Charting My Course

Working with professional service providers and small business owners who want to do a better job
marketing themselves and their services.

Friday, November 02, 2007

What Do You Do?

This is the question that inevitably comes up in any conversation when networking or meeting people in some other fashion. What do you do? If you do not have a clear answer to this question, you may have just lost a sale or a potential client for your services.

As service professionals, we must constantly tell people what we do. If you cannot clearly articulate this message, you lose.
When someone asks what I do, I can confidently say that “I work with service professionals who want to differentiate themselves from the competition and become more effective in their marketing". This is everything I do in a nutshell. This can be communicated in around 10 seconds. I say this and then I stop. I do not go any further with this as far as clarifying what I do. I simply let it lay there and wait for their response. Mark LeBlanc, in his book Growing Your Business, calls this your defining statement. It tells the person asking the question what you do, who you do it for, and the benefits of working with you.

Wouldn’t it be great if the next time you met someone at a networking group, you could clearly articulate what you do, who you do it for, and the potential benefits of working with you in a clear and concise way. Would this increase your edge in picking up new clients?

One of the mistakes I see people making when constructing their statement is to make it too vague and more complicated than it has to be. The greatest factor is creating a successful defining statement is to make it conversational and repeatable. If someone else cannot easily repeat your defining statement, then it is useless. Use simple wording that can be understood by anyone. Pick up a copy of Mark LeBlanc’s book “Growing Your Business” for information on creating a great defining statement.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]

<< Home