Is the desire to offer preventative services, stopping you gaining new clients?
“I wish I could start working with clients before they experience a problem.”
That’s what I regularly hear from consultants, coaches and experts.
By working with clients before they experience a problem, you can help them save time, money and stress by avoiding the issue or at least mitigating its impact. With your preventative services you can deliver a wider more positive impact to your client’s business.
This positive approach is more satisfying, enjoyable and rewarding for you, hence the wish to work with clients before they experience a problem.
Unfortunately, all the time there’s not an urgent issue to address, prevention tends to be less of a priority or ignored all together.
Take an HR Consultant, for example, who enjoys creating policies and procedures that reflect the culture and values of a business.
They enjoy focusing on providing positive, preventative services that add value to the business, rather than the stressful ‘curing’ of people person challenges.
Yet time and again they are engaged when there’s a crisis with an employee.
It’s a stressful situation for all concerned. Firefighting, time spent getting to the root of the problem, disciplinaries to conduct and a resolution to be found and agreed upon.
Perhaps you’ve had similar experiences within your field of work?
Do you have to accept that you’re always going to be working on the stressful ‘cure’ and not the satisfying ‘prevention’?
Well, yes and no.
Not everyone is in firefighting mode. There are opportunities to work with clients who are proactive and forwarding thinking with a positive manner.
To attract these clients, you can create products, services or packages that focus on preventive measures.
Your marketing content can educate on risks of not taking action and the benefits of taking early preventive measures.
But, if you accept that many of your clients find you because they are experiencing a crisis, how can you turn this to your advantage?
Look towards the long-term relationship.
Once you’ve done a great job resolving the current issue, what opportunities are there and what services can you offer to shift to preventative mode and continue to work with this client?
The result – a satisfying and enjoyable working relationship and continuing revenue from the client.
Foot in the door
Whilst it may not be top of your list to be delivering crisis solving services, being known as the expert for resolving a particular issue can be the foot in the door to a longer term and more satisfying working relationship with the client.
Implementing these ideas into your marketing
If you feel that your marketing efforts are ad-hoc and scattergun and you’d like to be more targeted, so you can attract the types of clients you’d really love to work with, and you’re not sure where to start, then please arrange a complimentary and informal chat and let’s see what ideas we can come up with.
