Your clients don’t always understand the value your services can bring to them. So why not offer to provide a diagnostic assessment, free of charge, to help your clients and prospects uncover the potential impact of your services?
Think of it this way – are your prospects looking to either save on costs or increase revenues? How can your product or service help them do that? And are they more likely to buy from you if they have quantified the potential that your product or service can impact their bottom line?
Offer to go in and spend half a day, interviewing people and asking good questions, looking into how the prospect currently uses and potentially could use your product or service. Then produce a short summary report of your findings and present it to the decision makers involved. Leave time in the meeting for a discussion of how they can benefit from implementing your suggestions, and how you can help them get it done efficiently.
A couple of tips for conducting a free diagnostic assessment for clients and prospects:
- Be sure to establish, in advance, that your findings will be presented in a meeting with the decision makers.
- Prepare a checklist of questions to ask so that you capture everything you need during the interviews. Ask questions that help them discover applications for using your product or service.
- Schedule interviews with a cross-section of the organization you are assessing, including people from different levels and across different departments.
- Don’t just offer the diagnostic assessment as a free service, establish a price for your efforts and let the prospect know up front what your assessment fees typically run.
- Make every effort to identify the impacts your product or service can have on their operations. The bottom line impact from increased revenue or cost savings are important, but so are improvements to quality, flexibility, and response time.
- Be conservative in your estimates of potential impact. For instance, if you find that you could help them save $1,000 per week, cut the estimate in half and present in your summary that you can save them at least $500 per week, perhaps up to $1,000.
- End your presentation of findings meeting by establishing a clear future. Discuss the next step - who will be calling whom, for what purpose, and schedule a time on your calendars.
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