Why Understanding Your Clients’ Pain Points Pays Dividends

....or ‘How to find your Fitbit in a very large park’

Last week, I walked the dog in my local park as usual.

As my hooligan of a Parson Russell Terrier, Rex, was running around chasing his ball, I thought it might be interesting to see just how far he actually goes as he hares around, so I attached my Fitbit to his collar. 

Bad idea. 

Within minutes the business part of the Fitbit had, of course, fallen off and the dog was still running around like a nutter (he’d also lost his ball, just for good measure). 

So there I am in the middle of a large park with long grass, looking for a 2cm long piece of black plastic and contemplating the prospect of explaining to my (no doubt smirking) husband how I’d lost it. 

Once I’d stopped kicking myself, I Googled ‘How to find my Fitbit’ and - Ta-da! - up comes a list of apps to do just that. My usual spend limit for any app is about ￡2, but suddenly a fiver for Find my Fitbit seemed like a snip. 

Ten minutes later, I had indeed found my Fitbit and five minutes after that, I had left one of the app’s many five star ratings. 

And now I’m telling you all about it. 

Understanding your customers’ pain

There’s a reason for sharing this rather humiliating story. It shows how understanding your customers’ pain, anticipating their needs and having a solution to their problem that they can find easily exactly when they need it makes it easier to sell your services. 

As my purchase shows, if you can provide a solution to a painful enough problem, it also means that you can charge a healthy fee.

‘Ah yes,” I hear you say, “But we sell services based on our expertise, skills and knowledge, not apps or widgets, so it’s completely different for our business.”

In fact, the same principles apply. 

Whether you sell an app or accountancy services, the same principle applies: Identify a pain, define the solution and make it easy to buy, and you will have ideal clients coming to you.

Know your clients better

To understand pain points - those thoughts that keep your prospective clients awake at night or make their palms sweat at 8am in the morning - you first need to know your customers.

Really, really well.

Not just the generic the ‘male, age 18 - 40, ABC1’ type of information, but really detailed stuff such as:

• Their likes and dislikes
• Their aspirations - personal and professional
• Where they hang out - online and offline
• What they read
• Their lifestyle and family
• Their personality
• How they like to be treated and spoken to
• Their pastimes and hobbies 

And of course, the problems and challenges they face which YOU could solve by selling them your services. 

The pain of being a well-kept secret

We’ve been helping business owners and would-be owners to identify their ideal customers’ pain points and develop products and packages to help solve these for years. 

Our clients come to us because, whilst they are -without fail - absolutely brilliant at what they do, they don’t know where to start when it comes to promoting and marketing their business effectively. 

When they come to us, the conversation often starts with something like this:

“We’ve tried marketing before and it didn’t work”

“We need the business to look bigger so we can get better clients”

“Our main competitor is rubbish - but he shows up online far more than our business!”

“We’re ridiculously busy, but it’s not really the right sort of business”

“Our website is a car-crash and I’ve no idea how to sort it out”

“Nobody has heard of us”

The answer is simple: build a business with an integrated marketing ecosystem that is entirely focused on how you solve your client’s problems and start marketing your business. 

Building a sustainable consultancy business

But like anything simple (such as finding a lost Fitbit), it isn’t easy to build a sustainable marketing ecosystem without specialist help. Especially when you have your hands full running a business, and even more so if there are multiple owners or directors who all have different ideas about how to promote the business.

That’s why we developed our Marketing Action Plan. It’s for owners or would-be owners of consultancy businesses who are fed up to the back teeth with being a well-kept secret and who want to start getting paid what they’re worth for their services. 

Our Marketing Action Plan or MAP (a handy acronym as it really does show you where to go!) is a tailored, step-by-step guide to show you what you need to do to promote your business confidently in a way that is affordable, effective and do-able.

It’s for consultancy businesses which are already running and want to step up to the next level, or for ‘corporate escape artists’ who want to use their skills and connections to leave the 9 - 5++ and discover the freedom of creating their own consultancy business.

So stop running all over the park looking for those elusive new clients. Book a Marketing Action Plan today with us today and start helping your ideal clients to find you.

Call 0208 528 6588 or message me to get the ball rolling.