Entwined with your customers
If you’re an expert selling your professional expertise in your marketplace, you already know your clients don’t always buy immediately.
You’re selling professional services, and either you get your business when someone has a crisis – in which case your success can owe a lot to luck – or you get the business because you’ve taken time to build a relationship with a prospective client over time.
The question you need to think about is how to build a relationship with those prospective clients, so that yours will be the organisation they come to when they need your sort of expertise.
Engage with prospective clients
If you’ve read part two of this series: How to find more new business for your professional services business (2) – the simple solution you already know you need to make your website attractive and to offer useful information to strangers who visit your site, in the hope that you can start to build a relationship as a result.
To be sure of getting their business you need to do more.
Of course, every one seems to be sending out newsletters these days, and offering helpful pdf downloads to demonstrate their worth. You need to do that, but you need to do more. You need to build the personal side of that relationship.
Connect with your prospects
Two heads are better than one at problem solving. Two connections are better than one. Make sure your website visitors and your newsletter subscribers have the opportunity to connect with you on Twitter and on your Facebook for Business page. Perhaps you can set up a LinkedIn group for the core elements in your target market.
Your aim is to build more connections so that you are bringing people closer to you and so that they hear useful and relevant information from you more often.
Present yourself in the right way
The best way for you to present yourself to your audience is in the role of an expert. People approach professional practices for expert advice. You need to build your reputation as an expert with the people who you want to do business with now and in the future.
This means you will manage your Twitter account to promote your expert persona to your marketplace. Your blog will do the same. Your newsletters will reinforce your reputation. Your Facebook presence will help you to make the points about who you are and how you help.
All the content you upload and promote will set out to reinforce that perception of you and your business as people worth knowing. Your content will promote your business as the place to go when someone needs your sort of service.
Remember who people buy from
It’s a truism that people buy from people, but that really is the case. Even when you’re working in a professional capacity, if possible, people still like to buy from people.
Therefore, the secret of bringing in more new business over the longer term is to be perceived as someone who a client would want to work with. Of course, your clients value the reputation of the practice and the support the whole organisation can offer, but they really buy from individuals.
- They want to know about you.
- They want to find that they like what they find out about you.
- They want to believe they can trust you before they do business with you.
Today, however, there’s more.
The know-like-trust continuum is well known to people in business. Today, it’s not enough to work on getting people to trust you.
Nowadays, people want to sample and to try you out before they buy. When you’re selling professional services, the best way to do this is to offer sound general advice freely and to be accessible.
Now’s the time therefore, to think about the image you want to present online and to work hard to build those relationships. Now’s the time to think about positioning yourself as a trusted adviser. Your efforts will pay off in the longer term.
What to do now
If you like this post, please tweet about it or say you like it on Facebook.
You might also like the read:
Are you selling a complex product or service?
How well are you closing the sale?
How to find more new business for your professional services business (1) – The challenges
How to find more new business for your professional services business (2) – A simple solution.
Let me know if you’ve found this series helpful.
About Margaret Adams
[...] also talked about how to get people to show more interest in your business and how to get people to build a relationship with you long before they’re ready to buy professional services in your area of [...]