Marketing your own professional services is simply not the same as marketing a retail product or an anonymous business service. You can't sell corporate consulting like you do web hosting........
If you have enough clients to keep you busy, you must be making a good living, right? Well, not necessarily.
One of the biggest challenges in selling professional services is that what you are offering is intangible.
Remember back in grade school when the teacher asked you to hold hands with a friend on field trips?
Are you finding many of your best prospects already working with competitors? When you pursue a new opportunity, is someone else capturing the prize? Maybe it's time to re-evaluate your positioning.
Every independent professional should have a web site, an ezine, and an email marketing strategy, right? If you're not taking maximum advantage of web technology to market your professional services, you are behind the times, and missing out on huge opportunities. At least that's what most marketing experts would have you believe. But how valid is this advice? And is it for everyone?
A question I often get from clients and students goes something like this: "I've been collecting marketing ideas... and I have a drawer full! I also have a stack of promising leads I've accumulated. And I know it's important to stay visible, so I do a lot of networking, but then I just end up with more names in the stack. How do I prioritize all this?"
I often suggest public speaking as a powerful way to show prospective clients what you can do. Many professionals and consultants have built successful practices by giving free presentations to associations, businesses, and educational institutions. But what about producing your own seminar, where you arrange the logistics and invite the guests? Does this work as a strategy for landing clients?
Entrepreneurs pay a lot of attention to the mechanics of marketing. They take workshops, read books, and hire consultants to find out how to do the best job they possibly can. With my own clients, I often discover that their knowledge of marketing techniques is quite good already. What they might lack is the right kind of marketing attitude.
When you're just starting out in business, it's a safe bet that you need more clients. But what if you have been up and running for a while, and you're still not making as much money as you would like? You may be in the habit of thinking that attracting new clients is the answer, but this isn't always the case.
