Who Will Buy Your Professional Services?
By: Sandy Barris

Are you an engineer, IT consultant or a dentist? How about a business coach, facilities manager, project manager or any of the thousands of professional services wanted by millions of businesses?

Have you recently been downsized or layed off? Or, have you retired and are climbing the walls wanting to get back in the game.

If so, stop and pull out your magic wand, wave it around a few times and imagine creating the perfect professional services business —without fear of failing—what would it look like?

Got it pictured. Now, take your magic wand and break it in half because whatever professional service business you choose to create, you’ll always be in sales and marketing business.

Why, because if you won’t market and close business deals, you’ll have a rough time staying in business.

Of course, one of the keys to your success in a professional service business is knowing, without a doubt, who will want and can afford to buy whatever it is you are offering.

One of the ways to get started is to figure out what and who the perfect client may look like to you:

• What business niche are they in?
• What markets do they serve?
• Who supplies that business niche with goods & services
• Where is that niche located?
• Are there enough businesses in that niche to be profitable?
• Can they afford your services?
• Who would recommend their products or services

Answer these questions and you’ll be well on your way to discovering exactly who’ll want your services.

Next, market to your perfect client using many different marketing approaches. Some will work better than others. Some will start out like gang busters then fad off. Others will crash and burn with no ROI. It’s all good because every success and failure is a lesson and brings you closer to succeeding in your business.

The key here is to create an overall marketing strategy that includes 15 or more marketing tactics. The more marketing tactic you try, the greater your chance of getting in front of the perfect future client.

Keep in mind people absorb information in different modes. Some people like information presented verbally. Talk to them face-to-face; send them a CD/DVD or an Mp3 they can listen to in their car.  Others want info visually; they like to see videos, graphs, charts and pictures to fully understand what you offer.

You should test many different marketing tactics.

• Build an optimized website and use the Internet to describe the benefits of your service using video, audio and the written word.
• Go to networking events.
• Approach your suppliers for referrals.
• Host webinars and pod casts because they are the 21 Century brochure.
• Grow your database
• Email market your growing database
• Create a local Pay-per-click internet marketing campaign
• Develop a social media marketing plan
• Join LinkedIn, Facebook and 3-4 of the other top SMM sites.
• And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Whatever marketing you do, provide a compelling reason to try out your services. If a future client has a choice between many similar services or does not have a compelling need to buy your service, your company will not grow fast.

Targeting big business? Your ideal future client may be hidden deep within the corporate structure. Professional service providers have sometimes found it was easier to sell at a department level rather than target the CFO.

But, it can pay to go to the top first, so you can name drop to the rungs down under. Granted, it’s a lot harder to get to the CXO’s. Is it worth the effort, you’ll have to be the judge. Now, keep in mind that when you do get in front of the CXO, birds of a feather flock together and it could be your ticket into many more C-level opportunities.

Discover what your perfect future client looks like, and how to get in front of him/her and you’ll be well on your way to growing a successful professional service business.

How would you like to be on the top of a best-seller list?

Well, then, why not create your own “best-seller list”
and feature it prominently in your marketing efforts?

People buy what is popular.

The higher up on the best-seller list that an item is—i.e. the more “popular” that it becomes—the more that sales for the item will climb.

For example, if you own an ice cream parlor, create a best-seller list of the most popular flavors of ice cream that you sell.

Post the list at several highly visible locations.
When folks come in, watch the sales of your best-selling ice cream soar!

You can create a best-selling list for any
product/service that you offer.

The power of suggestion helps people who do not know
what they want as well as those who are having trouble choosing what they want.

Many people just can’t make a decision
(sometimes even a life-saving decision), so why not help
them along by showing them what other folks like the best?

Some clients of mine (a husband-and-wife team who run a
carpet-cleaning service) were having trouble selling their service.

We created a best-seller list of the services that
the company offered by using good, better, and best offerings.

This list helped the couple’s prospects to choose the
services that they wanted based on what other people had done in the past.

The sales and profits on these “best-sellers” have increased dramatically.

This means that the sales and profits for the company
are up overall, which was our goal in the first place!

How can you create a “best-seller” list for your products/services?

How Much Information Do You Have?

The first time that I really became aware of the vast array of information available to me for use in marketing my clients’ businesses, it blew me away.

One of the best sources of information is your local library.
Call the reference desk and ask where you need to look for specific information. The librarians will lead you to many sources that you never knew existed.

Most of the recommended resources may be within the library walls or available through the library Web site. In fact, some librarians will do research for you if you just ask them for their help.

My local list broker, Ted Kelter, Vice President of Burnett Direct of Farmington Hills, Michigan, is a great information source. I call him on a regular basis and pick his brain. Ted has been an invaluable resource when I am digging for information to use to market my clients’ products/services.

His “list” advice and direct marketing expertise have been a very profitable resource for my clients.

I suggest that you call Ted 248-932-7100 or look for list brokers in your area. Get to know them and use their services.

Here are some other information source possibilities: I often consult my local Chamber of Commerce because they know who is new in town, who is leaving town, and why.

The local newspapers are great for monitoring the advertisements that your competitions are running. Also, classified ads in newspapers will tell you who is hiring. Bankruptcy lists will tell you where to buy inexpensive equipment that you can use to grow your business.

Local college business offices are another great source to find out who is hiring. They also can connect you with “interns,” college students who are inexpensive to hire and can bring fresh ideas to your business.

Your local “Yellow Pages” and “Online Yellow Pages” have been a consistent source for new business.

For example: I Look for industries that spend a lot of money in the various “Yellow Pages,” and I offer my marketing services to them. The advertising in the “Yellow Pages” will inform you about how much competition you have and how your competitors advertise their services.

Another great source of information is in the Federal Government reports that are available on the Web. A starting point for finding them is www.LOC.gov (Library of Congress). There are thousands of reports available on many subjects. Some of these reports are free, while there may be a very small fee for others. Also, the Web is an endless source of information that can be found almost instantly. If you can think of it, it usually can be found.

What information do you need today that could help you to market your business tomorrow?

Where are you going to go to find it?

Is it the beautiful building in which you are located?

Is it the money that you have in your business account at the bank?

Is it all of the products on your merchandising shelves?

Is it the stock in your warehouse?

How about your great employees? Is it them?

No, it’s none of these things, though all of them are important.

The most important assets that your busi­ness has are its clients and customers! Period.

Without them, you have no business.

“One of the most important lessons
of business is the value of concentrating
on the customers you have.”
Tom Monaghan

I surely hope that you have all of your clients and customers logged into a carefully organized database. It makes it so much easier to stay in contact with your customers if you have all of them in a database.

In addition, it makes implementing many of the marketing methods discussed in this blog much simpler.

A client once hired me to write two marketing letters, one to his active customers and another to his inactive customers. When I had finished writing these letters, I asked my client to send me his database so that I could handle the task of mailing out the letters.

What a mess!

There were about fifteen hundred names in the data­base, which turned out to be his accounting database. The only contact person listed for each customer was the person in the customer’s office who was in charge of accounts payable!

I’m sure that it was important to know who that person was when my client had invoicing issues. However, an accounts payable contact was not the person to whom we wanted to send mail regarding a new product offering.

To make matters worse, my client’s “active contact” database had at least five thousand names in it. On top of that, prospects and active clients were thrown in together. In other words, there was no separation into “current client,” “inactive client,” or “prospective client” files. What a disaster!

Lesson learned: I should have asked my client how his database was structured before I wrote the let­ters for him. My mistake!

We had to put the project on hold until he could find the time to get his database organized with the correct contact names plugged in for each active and inactive customer.

As of this writing, we still haven’t mailed those letters.

Time is money. Please don’t make this mistake with your most valuable asset.

If you don’t have a customer database, or if your database is a mess, it will put your business at a compet­itive disadvantage.

What are you doing to maintain the database records for your #1 asset