(Photo by Athena Workman)
Focus on your clients and prospects. You’ve probably heard those words many times, and know you should do it, but are you actually doing it? These days, when all buyers are busy and seemingly more providers than ever are vying for their business, this client-centric focus can make the difference between winning a deal and losing it.
As C.J. Hayden says in her article, Prospects Are People, Too, “Successful selling is not a power struggle between two opposing sides; it’s a friendly conversation between peers.”
You cannot make the mistake of thinking that the perfect sales letter or phone script will guarantee you new clients, she says. Treat your prospects like humans, not robots, and focus on personal exchanges of useful and targeted information.
Matt Heinz, author of the new book Successful Selling, agrees with Hayden. In his podcast interview, How to Avoid Becoming a Commodity in a Buyer-Centric World, Heinz says, “Sales has changed significantly over the past years. No longer can firms have the same approach for every prospect.”
And if you want to differentiate yourself from the competition and avoid becoming a commodity where buyers make a decision based simply on price, take the time to analyze your prospect’s problem and explain how you can solve it for them, he says.
“Take their problem and ask them questions to identify and quantify the problem in a way they might not have been able to do themselves,” Heinz says. “Too often when they can’t do that, they find the easiest thing that they can understand, which is price. And you don’t want to have to compete on price.”
One company who has seen great success with a client-centric approach is On Your Mark. In M. Sharon Baker’s case study on the firm, Market Research Firm’s Client-Centric Approach Leads to Many Cross-Selling Opportunities, co-founder Brenda Laguarta says she knew they needed to focus on their current clients if they were going to weather the economic storm.
By focusing on existing clients and increasing their visibility, On Your Mark found new opportunities in different divisions of their current clients. And to keep the pipeline full, the team started looking and thinking ahead about new opportunities.
“We’re intensely involved in our clients’ businesses, with projects going all the time,” says partner Jeanne Corrigan. “We started to take a look at what we were doing now, what we still needed to learn, and what could help our clients based upon what we were already doing.”
Laurie Young and Bev Burgess further state that the development of new services should focus on buyers’ unique needs. Using a process they call New Service Design (NSD), “allows marketers to create a new perception of value for the core service. They can create different versions of the core service for different segments of buyers and introduce innovations, both large and small, that enhance the existing service and improve its perceived value over time,” they write in their article, How to Develop Innovative and Profitable Services.
In general, services that are high-volume, low-margin, and easily reproducible can more easily be developed using a rigorous design plan than those that are highly customized (like consultancy or other professional services). But it is possible to apply the rigorous innovation process to professional services using their NSD approach, Young and Burgess say. Doing so will enable firms to produce much more lucrative services that are distinct and different from others.
How you communicate with clients and prospects also makes a huge difference. When you communicate using jargon and “corporatese” you alienate them. How can they possibly understand how you can help them when they can’t figure out what you do,” asserts Ernest Nicastro in his article, Is Your Writing Driving Away Clients?
Consider this real-world example from a firm’s website:
“Leader Coaching leverages a proprietary coaching framework, proven over years of practical application and success, to collaborate with clients in pursuit of shared goals.”
Such writing is “flat out bad communication, and bad communication is bad for you, bad for your reader, and, if you’re communicating in a commercial way, bad for business,” Nicastro says.
Fortunately such writing can be easily fixed using a simple tool in Microsoft word—Spelling & Grammar Check. It provides four important results that can make the difference between good writing and bad writing. Businesses would be well-advised to use it before sending out or publishing anything.
Now that you know how some firms are benefiting from a client-centric focus, tell us what you’re doing—or plan to do. What results have you seen?
