Late night phone calls & decisions that aren't so difficult after all

It was almost 10 p.m. when the phone rang. 

I'd planned to stay up past midnight to finish a freelance article, a feature about a VP of a company in Japan, but my friend was desperate for advice. She said it couldn't wait. 

My friend depends on advertising to find new clients. As a one-person shop, new business makes it possible for her to pay her bills and to keep her office in a beautiful complex.

For more than a year she'd been marketing her company on an exclusive website. She needed advice because the next day was her last chance to renew her internet ad for the next 30 days. 

Her ad had been recently removed from its usual, prominent space on the website. She would only be guaranteed that it would appear prominently throughout the month if she upgraded her plan and she had been paying $1,000 a month. 

She didn't understand why her ad was being held hostage; she wanted her ad to be displayed prominently, as often as possible, throughout the month. 

A rep from the website had explained that the link in her ad that led to her personal website had received hundreds of clicks. Clicks meant nothing to my friend. 

She was also unhappy that a competitor who had purchased the least expensive contract possible was given superior placement for his ad throughout the month while her ad had disappeared.

I explained to her that because so few people were clicking on her competitor's ad, it never met the lowest threshold in his contract. This allowed his ad to languish in its prominent spot while her ad had been consumed  so ferociously that it lost its place; its popularity would cost her.

"I don't care," she said. "No one's calling."

She explained that while she had received clients because of the ad in the past, it had stopped being effective. She ultimately decided to cancel her contract and would advertise on another website.

Before we hung up, she asked advice about a client she had turned down. When she tried to refer him to a different company, he told her that wanted her. "It's like dating," she laughed. "The ones you want could care less while the dates you don't care about are the ones that pursue."

I like to think about it in another way. 

A top screenwriting agent was giving advice about pitching one's work. "It's easy to try too hard," he said. "Don't do it. If you sense the person you're pitching to doesn't like your project, let it go. If you have to work extremely hard your project may sell, but it will have problems at every step of its development."

The world wants what it wants. 

Here's to clients, friends and potential partners, who want what we have, without the hard sell.