Selling your service-based business takes a different kind of savvy than a product-based sale. Products are tangible. Your customers can see, feel, even smell a product! Product sales are more straightforward, require shorter sales cycles, and are less complex than service sales.
With nothing tangible to showcase, services can feel invisible. How can you convince a buyer to hand over money to you for a promise and a prayer? Yikes!
Not to worry: mastering the art of selling services is within your reach. I’m outlining all of my best tips and strategies below!
1. Trust and social proof
In a services sale, you are the product. Read that again. You are selling you. The transformation your skills and knowledge can provide to others is the offer you bring to the world.
Throughout your marketing content, speaking engagements, articles and public relations spots, the onus is on you to prove why YOU are the expert in the specific subject matter.
Are you a web designer? Why? How much experience do you have? What transformations have you provided to your clients? What do your reviews look like? Why should buyers trust that you have the education and skills to be their first choice for a website designer?
Think like the buyer here. What do you want to know about someone before you hire them to provide a service for you? Share that information and more to become the go-to choice.
2. Reputation
Is everything.
Protect it.
3. Value first, not price
Comparing service providers is not exactly comparing apples to apples. Certainly, users could compare my hourly rate to another sales coach’s hourly rate. That won’t tell them anything, though. (One, because I am still priced too low and I know it!)
To determine if I’m worth the hourly rate I charge, a buyer will mostly likely look at the value I’ve provided. Check out my LinkedIn page. Check out my education and credentials. My experience. My testimonials. This website and all of the content I share for free. My Instagram page and Facebook group. There are lots of ways to not only see what I say about my zone of genius, but also what others say about it.
Those transformations are how your buyers determine value.
Start there and then continue seeking ways to add additional value to your programs. This is how you always stay ahead of your competition. Don’t get comfy, continue to innovate and respond to the market.
Perhaps you can speed up the transformation and as a result, up your price.
Improve your customer experience, up your price.
Provide an even better transformation, up your price.
4. Clear transformation messaging
How you communicate your value will determine how successful you are able to be in selling your services to others. This requires quick, concise and ultra clear pitches.
Features and benefits will not work here. Your focus needs to remain purely on the TRANSFORMATION: statements that are 100% focused on the buyer.
For example, I help entrepreneurs make more money by coaching strategic sales techniques to superchange their revenue. Notice – that is 100% about the buyer, not about me.
5. Customer service experience
The most predictable, simplest, and cheapest way to grow is to leverage your existing clients. You cannot leverage those clients unless they are WOWed by their experience with you.
Take a look at your onboarding process. Are your customers confident and clear in your entire process? Are you getting a lot of feedback/emails asking what’s next? That would be a clear red flag saying you need to communicate better.
Ensure again that you are thinking like your customer. How would you want the process to flow if you were on the other side of the table?
Are you investing your entire self during their experience? Do they feel you are caring about every detail? That you are grateful to work with them as a client? Review your company’s values again. How can you inject even more of your core values into your client experience?
6. Ask for the referral
Just as I coach my clients to ask for the sale, as a service seller you need to ask for the referral. In the same way that you begin by inviting your potential customers to work with you, you’ll end the engagement by asking your client if they have a friend that wants the same transformation you just provided for them.
Similarly, invite your client to share their experience! Use your clients’ testimonials everywhere. Reviews on Facebook and Google. On your website. Your social media pages. Everywhere.
Be sure to document the metrics. If you’re an Instagram coach, you can easily snapshot your client’s insights prior to working with you, and then again at the completion of your work. Numbers dont lie. How many can you gather to prove your transformation? These are your receipts! Collect them like gold!
Selling Your Service: Next Steps
I hope you feel more empowered to share your sphere of genius with the world! Remain clearly focused on the transformation you provide to your customers. Get as tangible as you can. Share, share and share again.
When you’re ready for help with the implementation of these skills, your Sales Cheerleader is here! Let’s see if I’m a good fit to help you supercharge your revenue, NOW. Book your 20 minute discovery call with me today!
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