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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.
Ultimately, a failure to set expectations usually ensures a failure of the project simply due to one party expecting more of the other Customer expects more work for the money; Consultant expects more money for the work – it’s a dead end street unfortunately and there is rarely a road out when this roadblock appears.
4. Take away their Pain
Professional Services providers are ultimately hired to deliver a skill and an outcome that is otherwise difficult for the client or business to achieve. It is therefore worthwhile looking at the value-add that you can offer simply by taking away your customer’s pain, in turn making their life easier and ensuring that they have plenty to rave about when they speak of you.
5. Deliver on your Promise
The most important thing you can do is to deliver on the promise that you make as a service provider. Your customer has trusted you to deliver on your promise of being capable to provide this service. Don’t let them down.
Posted in: Sale Services
