Will they come through your door?
If you’re a consultant, a lawyer, an accountant, an Independent Financial Adviser or if you’re selling other professional services, then you face a range of challenges when you come to try to sell your services.
Challenges one – your clients don’t really understand what you do.
Challenge two – your clients don’t see why whatever it is you do costs so much.
Challenge three – your clients are only interested in you when they have a problem or issue that needs an input of your expertise, if it’s to be resolved.
There’s an even bigger challenge. That is that most people buy professional services in a crisis.
Professional services purchases are crisis purchases
Most people buy professional services when they are in a difficult situation.
Those situations include:
I need to take out probate, so I need a lawyer, now!
I’m getting a divorce, so I need a lawyer, now!
I need to speak to an employment law specialist today to help me prepare for next week’s employment tribunal.
I’ve almost missed the deadline for submitting my tax return, so I need an accountant, now!
It’s a sad situation. Most people start to look for a supplier of professional services when the crisis is upon them. This means they’re making important decisions about their personal lives or about their businesses at stressful times. They could be less receptive to good advice at such times. They might choose the practice to help them on the basis of such criteria as:
- That firm as an office in the local high street
- That firm’s name sounds impressive.
If you rely on your new business arriving as a result of this sort of decision-making process, the chances are you’ll always have room for more clients in your practice.
Who are your best prospects?
Your best prospects are not the people who need your services today.
That’s right.
The person who has immediate problems is going to make a purchase, but getting the business could be a very hit and miss affair. By all means, take the opportunity to get new business in these circumstances, but look for others ways of filling your practice, too.
Try focusing on the prospective clients who don’t need you – yet, but either know they will need services in your area of expertise soon, or who are interested in learning more about what you do in readiness for the time when they may need you.
For example, the business owner who is struggling with VAT, end-of-year accounts, taxation and all the complexities of running a business and who is just beginning to realise that some professional advice could be useful, is the sort of prospective new client you might want to be speaking to, even if that business is not ready to take action.
You might be tempted to ask where you could find this person or several people like this. This is the wrong question. What you need to think about is how you can start to draw these people to you rather than going out looking for them.
How can you help the right people to find you?
There are lots of people out in your marketplace who are not yet ready to buy your services but who would like more information about your area of expertise. They want answers to questions like the ones below.
- What is probate?
- What happens when a business has a VAT inspection?
- How do you go about getting a divorce?
You need to find ways of making sure that when the people asking these questions are looking for information, they find you. You become a supplier of information to these people. You’ll stand a much better chance of converting these people into paying clients later on, if you’ve already begun to build a relationship with them ahead of their need to take action.
- How do you do this?
- How do you do this cost-effectively?
- How do you do this in a way that suits the values and ethos of your practice?
That’s what I’ll be dealing with in part two of this series.
What to do now
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About Margaret Adams
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