How to Sell Your Service

Your potential customers are just like you. Look in a mirror if you want to understand them. This is why you have to talk to live human beings. They need to check you out. Photo Credit: Getty Images

To sell a service, you have to make sales contacts. It could be at a trade show, a networking event, in someone’s office or on the phone, but you have to tell people what you do and start the conversation.

When your goal is to sell a service, you cannot only use blast emails, banner graphics, sponsorships, trade show booths, magazine ads or a website. To sell a service, you must also talk to live human beings. Why? Because of how people make decisions. Marketing efforts are absolutely necessary to make your business known and start the conversation, but you need more to close the deal. You need relationships.

Very simply, your prospects are just like you, and we all live in fear of bad decisions. That’s why any potential customers for your service want to speak with you. They could get all of the same information from your website, but some unspoken force inside them is driving them to read the room. They want to know if they can trust you. You are not selling the capabilities of your machinery. Selling a service means selling promises that you will come through for them.

The Gut Check

Think back to when you had to decide on a service provider. You narrow your choices to two or three, and one seems to be a leading candidate. But then, you get the gut check. You can’t even describe it, but something was not right. Something subtle in that person’s speech or actions created a disconnect between who they claimed to be and who they are. And since you are buying their service, not a product, you have no recourse if they fail you.

You are not selling the capabilities of your machinery. Selling a service means selling promises that you will come through for them.

This is what you are up against when you are selling a service. Your potential customer—just like you—lives in fear of making a bad decision. It is not a conscious thought process. Always picking up clues is a survival tool for our species. And we make significant life and business decisions based on the gut check. Guts checks are intuitive, not logical, but they may make the final call in the decision process.

The Human Touch

Your potential customers are just like you. Look in a mirror if you want to understand them. This is why you have to talk to live human beings. They need to check you out. After all, they are buying a service. They can’t return it or exchange it for another one if you mess it up. A mistake by a service provider means the buyer made a bad decision, and bad decisions have consequences.

The issue is professional consistency in what you say and what you do. To sell a service, keep doing what you are doing to get your message out there, stick to your metrics for contacts, follow through with proposals and take a hard look at what you are doing that could be silently alienating your prospects. Eliminate the gut checks.