Are you looking to attract more clients or customers right now? If you are, here is a very powerful piece of advice, contained in just 2 words.
Excellence sells
The massive majority of your competitors do not offer excellence. They may be average, good or even very good, but few businesses offer genuine excellence. Take a look at your competitors websites and you will see them offering an almost identical range of services and the same tired promises or guarantees. If one of them (say you) were to break out of that limited way of thinking, so you stood out for all the right reasons, you can own the marketplace; or at least the part where the most valuable clients are!
Doing the right things, uncommonly well: That for me is the essence of every company I know, who provides true service excellence.
This is the opposite of the generic approach I mentioned a moment ago. Don’t offer a range of services, because it’s what the other guys offer. If you do, you will simply blend into the background and attract fee-sensitive prospective clients. These people use fees or prices as a way to differentiate the average providers, as they seem so similar. When a prospect meets or speaks with 3 potential providers, making the same promises, offering the same kind of services and the same kind of testimonials and the same guarantees etc, there’s little left other than fees, to base their decision on. All things being equal, the least expensive seems the best value.
I strongly recommend you avoid that approach!
Developing service excellence
Develop services or products based around the needs and wants of your marketplace. For example, if they want a provider who answers the phone at 8am and none of your competitors do that, DO IT! It gives you an immediate competitive advantage and costs peanuts to provide. Listen to what your marketplace wants and then figure out how to deliver it. Oh, and don’t worry about delivering it cheap. When you are offering service excellence, people are happy to pay an excellence premium.
If you look at most industries, there are usually just a tiny minority of providers, who are at the very top. They tend to get the best clients, charge the highest fees and operate the most valuable businesses. The bottom of the industry is a little larger, but not much. In fairness, as a percentage there are very few really poor providers in most industries. However, there is a HUGE middle, occupied my average providers.
Of course, these average providers will tell you that they offer a very good service, but when you compare them to their counterparts, they are usually very similar. They don’t set out to be average and most don’t even realise they are average, which is why there are so many people in that “average” space.
Success leaves clues
I wrote recently about life-long learning and why we need to constantly invest in ourselves, if we want to reach our full potential. This is equally important, for those of us who seek to offer service excellence. Thankfully, success leaves clues. This means we can study the most successful people and brands and discover what they did in order to achieve so much. Yes, it takes time and no, it’s not easy – But the rewards can be amazing!
How familiar are you with the businesses at the very top of your industry?
How did they become so respected and successful?
When we become students of excellence and invest what we discover into our businesses, we start moving away from the camouflage of average providers in our industry. Marketing your services, when you are offering something that is genuinely, clearly of more value than your competitors, is the foundation of great success.