Sell Your Services in Five Easy Steps
Marketing a modern services business is extremely different to selling a product. When you market a service you are selling a promise of wisdom, knowledge and capability. That is, you are selling the promise that your team and your business has the intelligence and capability deliver the exciting and hopefully dynamic service that you are selling.
So how do you sell your service to new customers and get them over the line in an increasingly competitive services environment?
1. Build Trust
The first step of selling your dynamic service promise is to build trust. A trusting customer is one that comes to you with the existing belief (usually by referral or word of mouth) that you can deliver on your promise or has been convinced by you that you are deserving of their trust. Whether that promise be good legal skills; good accounting skills; good architecture skills or great IT skills – believing that your team has the capability to deliver is the first step to making a sale.
2. Demonstrate Your Capability
Everybody loves a sample, and exciting, cutting edge services is no different. People love to think, early in their relationship with a professional services provider that they can get something for nothing. This also provides you with the most solid opportunity to demonstrate the depth of your business’s capability by delivering over and above expectations. Be careful at this point not to give away the farm though – there is many leads in every sales process who are only there to tyre kick. Try to sort them out before you keenly offer your demonstration and innovation for free.
3. Set Expectations
Customers who seek professional services often don’t know exactly what they are buying. It helps therefore to have clear and concise steps that you walk a new customer through as a part of your sales process. This helps both you and them define the service that they are buying. Putting these fences up at an early stage of your trusted relationship ensures that they understand the boundaries, and allows you to manage their expectations if their scope of service requirements change. It is amazing how many large services businesses fail to manage their clients through a thorough and fair expectations-setting process that ensures that no-one has unfair or unrealistic expectations.
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