Selling Services

Selling a manufactured product using marketing techniques is fairly straightforward: identify the needs of your target market, design the product to satisfy those needs, change the product as dictated by your target market, etc. Selling a service from a small business is a bit trickier. For one thing, your service depends on your qualifications and experience and, unless you can afford to hire a completely new team, that is difficult to change. For another, you are really selling confidence that you can perform and that message is difficult to communicate.

Given that the customer usually does not know exactly what is needed, your role is not only to evaluate what needs to be done but also whether it is something that you can do well. This means that before you even start describing your company and what you offer, you have to listen to the customer and extract the relevant parts from an often wide-ranging discussion. Your customer will be describing mostly symptoms and it will be up to you to piece together the underlying problems and which symptoms they are causing.

Once you know that the service needed fits in with what you can do, you have to change the focus of the discussion to solutions and how you can help. This is when you establish your competence and instill confidence with references to past projects successfully completed in the same field and to your expertise and qualifications.

Finally, it is generally not useful to try and propose concrete solutions right there on the spot. Your customer has serious problems which he hasn't been able to solve - he expects that you will have to think over possible solutions before coming up with a proposal. Organize your thoughts for a few days and then come back in writing with a well-thought-out framework together with some idea on costs. Follow up with a call a few days afterwards. Once the customer sees you as a partner in solving his problems, you can nail down a contractual and cost framework for your activities.

The Entrpreneurial Edge offers this book review and excerpt which discusses the topic of selling services in greater detail and has some interesting worksheets which will help crystallize your thoughts with regard to talking about your service.

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