Think about how you can put a dollar figure on all the value a client receives by using your services. Photo / 123RF
COMMENT: An interesting way to promote your service is to focus on the financial payoff that your client enjoys by using it.
In other words you look at their Return on Investment or ROI.
Here are four examples to get you thinking.
I've had a Major Care Health Insurance Policy from Sovereign Insurance for many years now.
For this policy I pay a monthly premium to be covered for medical expenses that are usually expensive.
My current monthly premium is around $240.
So I'm investing around $3,000 a year for my health insurance policy.
Two years ago I had an unexpected heart problem occur that needed treatment.
Over the next four months I had medical services costing around $50,000 and my heart condition was completely fixed.
My Major Care Health Insurance policy covered all these costs in full except for a small once only excess of $600.
So my payoff for my $3,000 annual investment was $50,000.
Plus I had the advantage of getting the best treatment for my condition right away rather than having to wait for months in the public health care system.
One of my clients is an Employment Law Advocate called Paul Brown.
Paul works with a wide range of organisations to help them minimise the costs of employment law disputes.
I was chatting with Paul a few weeks ago and he told me about a business that had just been ordered to pay out $140,000 to one of their managers because they had dismissed him unfairly.
Paul had read the case in full and told me that this company could have saved at least $130,000 if they had talked with him before they decided to dismiss their manager.
Paul's advice would have cost this business no more than $1,000 so they would have enjoyed a massive return on their investment.
smartAR is a business that helps professional services firm (like accountants and lawyers) to get paid faster by their clients.
I was chatting to Dave Birch the Managing Director of smartAR recently and he told me that if a client invests around $250 a week in using their services their track record is to put over $40,000 over money into the clients bank within 90 days of starting work for a client.
90 days is three months or 12 weeks.
So for an affordable investment of $3,000 (12 weeks at $250) the professional services firms that use the services of smartAR get a return on investment of $40,000.
More than ten times what they have paid.
Plus they free up the time of their own staff to do more productive activities rather than chasing up clients who are late paying their accounts.
A few years ago I created a simple two page motivational newsletter that I customised for a number of my clients.
I encouraged each client to send this newsletter out in hard copy format to 200 or more of their customers and key contacts each month.
I explained that it was very uncommon to receive something like this in the mail.
And by adding value like this each month they would get positively remembered and generate some highly profitable referrals and easy repeat sales.
I also told each client that used the newsletter that they would start to see great results after they had used it for six months.
One of my clients who used this newsletter was a real estate agent.
He dutifully sent out this newsletter each month by post in hard copy format to 250 of his customers and key contacts.
It cost him about $2 a month for each client for printing and postage. So over six months he invested around $3,000.
(Plus there was a fee to me for providing him with the newsletter.)
He started doing this in May and in December he contacted me to tell me what had happened.
He explained that in November he had signed up 9 auction listings and 8 of these listings had come through the 250 people that he had been mailing the newsletter to.
His average commission on each listing was around $10,000 so the return on his investment for using this newsletter was around $80,000.
Significantly more than what he had invested.
My suggestion to you this week is to think about how you can put a dollar figure on all the value a client receives by using your services.
In many cases this dollar figure will give many of your clients a massive payoff and very high return on investment from using your services.
Which would make investing in your services a smart financial investment.
"Wise spending is part of wise investing. And it's never too late to start." - Rhonda Katz
Action step: What is the payoff in dollars for a client using your services?
- Graham McGregor is The Added Value Marketing Expert™. Register at his website www.addedvaluemarketing.com and Graham will give you a free copy of his brand new free guide 'Easy Sales with Added Value Marketing'. (This guide contains ten time tested strategies that any business can use right now to create easy sales and delighted clients and is with Graham's compliments.)
Scott Carr has had many leadership roles over a 35-year span.