When you make the work you do for your clients look easy, they could ask whether you are delivering value and if it’s that easy, why they aren’t doing it themselves and saving the money.
It’s tricky, isn’t it? You want to wow them with your awesomeness, but if you’re really good at what you do then your value can be taken for granted because it all looks so seamless.
This happened to me recently when I organised an offsite/overnight conference. Admittedly it was a small conference by my previous event organising standards with fewer than 25 of us. But there’s still a similar amount of planning and action that’s required even when the logistics are on a smaller scale.
One of the workshops on the day (carefully and painstakingly planned) was to create a graphical representation of how the conference demonstrated the values of the organisation that could be shown to potential future employees and associates. I went around the various teams offering my conference organising brain for picking, but no one took me up on it and two of the groups dumped my organisational efforts into a box called Admin.
My immediate sense was to be deeply insulted (I’m rather oversensitive 😊) – how very dare they dismiss so glibly all the effort that went into it? But then as I reflected upon it, I decided it was actually a compliment. The organisation and structure of the day/night had been so smooth, it barely registered on their horizon.
So how do you go about showing people the mad paddling legs of the swan elegantly gliding across a lake without making a meal of it?
I have a few ideas, but I’d be really interested in understanding how others get around the issue:
- Keep clients informed with a regular update report showing what you have done.
- Perhaps send or show them plans and processes as well, so they can see the steps you have taken to achieve something to show it didn’t all happen by magic.
- Remind them of the time you have saved them (and the associated stress (or mistakes) that they might have if they’d had to do the work themselves).
- Get feedback from end users if you can. In the case of the conference, I sent out a feedback form after the event. Conference logistics and organisation got the highest ratings (9.8 out of 10) which I have shared with the client.
- Make sure you have regular feedback sessions with the client to check in to see if there are any issues you need to talk about or to remind them of the good work you are doing.
- Subtly remind them of your experience that makes it easy for you to do the work. This may be indirect e.g. posting experience and case studies on LinkedIn if that’s where they go to get information. Or more direct – can you show them the technology you’ve used that requires skills they may not have such as CRM systems they are unfamiliar with or design software as examples?
- Publish testimonials from happy clients as another subtle reminder – make sure they are on your website and other social media outlets where your client may see them.
- Ask them if you can write a case study on a particular project – this helps them focus on the good stuff.
- Ask them to write a recommendation on LinkedIn/Trust Pilot/Google Review
For 8. And 9. I find it helps if you offer to write it for them to edit.
Hopefully, these will help prove to your clients that you aren’t just swanning about!
And all other ideas gratefully received!
Image source: Mariya Muschard - Pixabay