Most of the people and organizations I work with prefer to be seen as a trusted advisor rather than a commodity. It allows them to make more money and help their clients on an ongoing basis.
What about you? Are you doing business on a project-by-project basis? You may be a commodity, whether you thought you were or not! You're probably selling yourself short and under servicing your clients.
For better or worse, we've become a subscription-based society. You probably have multiple services you pay for on a monthly basis, like your cell phone, Netflix, or even Amazon Prime.
One of my long-term clients is in the digital marketing space. A few years ago, he was providing low-end website hosting to his clients when his servers were attacked by hackers. My client ended up unexpectedly fighting the hackers for six weeks straight, which put other projects on the back burner.
He was shocked to find out that most of his clients assumed their low-end hosting included fighting hackers. In fact, they didn't know they had low-end hosting!
My client ended up raising his prices by around five times per client and lost almost no business. In fact, his hosting services went from being a minor part of his business to a rather significant portion. And his clients preferred it that way!
We've seen it in Sandler as well. On the international level, our organization has invested in project-based solutions. In one specific instance, we discovered during the process that the project would take two years to implement and would be out of date by the end.
Can you imagine how irritated we were? Do you think we would have preferred to pay for an ongoing service instead? Of course!
Of course, you can't make it about yourself. But are there ways you can provide an ongoing service to your clients, make more money, and provide better service?
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