6 ways to help your clients
Being nice shouldn’t be seen as a negative. The ability to help others is a trait as worthy in business as it is in your personal life. Helping your clients, even if there is no direct payment in it, will hopefully in the long run not only help their businesses but also your business too. Here are just five ways you can help your clients:
Help them solve their problems
Offering advice is all well and good but there’s more to being a successful consultant than just imposing your opinion. Guiding your client to a solution will actually reap better rewards. Your client will know their business better than you. You may know the market but the intricacies of every business differ.
Offer a partnership project
At the moment money is tight for many businesses, so investing in new work or new products is difficult to justify. Offering a partnership project is one way of sharing the load. Make it a project you can both benefit from. For example, they get the benefit of your services or product while you get to use their marketing machine and publicity from being a named collaborator.
Signpost some useful articles
There’s plenty written out there, but finding the most worthy and most relevant to your business can be hard. Consider putting together a regular newsletter that summarises the main discussion points relevant to your services, or perhaps the sector you specialise in, and sending it out to your customer base. Provide links to further articles that will help guide them.
Share your network
If a direct partnership project between you and a client is not possible, consider how two or more of your clients may benefit from working together and see if you can facilitate that link-up. You may not benefit directly if it works out, but people will remember and you may be able to call in that favour again in the future.
Link and share
Again being helpful now could reap you benefits in the future, so make sure your clients have the benefit of a link from your website – get their permission first though. Keep an eye on their social media and website too and if they have something of note, worth sharing with your own audience make sure you share it, retweet it or re-post it with the relevant credit. It will all help to build your relationship.
Make communication easier
The best relationships are built on two-way communication. Make sure it is easy to contact you and that your clients know they can contact you without an invoice heading their way. Keep channels open, even if it’s only to share ideas that may or may not come off in the future.
Clients are the key to any successful business. It takes more to find them and develop them than it does to keep them, so make sure every now and then you pay them the attention they deserve.
