Could Your Clients Be Your Best Salespeople?

You’re crushing your service delivery. Your client satisfaction is 99.99%. You regularly save your customers tons of time, energy, and money. Yet, when you look at your sales pipeline, it’s disturbingly quiet. Why aren't these happy clients shouting your name from the rooftops?

The truth is, satisfaction is passive. A satisfied client pays their bill and doesn't complain. However, if you want to grow your business without spending a fortune on cold ads, you need to move them from “satisfied” to “engaged.”

In a word, you need advocates.

“Good Service” Just Isn’t Good Enough Anymore

Want to hear a big secret? For generations, there was a healthy degree of separation between a business and its audience. You’d publicize your services, a client would come in, you’d attend to their needs, and everyone would be happy.

Now, things have shifted. There are so many options out there, and so much noise, that you need to actively work to keep your clients aware of you and your services. Not being involved reads to a client as indifference.

Indifference leads to your business being perceived as more of a utility than anything else—something they pay for, only really interacting with you when they’re paying their bill or complaining. A utility is something to be used, not something to be collaborated with.

Most disconcertingly, a utility is something you wouldn’t hesitate to shop around for and switch from.

This is why it is so critical that you establish yourself as a partner to each of your clients. A partner doesn’t get swapped for whatever’s cheaper. People brag about their partners and try to support their success. People refer their friends to a partner’s services, and go beyond even that.

Transcending Referrals into True Customer Advocacy

There’s a significant difference between someone providing you with referrals and someone acting as your business’ advocate. It’s the difference between a transaction and a mission statement.

While a referral is someone passing your name along with their implicit seal of approval, someone being your advocate means much more:

• An advocate will represent your business—defending it, if necessary—amongst their peers.
• An advocate will go beyond the referral, offering case studies, testimonials, and even speaking to prospects on your behalf.
• An advocate is willing to work past mistakes and continue working with you as an invested party in your business’ success.

This is a critical level of relationship to cultivate, as an advocate not only helps drum up interest in your services, but they are also more likely to subscribe to more of your services.

How Engagement Helps Promote Advocacy

Advocacy isn’t something you can force. That said, there are steps you can take to help inspire this level of advocacy… namely, by consistently delivering value.

Invest in Valuable Reminders

Let’s face it—your team shouldn’t be the only ones responsible for selling your services. They have enough on their plate providing them, never mind convincing others how great they are, and gently guiding them along the sales funnel. Instead, you need to rely on consistent, unintrusive ways to remind your clients and even prospects about what you have to offer. Consider these means of communication:

• Newsletters - Whether print, digital, or both, a well-made and predictably delivered newsletter can make your business look really good. In addition to showcasing your offerings, it serves as a repeated reminder that you’re there to help.
• Educational Drips - Stop selling at every interaction. Instead, educate! Share tips on how to properly use the products you offer, or share industry news and other information.
• Social Media - Social media platforms offer you a simple and inexpensive way to communicate with your customers, humanizing your business and keeping it top of mind.

Ask at the Right Time

Let’s say you started Q2 on a strong foot, helping one of your clients solve an issue that has caused them significant frustration over time. The time to ask for a testimonial or case study is just after the service is finished, not at the start of Q3 during a quarterly business review. Fortunately, there are tools available that can help ensure these requests are made in a timely manner via automation:

• Triggered Surveys - Customer relationship management platforms can be configured to prompt a survey whenever certain interactions take place, giving you a no-effort way to ask your clientele for their thoughts on the effort you put into their needs.
• Prompting - Similarly, there should also be a CTA sent whenever someone gives you a high rating to share their comments on your business’ Google Reviews as well.

Highlight the Real Hero of the Story: Your Client

Your marketing should be filled with success stories, but not necessarily your successes. Instead, your clientele should be the protagonist, with you and your services taking a backseat. While this may seem counterintuitive, there is a very good reason for doing so: the better your client looks, the more likely they are to share the story with their peers, too.

• Highlight the Right Choices - How motivated would you be to share a story that made you look inept and helpless? That’s right… you wouldn’t be. The same goes for your clientele and subject matter. Instead of making your client seem like the fool who needed rescuing, portray them as the beleaguered hero who just needed a bit of assistance and made the wise decision to seek you out. One version of that story makes you both look good, and that’s the one you should tell.
• Focus on Results - As impressive as all the tools and processes that you used to solve whatever problem your client was dealing with are, it’s not what the story is supposed to be about. In your marketing, the hero’s journey shouldn’t be peppered with ads… it should feature the hero embarking on their journey, encountering an obstacle, overcoming it, and living happily ever after. In this case, the hero is your client, and you are how they overcome that obstacle. The happily-ever-after is how well things worked out for them after taking that course of action.

We Can Help Keep You Engaged Enough for Advocacy

Trust us. We know better than most how much of a pain marketing can be… especially when you’re actively running the managed services you’re also trying to promote. That’s why we’ve actively worked to make it as simple as possible for you to focus on your operations without sacrificing the benefits of marketing.

By helping you create an attractive and optimized website, we can allow you to largely automate your engagement. Every form a visitor fills out will create a ticket, schedule a meeting, or add them to a specific marketing campaign. Meanwhile, we can provide you with the collateral and content you need to impress them.

It’s Time Your Clients Started Advocating for You

Sign up today for a free, no-obligation demo of our marketing platform to see for yourself how simple engagement can be.