How do you sell yourself to clients? What do you do well that’s unique from other businesses in the market? In order to explain this to prospective clients, you need to clearly understand your unique strengths. Our strengths aren’t always apparent to ourselves, so you have to do some strategic thinking.
Examine Your Experience
Go over your experience working in this area. Where have you spent the greatest time working? Whatever you’ve done most is probably something you’re good at. You’ve accumulated knowledge and expertise by doing it. If you are anything like me you will be constantly learning new things within that area, leveling up and making sure you are head and shoulders above anyone else in your industry.
As an example, we have been creating and delivering courses for over 15 years and we are still improving and taking our training to the next level, we don't just know how to create and deliver courses we are experts at this. Our experience is not only in the time we have spent doing this, it's the 1000's of customers that go through our training academy, the customers we have coached through to producing their own training courses and academies.
Look at Your Biggest Successes
Go back over your history and look for your biggest successes. Find the times when you really achieved something fantastic. For each, what was behind the big success that made it happen? Sometimes the timing was good, you had some luck, or it was something external to your business, but look for instances where something you did that brought about the success.
These wins may not always be the biggest projects you have worked on but maybe it's the most impactful. Often we will work with a client that needs an email sequence looked at that isn't converting in the way they wanted, many times we have looked over these made a few necessary adjustments in the deliverability, sequencing, or content and they have gone from a near-dead funnel result to a high converting sequence.
Consider Soft Skills
Don’t just look at topic areas you know about or hard skills you’re good at. Look also at soft skills like communication, problem-solving, reliability, or other facets of your personality that affect the way you work. One of your natural strengths might be that you always deliver work on time and you’re always easy to reach.
We are very direct in the way we communicate, let's face it life is far too short to beat around the bush when you can get to the point and move on and our clients love this, it saves them time and save them money with this type of approach. We don't hide from challenges and always have a solution even if it's not exactly what the client thought it would be. Being a master in problem-solving is another of our skills that you could say is brought about through experience but I think it's part of us as a business and culture within our business.
Your Reputation
What do people say about you? When people have praised you before, what did they say was great about your services? Try to find comments where a customer or client expressed their satisfaction with the work you did and see what they said they were happy with specifically. Gather as many as possible and look for patterns. If you can’t find many, reach out to current clients with a survey asking for their feedback.
Testimonials and reviews are the best way to do this, it's awesome when a customer in a 1 -2 -1 setting tells you how happy they are, how you have changed their business but how does this help your prospective customers understand your awesomeness? you have to show them this conversation through a written or video testimonial
Focus on the Positive
Focus on positive aspects of the work you do, not the negative. For example, “I don’t turn work in late,” isn’t a good natural strength. You can frame it positively by saying, “I always turn work in on time.” Don’t make a list of things you don’t do.
Make a list of as many natural strengths as you can. You may know some off the top of your head, but try whenever possible to use actual feedback from clients. Use what you discover in your marketing materials. After all, these qualities are the reason people choose you over another similar business.
Get into the regular habit of collecting feedback from customers and clients so that you can maintain an understanding of your natural strengths.
Conclusion
Going through this type of exercise will more than likely make you feel uncomfortable, I have had this conversation many times yet it is essential for you to gain confidence and show those future clients that you are not having direct conversations with what you are good at and what sets you apart from another business.
As a business owner we don't have the luxury of hope and pray in our marketing we have to take every and any opportunity we can to use the assets we have to engage with our prospects, this exudes confidence in ourselves and in our abilities to do not just a good job but a fantastic job and NOTHING is more attractive to a future client than that.
