If you want to get smarter about the way you work, which was one of our firm rocks for 2016, you have to get serious about the types of companies that make up your ideal client profile, so you can bring focus to your business and build the expertise and processes you need to scale. But you also need to make sure you’re meeting the needs of your clients and keeping pace with the business and revenue goals you’ve set forth for the year. Following are three things Alyssa and I did at the beginning of 2016 that have allowed us to get smarter about client work and the future of Prosper Strategies.
1. Become Resolute About Who You Want to Work With
As you’re launching your business, the most important thing you can build is experience. Yes, you may have done the work before, but now it’s under your own name and your own brand. In Prosper’s infancy, if you looked at our client roster and weighed the balance between love and money, some of our initial clients tipped our scales toward the money side. Our focus was on building our portfolio (and our bank account). As a result, many of them weren’t in our industry or service wheelhouse, and we were spending a lot of time reinventing our processes and stretching ourselves too thin.
That is until we became crystal clear about the types of clients we wanted to work: changemaking companies that want to grow their revenue to make a positive impact. We also got specific about the industries these companies need to be in — tech, healthcare, professional services, education, non-profit and social impact.
Defining our ideal client allowed us to spend less time spinning our wheels and chasing down business we couldn’t win. It also afforded us the opportunity to build a repeatable, proven marketing process that we know works for changemaking companies. As a bonus, we end up doing more of the work we love.
While narrowing your target audience can feel limiting at first, if you hit the nail on the head, you can position yourself as the go-to resource in your area of focus and you’ll have greater opportunity to grow your expertise and scale your business.
2. Keep Up with Evolving Industry and Client Needs
Great businesses evolve to meet the needs and expectations of their clients. To be successful, you have to stay at the forefront of your industry.
When I ventured out on my own several years ago (even before partnering with Alyssa), I was starting a public relations firm. All of my clients at the time rightfully wanted to understand their ROI. The difficulty was that while PR is great for building awareness, if you want to drive leads and sales, you need more than media placements. Within months of starting my business, I knew I needed to build out my suite of services to better demonstrate ROI.
When I merged with Alyssa, our business was more quickly able to meet the needs of clients that needed PR as well as those that wanted true marketing and sales alignment. Today, Prosper Strategies offers a full scope of inbound marketing services designed to raise awareness, drive consideration and nurture leads more quickly to close. This gives us the ability to directly tie our PR and marketing activities to bottom line business results. However, the evolution isn’t over. As the tides continue to change, we’ve needed to build out design services, website development and search engine optimization offerings for our clients — and that’s just in 2016 alone.
Don’t let your industry pass you by. Stay up-to-date by reading the latest trade news and also by listening to your current and potential clients. What do they need? What is their leadership or board of directors asking of them? If you’re getting multiple organizations looking for similar services that you’re not currently providing, it might be time to evaluate and update your offering.
3. Build in Unique Service Offerings
Unique service offerings aren’t the core driver of your business, but can allow you to get a foot in the door with a potential long-term client, experiment working in different verticals or help fill gaps in the revenue pipeline so you can continue to take on long-term clients that fit the profile of your ideal client. These unique service offerings can include speaking engagements, workshops, short-term consulting projects and other things you can do on a project-by-project basis.
Alyssa and I have developed workshops to help companies develop their vision and mission statements, point of difference, target stakeholder personas and key messages — a deliverable we call the Brand Base. We’ve also started to take on short-term projects to help companies develop their six to 12 month marketing plans. These short-term projects allow us to work with organizations we really want to help, but that might not have the budget for a typical Prosper engagement. They also allow our team members to develop additional hands-on strategy development experience.
Think about if there are things you can do on a one-off or short-term basis that lend themselves well to your business growth and revenue goals.
The combination of these three things has brought a sense of focus to our current client roster as well our business development activities, allowing us to maximize our time and effort as business owners. Are there things your organization is doing to get smarter about client work and where you’re headed with you company?
