Remember your best projects, when it was easy to go the extra mile for the clients you loved?
But were they loyal?
Who’s appreciating your clients now?
Appreciating your clients
I’ve had some nightmare clients over the years.
But I’ve also had some great clients, including some from way back in my early days.
What about you? Did you have some great clients too?
Those clients were grateful for your support, and you valued those clients. You were humbled by their honesty and their trust in you.
You want them to refer you to new clients. you want them to write a testimonial. You would love them to come back again, but you’ve not been in contact for months or years.
You wonder: how loyal are they really?
You appreciated those clients back then.
But who’s appreciating your clients now?
When I was doing bookkeeping and administration, one of my first and favourite clients gave notice that he would move on to another provider. Not because he wasn’t happy with my work. On the contrary, he kept posting praise about me on social media.
He found a large company who had the personnel to do remotely everything that I did for him, (apart from filing). The irony is, I was learning to niche down on my services at the time. Plus, by his admission, I was grossly undercharging.
The only contact we had since then was a few occasions when he provided references for me, which I appreciated. But somebody else is appreciating him now.
What did I learn?
In this particular case, nothing would have changed. However, I have noticed a few things about some other clients.
Some never had a really good look at my website, so they didn’t appreciate the depth of my experience or expertise.
Some never asked me what else I can do, and therefore presumed that I could not do some things that they decided to outsource to somebody else (for a lot of money).
But I was partly to blame!
I didn’t encourage my clients to take a good look around my website to see what else I could do for them.
The reason was partly that I didn’t finish it properly or have it up to scratch.
I didn’t keep my blog focused or up to date, thus diminishing my authority and credibility.
And I didn’t address the matter of loyalty with any of them. I just accepted it, as if I didn’t care.
Learn from my mistakes, and you will go a long way to growing your service business.
