Guest post by Niraj Kapur
Businesses are built for profit.
Yes and No.
Yes, your goal is to run a profitable business.
No, you can’t run it without taking amazing care of your staff and loving your clients.
So, what does that mean, loving your clients?
I rebuilt my business after lockdown into being consistently profitable by giving massive value to clients and standing out from the competition. Here are my seven best practises.
Loving Your Clients Can Help You Grow Your Business: 7 best practises
Learn to Listen
Women are generally amazing at listening whilst men often struggle with it. You don’t listen to get your own point of view across, you listen to understand. You listen to what is and what isn’t said. You can’t offer advice to anyone unless you listen, without distraction and without thinking of closing the deal. Listening is one of the two great superpowers.
Tell Stories
Storytelling is the other great superpower. People connect with stories more than stats, percentages or bar charts, long after you have left the room. The best stories are personal ones, where you share challenges, you’ve had to overcome to achieve success.
Send Thank You Cards
What do you get in the post? Bills, postcards from estate agents and cheap takeaway flyers. It’s rarely anything good. Thank you cards go a long way reminding people that they matter. It’s more memorable than a thank you text. It’s also more original. Business is about standing out.
Overdeliver
Most companies do the bare minimum. Some do even less.
Constantly overdeliver. What happens as a result? Clients want to work with you more? What if they don’t have the budget to do that? They often recommend you to others. Either way, you should always ask for recommendations. The best business to win is the one that has been recommended by others.
Remember special occasions
Know your client’s birthdays and send them birthday gifts. Anything under the value of 20 euros is fine. They will care more about the gesture than the value. I know the names of all my clients’ partners and children and their children’s birthdays. I always wish them well. No presents are sent, it’s the thought that counts and it makes you memorable.
Share competitor information
Find out who the competitors are to your clients. Subscribe to their newsletter and blogs and make sure you forward onto your clients. Your client should be keeping an eye on their competitors. However, most of them don’t.
Give useful insight
Anytime there’s anything new happening on LinkedIn, I share it with my clients. It has 900m followers and it’s one of the best places for business, yet most businesses don’t know how to use it properly. By giving them information before most people know about it, it helps them stay ahead of the game.
Niraj Kapur is a LinkedIn trainer, TEDx speaker, and author of the bestseller, Business Growth: Lessons Learned from Divorce, Dating and Falling In Love, available on Amazon
See more book reviews here.
