Sales & Marketing Strategy For Service Based Business

If you try to sell your services using marketing strategies that were designed for product-based businesses, you're going to end up pretty disappointed with the results. This is because selling services and doing marketing for a service-based business requires a very different approach than the standard advice and strategies and tactics that are out there. Strategies and tactics that were designed primarily for selling products and that rarely translate well over to selling services. So if you want to get more clients, grow your business, and sell more of your services, there are three things that you need to know. First, you need to use finish line language. Get this wrong and it doesn't matter how great your services are, how much you care, or how smart and funny and creative any of your sales or marketing materials are, they're just not going to work. Don't worry if you've never heard of this before. I'm going to walk you through exactly what it means and how to use it in just a minute. Next, you need to nail the feature-to-benefit ratio, which will make everything you say in your marketing immediately more powerful and believable, and will make the whole sales process about as close to effortless and automatic as possible. Lastly, you need to be using something called a case funnel. This is a simple but incredibly effective sales and marketing funnel for service businesses that's been proven to turn leads into clients. And it will allow you to replace hoping and wishing in your sales and marketing with knowing and the confidence of being able to generate new leads, new clients, and new sales anytime you want. So let me show you how it's done, starting with the all-important finish line language. The biggest difference between selling services and selling products is clearly the fact that services aren't physical items. They're intangible, and your clients can't see them, or feel them, or hold them, or do anything like that ahead of time prior to making a purchase. Sure, you could offer trials, or demonstrations, or show videos and graphical representations of what it's like, but it's still not the same as being able to pick something up and hold it in your hands before making the decision to buy it. This is why one of the biggest mistakes service business owners make when describing their services is focusing too much on the service itself and all the deliverables that go along with it rather than what is actually important to the client. Because the fact is, when it comes to selling and marketing services, the single most important thing is the end result. This part's really important, so let me say it again. The key to selling more services is to focus almost obsessively on the end result and how the client will be better off after than they are right now. There's a quote in marketing that's commonly attributed to Theodore Levitt that goes, people don't want quarter-inch drill bits, they want quarter-inch holes. Basically meaning, your clients and customers don't want the thing you're selling, they want the benefits of what that thing is going to provide. They want the end result, the outcome. But we could take this a step further, and we should, because people don't want quarter-inch holes either. So what I'm thinking here is we just fill it with as many quarter-inch holes as possible. Yeah, that's perfect. Rather, people want to hang a picture, or a shelf, or a guitar, or anything else that people hang on walls. And this is where finish line language comes in, which is all about highlighting the end state, the end result, the outcome of whatever service that you provide. How will they be better, or healthier, or stronger, or wealthier, or whatever-er? You see, your potential clients all have some kind of pain, or problem, or fear, or frustration that you could help them with. They're all at the starting line, suffering needlessly, and in desperate need of what you have to offer. But because they can't see, or hold, or feel your services ahead of time, you need to show them what the finish line looks like, and show them how it will feel when you guide them across it victoriously, like a winner. Let me give you some examples. If you're a coach or consultant, then you're not offering a package of four 60-minute consultations delivered in person or over the phone. What you're actually selling is better performance, or health, or relationships, and showing them how their lives will be better once they get this taken care of. If you're an agency, then you're not giving clients social media, or content, or video services. You're actually offering the promise of more customers, more clients, and more sales and revenue, which in turn will give them a feeling of success, and pride, and safety, knowing that their business is growing and in demand. If you're a service professional, like, say, a landscaper or lawn care specialist, where you show up at someone's house and take care of their backyard for them, well, you're not just offering a freshly cut lawn, you're giving them back time, and freedom, and the opportunity to spend their weekends doing what they want instead of baking under the hot sun, getting hit in the face with grass clippings. A photographer? You're capturing memories and helping preserve someone's legacy. Child care services? You're offering freedom, security, and peace of mind to parents. Meal preparation services? You're selling convenience, and time, and maybe health, depending on what kind of food you cook. I think you get the point. Next, let's make sure you nail the feature-to-benefit ratio. One of the biggest sales killers in all of services marketing comes down to failing to do one simple thing, and that simple thing is failing to clearly communicate why your potential prospect or client should care about what you're selling. That's it, because if they don't care, they're definitely not going to buy. And this is where so many service businesses go so wrong, spending way too much time on features and not enough on benefits. But I'm getting ahead of myself, and I don't want to totally trash features here, because they are important. Yeah, bro, what you got against features? Nothing against features. So with that said, first, let me uncover the key differences between features and benefits. The simplest and most clear way to put it is that a feature is what something does, and a benefit is what something does for you. To put it another way, a feature is about the service, like how long it takes, what's included, are there any guarantees and things like that. And the benefit is about the client and how they're going to be better off because of the feature, like how it'll make them cooler or safer or smarter or better off in some way. The feature is what enables the benefit, but it's not the feature they care about, it's the benefit and the result they're going to get by engaging with the feature. This stuff can be a bit confusing, so here's some examples. A coffee cup has a handle, that's a feature. The benefit is that you can hold a hot cup of coffee without burning your hands. A pen has a removable cap, that's a feature. The benefit is that you don't write all over yourself when you're carrying it around. A baseball has stitches, that's a feature. The fact that these stitches help you throw it farther and faster, well, that's the benefit. Catch. Now, those are useful examples to help you understand the difference between features and benefits. But now let's put that into a service context. A good example here would be something like, say, Domino's Pizza, which I appreciate is also a product. However, the service is pizza delivery, and the feature is 30 minutes or it's free. The benefit is you know you're probably going to get your pizza in 30 minutes. It's not going to be very good pizza, but at least you're going to get it. And while we're on the topic of time-based features for services, well, FedEx is another good example. Well, their tagline of when it absolutely positively has to be there overnight. Well, overnight delivery is a feature, but the benefit is you're going to get things, whatever it is that you're shipping, fast. Overnight fast. I think you get the picture. So now let's get a little bit more practical, and tactical, and a little bit mathematical. That rhymed more than I thought it would. Because it's time to break down one of the most effective service business sales and marketing funnels of all time, the case funnel. Just to make sure we're all on the same page here, in case you're not already familiar with a marketing funnel, it's also known as a sales funnel. And it's really just a visual representation of the steps that a prospect or potential client would need to take in order to go from having no idea who you are, all the way through to becoming a paying client. And over the past 10 years, I've found there's one simple marketing funnel that continues to beat pretty much anything else I test against it. It's perfect if you sell your services through a sales call, and it helps you to pre-qualify clients, overcome objections in advance, and really just makes the entire process faster, easier, and a whole lot more enjoyable. I call it the case funnel, which stands for coaches and consultants, agencies, service professionals, and experts. And it looks like this. We start with traffic, we move on to the opt-in, then the authority amplifier, then to the application, a calendar booking, and ultimately a sales call where they become a client. I'll walk you through the steps now. Every marketing funnel starts with some kind of traffic. This could be a social media post, a blog, a podcast, a video, an ad, pretty much anything. The key here though, is to drive this traffic to the next stage of the funnel, which is the opt-in page. The opt-in page exists for one simple reason, to get someone to opt in. That was profound. I know. What you want to do here is offer something valuable, like a free downloadable cheat sheet, or a checklist, or a blueprint, or a guide, or some kind of downloadable training. And you're doing this in exchange for your prospect's name and email address, so you can follow up with them later. Once they enter their name and email address, and they hit submit, they're immediately taken to the next stage of the funnel, which is the authority amplifier. It's here in the authority amplifier stage that you want to provide value and establish your credibility and expertise. What works best here is to provide a short training, and ideally in video form, that helps your prospect with a problem that they have. And you don't have to give everything away, but try to provide a quick win, and then follow it up with an invitation to apply to your services by clicking a link somewhere on the page. Once they click the link to apply, they're then directed to an application form, which is the next stage of the funnel. Having an application form for your services is one of the most valuable things you can do, because it not only allows you to collect valuable and relevant information on your prospect, and whether or not you can help them, but it also sets the frame that you're the expert, and you're not necessarily just going to work with anyone just because they have the money. You can choose to review each application manually, or most online form software will allow you to automatically redirect depending on the quality of the application and take them to the next stage. And the next stage is the calendar booking. Here in the calendar booking stage, you can allow your prospect to choose from one of your available times in order to have a quick call with you to go over their application, discuss their goals, and decide together whether or not you're a good fit to work together. All of which of course happens in the final stage, the sales call. If everything goes well up to this point, then your prospect is going to show up to the sales call interested and informed, and with many of their questions already answered through the help of your authority amplifier. If you're anything like me, and you don't particularly love sales calls, you're not a pushy person, and you just wanna help people, then you're gonna love this. Because by setting your funnel up in this way and providing so much value and information ahead of time, when your prospect does show up on the sales call, they've pretty much already decided whether they wanna work with you or not. So now the choice is yours of whether you wanna work with them or not. Pressure, no persuasion, no hard sell tactics required. It's a whole lot more fun too. But as great as this is, there's still a few more things you can do that I didn't have time to get to in this video. And this is why I've linked up a video right here with seven of my most effective marketing strategies. So make sure to check it out now, and I'll see you in the next video. We offer higher quality and we offer better service and all of that stuff that everybody's heard a million times before and they're completely blind and deaf to. So the best way to solve this is to move on to our next point here, which is that you need an ICA. ICA is Marketing Talk for Ideal Customer Avatar.