Article
December 2012
As you no doubt know, anything that cuts down on time and resources and allows you to more efficiently run your business (and your life) is considered valuable and used most often. What applies in your personal life (smartphones make things simpler to accomplish, etc.) is also a business rule: easy is appreciated. And while that doesn’t mean that easy is simple to deliver, some deep thinking about how YOUR products and services save your customers time and money is brainstorming well spent. Because once you have distilled your offering into HOW it makes your customers life easier, you have either your tagline or the elevator pitch that explains quickly and succinctly what you do to solve problems for your target client.
If you’ve already figured out the who, what, and why of your product/service (i.e., essentially explaining why accepting your product/service is simply the smartest, most beneficial, most obvious decision to make), you can begin to address how to make doing business with you easier.
When I worked at Boeing, my team developed a wonderful (to us) proposal for NASA that included a complex do-it-yourself pricing kit. We sent the proposal off and waited for it to be accepted. When it wasn’t, we took a closer look. What we found is that our bid put a lot of burden on NASA to decipher and figure out exactly WHAT we were proposing and for how much. It wasn’t easy. Most likely, the NASA folks figured that if we couldn’t put together an simple, comprehensible proposal, dealing with us during the project would be similarly as complicated.
At Impactful, our first thought is how we can make our clients’ lives easier. We created a simple one-page contract with simple easy to understand terms and conditions., and always provide an immediate response to issues (who wants to wait for a problem to be solved?). Our project plans include deliverables with status reports so our customers can see at a glance what we’ve done and what we’re doing without having to wade through emails and voice mails. As far as pricing, we offer a single time and materials fee based on the consultant used, and don’t assess administration fees and other add-ons. At the risk of redundancy, I’ll say again: we make doing business with us simple. In short, we answer the question: What’s going to make our customers’ lives easier while getting impactful results?
This “easy” rule can be extended further by thinking of:
- How can I make it easy to reach me and communicate with me on a regular basis?
- How can I make it easy for them to continue doing business with me?
- How can I make issue resolution easy?
These answers will be different for every business and might take a lot of work up front, but making life easier for your customers is the key to a lot of business success.
It’s all about value – and saved time and money is the “easiest” way to your clients’ hearts (and continued business).
Photo credit: Staples logo from Staples website