Let’s stop saying this phrase because it no longer means what it once did. What it appears to say is: “Let’s work together on this project, and we’ll both get paid.” In the U.S. economy, work is always tethered to usually a monetary reward, or significant shared benefit.
Today, this phrase has come to mean: hire me to work for you, and I will attempt to give you what you want.
It sounds like a friendly invitation, wearing “respectable clothing.” It uses warm words. It wraps a sales pitch inside the language of partnership and calls it an invitation.
“Let’s work together” is perhaps the most practiced example of a bait and switch pitch.
Nobody actually means let’s work together. What they mean is: I want you to pay me. All they are doing is selling but refusing to say or call it what it is.
Using Language as a Costume
The word TOGETHER implies mutual and shared benefit — as if the two parties are already aligned, already in relationship. It borrows the emotional warmth of partnership and makes it an advertisement.
This is not communication. It is a masquerade.
What would an honest version sound like? Here is what we do for clients. Here is what it costs. Here is what changed for these specific people after they worked with us. Here is how you will know whether it worked.
Stepping Out on the Wrong Foot
The problem is not selling. Selling is not dishonorable. Every writer, podcaster, accountant or lawyer sells their time and expertise – offers something of value in exchange.
You cannot build a consulting or business relationship on a currency of feelings.
Why Language Is Used to Entice Rather Than Prove
Enticing language uses words to make people believe in what you are saying words like: Partnership. Growth. Together. Brave. Healthy.
There is a deeper issue underneath this, and it applies not just the consulting programs offered but to an entire culture of professional services that has learned to sell transformation without being able to document it.
The Standard Called Character
If you want to stand apart — not just as a service provider but as someone worth following — the standard is this: say what you mean, mean what you say, and let the proof carry what the poetry never could.
“Let’s work together” in any pitch is “marketing fog” used to seduce.
Good marketing is telling the story that in the end makes a hero out of the customer. Here is what I do. Here is what it has done. Here is what it will cost you. You decide.