Making-Money-Month Is Now!

Clients who love what you do are the cornerstone of a successful professional service business. Here are three ways to boost the value your clients associate with you and your business.

1. Deliver unexpected value.

Delivering your service with excellence each and every time is the foundation of this method. Excellent service is essential. But you can’t stop there if you want to create top-of-mind awareness and become one in a million in the mind of your client. You also need to proactively manage your client’s expectations, and to provide unexpected value systematically and regularly.

Management of client expectations begins with your very first contact. How you introduce yourself and your business, the messages you provide in your marketing materials and your reputation combine to create a set of expectations in the mind of your client.

And that set of expectations is why your client hires you. If you don’t live up to those expectations, no matter whether or not they are realistic, your perceived value instantly decreases.

Hence, it is incumbent upon you to unearth all expectations held by your client that will ultimately affect her evaluation of your service. Where it’s appropriate, you need to help your client revise her expectations of you. This is an on-going process as you interact with your client over time. But you mustn’t ever forget to attend to the task of managing client expectations.

Adding unexpected value is easy and has a great impact on the positive perception of your business. This can be done in a myriad of ways, depending on what your actual service is just be sure that the unexpected things you do or give your clients are aligned with who you are and what your business is. A couple of ways you might give unexpected value are:

– Giving your home phone number to clients when you’re working on a project that requires late hours or weekend work (i.e., making yourself available outside of regular business hours).

– Keeping a file of information you come across in the newspapers, magazines, and on the Internet that is pertinent and valuable to your clients. Regularly sending this information to your prospects and clients even though they may never hire you.

– Going the extra mile with your services regardless of the short-term expense to you.

– Delighting and surprising your clients in a personal, yet professional, manner such as with a Happy Completion-of-Project card or a new business journal.

– Providing extra services either exclusively for your active clients or at a reduced rate for them.

2. Ensure your client’s success.

This path starts by ensuring that the service you provide is actually going to solve your client’s problem. To do that, you need to perform a thorough discovery process. As part of your discovery process, you’ll determine if this project is ideal for you, and if the problems it presents are ones you can magnificently and happily solve.

You’ll do your best work on projects you find intriguing, interesting, and just a bit of a challenge to your expertise. If the project will bore you or overwhelm you, I recommend you refer it on to someone else who is better suited to it. Give your clients the best opportunity to be successful by ensuring they have the right person for the job, even when that isn’t you. Your client will respect you for this, be surprised by it, and hire you when a more appropriate project arises.

Once you accept a project, proactively reduce the risk your client faces. Your client is expected to provide a solution that meets certain criteria in the areas of schedule, cost, and quality. Be sure you fully understand what those criteria are. Every project needs to rank schedule, cost, and quality in order of importance to the project. The primary criteria could be any of these three. If you have agreed to provide a solution for a fixed fee, manage the scope of the project and your expenses so that you don’t exceed the project fee. If you have agreed to a target delivery date, manage the scope of the project and the resources allocated to the project to ensure the date is met.

And, if you have agreed to a standard of quality, manage the schedule and resources to ensure the standard is met. You can only hold one primary criterion at a time the other two are movable. Of course, the ideal is to meet all three criteria. Help your client’s projects come in on time, in budget, and with exceptional quality.

Don’t just provide your service provide your expertise and your wisdom. Help your clients find an easier, safer, less expensive or quicker way to accomplish their objectives.

3. Toot your own horn.

If your client doesn’t know all that you’re providing her or her project, how can she possibly fully appreciate you? Clients are busy people and they frequently don’t see everything you provide. So it’s up to you to make sure that they know what you’re doing.

But first you need to know what it is that you deliver for your clients. You aren’t just providing technical writing, graphic design, editing or whatever. You are providing solutions, new perspectives, structures, planning, alternatives, strategies, resources, energy, processes, procedures, and more.

Once you know what you provide, find several ways to communicate it to your clients. For example, you can add a hand-written and personalized note on your invoice to the effect of “Terry I really enjoyed the opportunity to brainstorm options to ABC process with you. Looking forward to our continued great relationship.” Or set up several different email signatures, each one focused on an intangible you provide.

If you don’t toot your own horn, nobody else will!

Copyright 2004, Rose Hill, Inc

Rose Hill, Founder and Owner,of Biz Whiz Expert (http://www.SoloBizVille.com) and Team Member of Solo-E.Com (http://www.Solo-E.Com) has been self-employed since 1990. Knowing how to run corporate departments and how to market corporate entities, products, and services did nothing to prepare her for successfully running and marketing a one-person business. That is why Rose created the SoloBizVille and SoloBizU community to specifically to help solo entrepreneurs jumpstart their business success without all the trial-and-error learning.

Find more articles like this at http://www.Solo-E.com, the lifestyle-inspired online learning and connection community. Visit now to receive a free copy of our special report, The Four Secrets of Solo Entrepreneur Success, plus a complimentary 30-day membership.

As Branding and marketing professionals, we have an in-depth understanding of the importance of a marketing plan. However, not everyone recognizes the benefits of investing in a strategic marketing plan prior to launching strategies and tactics that seem intuitive at the time. The following few paragraphs attempt to impart our understanding of a well-written plan’s importance by first defining some of key elements of the role of marketing in most organizations.

Defines Focus: Your strategic marketing plan gives the company, and everyone in it, a benchmark to measure all marketing activities against. A well-developed strategic marketing plan not only gives you a structured strategic and tactical outline, but also defines your target audience, messages, goals, and objectives, in a way that allows flexibility. A structured plan provides a benchmark to measure all marketing activities and ensure that the investment they require meet the needs and goals of the marketing plan - preventing you from spending on wasted efforts. It helps staff understand goals and become customer-focused. It also empowers them to make decisions on their own that are consistent with the company’s objectives.

Tracks Costs / Measures Value: A marketing plan provides a step-by-step guide to what you are spending money on and when. It enables you to budget marketing expenses–helping you keep control of your expenditures, manage your cash flow, track sales to marketing expense ratio, and measure success of your marketing efforts. It also ensures that product development dollars are not wasted.

Charts Success: A marketing plan helps you chart your destination point. It becomes a guide through unfamiliar territory.

Captures Thinking on Paper: The finance department isn’t allowed to run a company by keeping numbers in their heads. It should be no different with marketing. Your written document lays out your game plan. If people leave, if new people arrive, if memories falter, the information in the written marketing plan stays intact.

Reflects the BIGPicture: In the daily routine of putting out fires, it’s hard to turn your attention to the big picture, especially those parts that aren’t directly related to the daily operations. Writing your marketing plan helps in determining your current business status and provides a roadmap for business goals.

Becomes a Document to Build On: Creating your very first strategic marketing plan is a time and resource consuming endeavor, but well worth the effort. Once the plan is complete, you just need to make minor adjustments and tweaks to it; you won’t have to re-create it from scratch. It will serve as a template and benchmark for you to work from as you define your objectives and strategies for future years. It becomes a living document for measuring sales success, customer retention, product development, and sales initiatives.

Where Do You Start?

The best place to start is to evaluate where you are now. How are you positioned in the market? How do your customers see you? What are your strengths/weaknesses, and what are some emerging market threats and opportunities?

Typically the strategic marketing plan is done in sequential phases–each part of the plan builds off of the phase before it. Your strategic marketing plan also needs the help of most everyone; it cannot be completed without the assistance of many people within the company: finance, operations, sales, management, and marketing.

Your Strategic Marketing Plan Should Include Include:

Phase 1

Situation Analysis: Defines the market dynamics and identifies client’s position in the market as it currently exists and will summarize the current situation from an internal and external perspective.

Industry Overview: Defines the current market situation and explores market trends and product consumption.

Competitive Profile: Identifies key players in the market and defines their positions, strategies and initiatives. This section is designed to give the client a clear understanding of the competitive dynamics of the marketplace and will provide you with valuable information for developing your future strategies and target markets.

Customer Profile: Provides an analysis of each of the potential target markets, regarding their use of the product and the factors affecting their buying process. This information is gathered using a variety of research tactics and may include you contacting a number of organizations within each category to gather facts about the buying process.

S. W. O. T. (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats):
Provides client with an in-depth view of the strengths and weaknesses of his or her organization, both from an internal and external perspective. It also defines potential opportunities and threats. This section is critical because it provides an objective summary of both perceptions and issues that will affect the success of future marketing efforts.

Target markets: Key target markets will be identified given the competitive situation, growth potential and product offering of the client. These markets will provide the best opportunity to develop strong brand awareness and will maximize the potential for both market share and revenue growth.

Phase 2

Key Objectives: Once all of the information is gathered during Phase I of the plan, you will work as a group to define the key objectives that will be instrumental in developing future strategies and tactics.

Positioning: After reviewing the industry, competitive information, company objectives, you will then define the new positioning in the marketplace. It will tie directly to the company ’s strengths and will reinforce its objectives and strategies.

Summary: A summarization of all relevant factors and information will be completed prior to developing strategies and tactics.

Phase 3

Strategies: You will then develop marketing and communication strategies that support the positioning and key objectives. These strategies will address channels of distribution, as well as define key corporate sales messaging.

Tactics: A list of marketing and communication initiatives that support and reinforce the company’s positioning, objectives and strategies will be developed. You will identify and produce the marketing support tools that provide the largest return on investment and ones that will substantially increase a client’s brand recognition and market share.

The Strategic Marketing Plan is a comprehensive effort that will allow a company to direct its resources toward achieving a common goal. It has been our experience that a Marcom plan plays a vital role in developing accurate messaging and provides a forum for consistently delivering those messages to your marketplace. It is the one document that ensures that every dollar spent on your efforts reinforces the corporate objectives, identity, image and Corporate Branding.

Scott White is President of Brand Identity Guru a leading Corporate Branding consulting and Branding research firm located in Boston, Massachusetts.
Brand Identity Guru specializes in creating corporate and product brands that increase sales, market share, customer loyalty, and brand valuation.

This Article may be freely copied as long as it is not modified and this resource box accompanies the article, together with working hyperlinks.

OK, so you took the plunge and purchased your internet domain. Good for you! Now what? According to Google.com there are about 8,058,044,651 current web pages. That’s billion with a “B”! So how do you stand out?

The first thing you should do is stop using a free email service. More often than not, a potential client will delete your email if they are not familiar with whom it is coming from. Think about what you do with emails that you are not familiar with. Having your domain name in the “From” field lets them know that it is you and your business that is calling on them. Plus, don’t you want your business name in front of as many eyeballs as possible?

If you use a free or fee-based email service (Hotmail, Yahoo!, AOL, Earthlink, etc.) then at least make it work for you. Having an email named wilsonwidgets@hotmail.com is much more identifiable than wilwid123@hotmail.com and again puts your companies name in front of the client. If you choose to send email via one of these services then most people will assume that you do not have a web presence and that can reflect negatively on your brand.

The best way to present your identity to your clients via email is to make sure that they are reading what you are sending out. If they delete it then they never read it.

In many cases, email accounts come free with standard hosting of your domain, so it makes zero sense to not have your own personalized email account.

Bottom line: If your email address doesn’t convey any meaning about you and your business, every email you send will be a missed opportunity.

Glenn Geiger is the Director of Interactive Services for Pixallure Design LLC, http://www.pixallure.com. Glenn has worked in Web site design, development, systems administration and management since 1987, including work for DynCorp, Accent Software, GlobalKey, Inc., and Digital Equipment Corp.

This article may be freely distributed as long as the author’s bio is included with an active link to http://www.Pixallure.com.

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