The other side of giving away free information is the people, typically service providers, who run themselves ragged doing free consultations.   The problem is that the type of people who want to just “pick your brain” (a phrase that I hate) are seldom the people that go on to become clients anyway.

And, as much as I believe that you need to give some information away for free, I just as strongly believe that you must do it in a leveraged way.  Otherwise, you’re giving away the most precious asset you have – your time.

The concept of a funnel is that there is a higher priced service or product at the bottom of the funnel.  People can buy at any level and come into the funnel at any level.  The prices are less at the top of the funnel, and the products or services are much more leveraged.  The model at that point is quantity.  X times Y can be a big number even if X (price) is small.  It all depends on how big Y is.

As you move down the funnel, the service level becomes more customized, taking more time and thus costing more.  The formula is still X times Y, it’s just that now X is bigger and Y (quantity) is smaller.