The Bitch Ditch

Clients who love what you do are the cornerstone of a successful professional service business. Here are three ways to boost the value your clients associate with you and your business.

1. Deliver unexpected value.

Delivering your service with excellence each and every time is the foundation of this method. Excellent service is essential. But you can’t stop there if you want to create top-of-mind awareness and become one in a million in the mind of your client. You also need to proactively manage your client’s expectations, and to provide unexpected value systematically and regularly.

Management of client expectations begins with your very first contact. How you introduce yourself and your business, the messages you provide in your marketing materials and your reputation combine to create a set of expectations in the mind of your client.

And that set of expectations is why your client hires you. If you don’t live up to those expectations, no matter whether or not they are realistic, your perceived value instantly decreases.

Hence, it is incumbent upon you to unearth all expectations held by your client that will ultimately affect her evaluation of your service. Where it’s appropriate, you need to help your client revise her expectations of you. This is an on-going process as you interact with your client over time. But you mustn’t ever forget to attend to the task of managing client expectations.

Adding unexpected value is easy and has a great impact on the positive perception of your business. This can be done in a myriad of ways, depending on what your actual service is just be sure that the unexpected things you do or give your clients are aligned with who you are and what your business is. A couple of ways you might give unexpected value are:

– Giving your home phone number to clients when you’re working on a project that requires late hours or weekend work (i.e., making yourself available outside of regular business hours).

– Keeping a file of information you come across in the newspapers, magazines, and on the Internet that is pertinent and valuable to your clients. Regularly sending this information to your prospects and clients even though they may never hire you.

– Going the extra mile with your services regardless of the short-term expense to you.

– Delighting and surprising your clients in a personal, yet professional, manner such as with a Happy Completion-of-Project card or a new business journal.

– Providing extra services either exclusively for your active clients or at a reduced rate for them.

2. Ensure your client’s success.

This path starts by ensuring that the service you provide is actually going to solve your client’s problem. To do that, you need to perform a thorough discovery process. As part of your discovery process, you’ll determine if this project is ideal for you, and if the problems it presents are ones you can magnificently and happily solve.

You’ll do your best work on projects you find intriguing, interesting, and just a bit of a challenge to your expertise. If the project will bore you or overwhelm you, I recommend you refer it on to someone else who is better suited to it. Give your clients the best opportunity to be successful by ensuring they have the right person for the job, even when that isn’t you. Your client will respect you for this, be surprised by it, and hire you when a more appropriate project arises.

Once you accept a project, proactively reduce the risk your client faces. Your client is expected to provide a solution that meets certain criteria in the areas of schedule, cost, and quality. Be sure you fully understand what those criteria are. Every project needs to rank schedule, cost, and quality in order of importance to the project. The primary criteria could be any of these three. If you have agreed to provide a solution for a fixed fee, manage the scope of the project and your expenses so that you don’t exceed the project fee. If you have agreed to a target delivery date, manage the scope of the project and the resources allocated to the project to ensure the date is met.

And, if you have agreed to a standard of quality, manage the schedule and resources to ensure the standard is met. You can only hold one primary criterion at a time the other two are movable. Of course, the ideal is to meet all three criteria. Help your client’s projects come in on time, in budget, and with exceptional quality.

Don’t just provide your service provide your expertise and your wisdom. Help your clients find an easier, safer, less expensive or quicker way to accomplish their objectives.

3. Toot your own horn.

If your client doesn’t know all that you’re providing her or her project, how can she possibly fully appreciate you? Clients are busy people and they frequently don’t see everything you provide. So it’s up to you to make sure that they know what you’re doing.

But first you need to know what it is that you deliver for your clients. You aren’t just providing technical writing, graphic design, editing or whatever. You are providing solutions, new perspectives, structures, planning, alternatives, strategies, resources, energy, processes, procedures, and more.

Once you know what you provide, find several ways to communicate it to your clients. For example, you can add a hand-written and personalized note on your invoice to the effect of “Terry I really enjoyed the opportunity to brainstorm options to ABC process with you. Looking forward to our continued great relationship.” Or set up several different email signatures, each one focused on an intangible you provide.

If you don’t toot your own horn, nobody else will!

Copyright 2004, Rose Hill, Inc

Rose Hill, Founder and Owner,of Biz Whiz Expert (http://www.SoloBizVille.com) and Team Member of Solo-E.Com (http://www.Solo-E.Com) has been self-employed since 1990. Knowing how to run corporate departments and how to market corporate entities, products, and services did nothing to prepare her for successfully running and marketing a one-person business. That is why Rose created the SoloBizVille and SoloBizU community to specifically to help solo entrepreneurs jumpstart their business success without all the trial-and-error learning.

Find more articles like this at http://www.Solo-E.com, the lifestyle-inspired online learning and connection community. Visit now to receive a free copy of our special report, The Four Secrets of Solo Entrepreneur Success, plus a complimentary 30-day membership.

A consumer will give you about three seconds, maybe 4 if you’re lucky, to get to your message across. To make it obvious that your brand is different, that your brand is better, and why they should take time to care. That’s it. You’ve got three seconds.

It’s imperative that you make it clear that you differ and deserve a languid look.
Three seconds isn’t much time.

Which means you better be different if you want to survive whatever with any degree
of relevance. We’re not talking 20% or even 50% different. We’re talking a complete
180. In a market where products try to be everything to everybody, where
everything gets pushed to the lowest common denominator, you’ve got to set
yourself apart, find a point of difference that can be turned into a point of genuine
differentiation. Then, you’ve got to put your branding efforts toward communicating
exactly how interacting with your brand will be a different experience, and why it
will actually be a better choice. You’ve got to make sure your brand is seen as a
clearly distinctive choice.

The fact is, the number one job of branding today is to get people to stop and look
and recognize in an instant that they’re seeing something they’ve never seen
before and that it meets a justifiable and relevant need, whether it be related to
corp. logo, service, to value, to functionality or fun. It also has to generate recall.

You have 3 - 4 seconds!

Find your point of differentiation. Do not focus on the lowest common denominator,
but rather spend your time and effort concentrating on what you don’t want your
brand to be. Then establish a point of differentiation between the two.

Consumers need all the help they can realizing that what they’re looking at is
actually new, you need to make it a crystal clear. My belief is that the only way to
make it clearly obvious what your brand is, is to make it clearly obvious what your
brand isn’t. To be different you have to start by looking at who you want to be
different from and why.

You’ve got to find yourself a unique opposing foundation with a strong rationale for
market acceptance. I’m not talking half-baked attempt here. We’re not talking Tim
Hortons with a larger cups. A Costco or Wallmart with a longer name or brighter
lights. In dealing with Branding is Everything and Everything is Branding, a little bit
different doesn’t cut through.

Evaluate your competition. Identify where the key emotional and rational
associations linked to this logo/brand is in the consumer’s mind. Who do they
appeal to and why. What sets them appart? Who are the customers and why. How
does the competition’s competition differ? What is their point of differentiation? It
does take real focus to evaluate all of this.

Travel off down that road not yet traveled. To determine which market needs are not
being met and how you can meet them.

We all know that brands help consumers make choices. In a world of branding, it’s
critical that you make unquestionably clear the different and relevantly better choice
you have to offer. This can begin with a strong Corp. Identity that functions on
different levels. (eg., http://www.bullseyelogo.com) That logo may be what opens
the door for you. Three split seconds goes by in an instant.

Umberto Micheli - Creative director - http://www.bullseyelogo.com

The Sears-Kmart merger hopes to fabricate some sort of silver lining for
both retailers but instead seems to embody the inevitable philosophy of “going down together.” Kmart, an already sinking ship, certainly worsens conditions for Sears, and Sears does not have a strong enough current to keep Kmart afloat when there are enterprises like Wal*Mart and Target constantly blasting holes in the stern with brand messages of “smart and classy.”

On the opposite end of the branding spectrum, Nike sits at the top of the todem
and watches the plethora of other brands struggling beneath. Nike is the only brand
of shoe for which people are willing to pay two to three times more just to bear the
swoosh emblem in the gym. Nike is the only athletic brand creating new and original
advertising (i.e. the Nike Pro Apparel “Warriors” campaign) while Adidas, Reebok,
Puma, New Balance, and countless others attempt to “be like Mike” and copycat
concepts to boost their market share. In reality, Nike only becomes more powerful
and valued despite the efforts of brand emulation.

Before Sears merged with Kmart, Sears carried several Nike products, shoes,
clothing, a few sporting goods…etc. However, when Sears announced the
agreement with Kmart, Nike announced to Sears that they would no longer be
needing their shelves. If Sears was opening up to Kmart, Nike was closing off to
Sears. There is a simple equation and contingency of Nike’s brand conservation.

Kmart is known for “lower quality, but dirt cheap,” and Nike is a premium, high
quality brand that can inflate prices based on brand equity and reputation.

What can brands like Sears and Kmart learn from brands like Nike?

Unfortunately
not much can be accomplished at this point because when it comes to brand, this
market does not allow much time and space for second chances let alone acts of
desperation. Nike “got it” from the beginning, and continues to grow their market
share by being the father ship. Consumers can see themselves inside the Nike brand
and feel a sense of pride and confidence. Sears and Kmart cannot even even make
consumers feel like consumers. Being loyal to these brands feels more like a public
service.

Molly Sunderdick
Brand Strategist
Stealing Share, Inc.