Give your clients what they want
How many times this past week have you asked yourself, “How well do I know my clients?”
Understanding
Knowing what your clients need and want is very important in building and maintaining a great relationship with them. This builds trust and essentially leads to long term relationships that could lead to more clients and opportunities coming to your business. In this post we define that giving your clients what they want is best for business.
Loosely translated, this means you have empathy for your clients’ needs and wants, and have an excellent understanding on how to make things happen.
Anticipating their needs is the first part of maintaining a successful business relationship. This takes time to develop, and in the Virtual Assistant industry this is a fundamental skill that everyone needs to learn as quickly as possible. Clients can be very fickle or particular, about the way they want certain tasks and deadlines completed and having this skill will help a long way in building trust. For example, if a client has a habit of forgetting to assign a task to a staff member or doing a routine HR or finance related task on a certain day, volunteer to remind them thereof or even offer to complete the task!
External sources are often perceived as the second brain of the client, and this is especially important in the VA industry.
Research
Make it a point of doing constant research to see what news and or events are taking place locally, nationally and internationally in your business field. It will give you an added advantage when pitching to new clients. For example, if in Joburg, the VA’s are offering a new Meeting schedule template for clients, which they are free to use even after their contract with their VA is complete, why not do a trial in Cape Town or wherever you are based to see if it would work.
As stated in this article “It doesn’t start with the product. It starts with the customer”. This means you have to always keep your customer in mind when developing new products and services.
Empathy
As stated before, always look at ideas from a client’s perspective, how to make things as easy as possible for them, by trying to put yourself in their shoes. The article highlights the different ways in which some marketers tried to use empathy to try and lock potential client’s attention to a particular business or initiative.
You can use this in all forms of your marketing including Social Media. Before pitching any ideas by trying to appeal to emotion there are four aspects you need to look at: Thinking, Feeling, Seeing and Doing.
Also use this method for all your stakeholders when liaising with them. It goes a long way in determining what clients want and fulfilling that want. Clients always look for employees and contractors to get the job done as quickly and accurately as possible. Understanding their needs and wants and anticipating them can put you ahead in your industry.
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- Credit goes to www.copyblogger.comand author Demian Farnworth
