language of it never sat right with me, closing, prospects, pipeline, all of it, and I'm about as introverted as freelancers come.
You'd think that was a problem for someone who has to sell a service online for a living. In 2025 I sold over a hundred thousand euro of my own work. And the strange part is that the growth didn't come from getting better at selling. It came from the moment I stopped trying to be a person who sells at all.
I don't think of them as sales calls anymore. I don't even let myself call them that. Someone books time, and what I'm actually doing is getting a read on where they're at and what they're trying to achieve, then having an honest conversation about whether that lines up with what I can genuinely do for them.
Fit comes down to a few plain things. Is the language they're using realistic. Are they expecting a quick fix or results faster than anything could reasonably deliver. And more than once, when those things don't line up, I've told someone plainly not to hire me.
What I actually say
"Your best first step here isn't to hire me. It's to try this yourself, or find something more affordable, so you can test the water first."
It sounds like giving away a sale. It's actually the only way to end up with the right one.
That's worked because of what it produces on the other side. Somewhere over eighty percent of my customers have stayed with me over a year. A large chunk have been with me over two. That's not a coincidence. That's what happens when you stop trying to sell every single person who gets on a call with you.
I know freelancers who are brilliant at selling, the kind who could sell ice to Eskimos, who can get anyone on a call to say yes. That's a real skill and I don't say this to knock it. But the churn is fast. Expectations were never matched to reality in the first place, so the client leaves within a few months and that freelancer is straight back into selling mode, forever chasing the next yes. If you're very good at that, your job quietly becomes sales, whatever you actually wanted to be doing. I still want to be doing the hands on work, the podcast production and video editing itself, not running a machine that only exists to keep closing.
"If you need to convince somebody, they're probably not your client."
Selling isn't about getting someone to say yes. It's about finding out whether they should.
This approach is slower. Quieter. It looks worse on paper in the short term, because you're turning away calls that a better closer would have converted. But it compounds, because there's less churn, less pressure managing mismatched expectations, and a client list that mostly wants to be there.
There's a version of this you can practice even before you fully trust it. Give real advice on a call even when you already know it means they won't hire you. Say the thing that actually helps, not the thing that keeps the sale alive.
Give the advice, not the pitch
"Maybe here's what you should look at first. Maybe here's the approach that might help, even if it isn't me."
It costs you nothing on the calls that were never going to convert, and it's exactly what brings some of them back later, once they're actually ready.
People are sales savvy now. Most can feel a pitch coming a mile off, which means honesty like this isn't a weakness anymore, it's the actual advantage. If selling has never sat right with you either, this is the version worth trying. Not convincing anyone of anything. Just finding out, together, whether they should say yes.
