Selling Services is About Relationships

When a company hires you for a service it is usually because they do not have the expertise to do it themselves. Consequently, they can't effectively evaluate your expertise. They can see the work you've done for others. However, they might fear that they would not get the same quality for their project, or that they could not afford the level of quality they might see in your portfolio. They might fear that they won't get the best talent assigned to their project.

In our case our clients don't have the expertise to evaluate how well we've coded a site to work across multiple browsers and platforms. The hard work we do in this respect goes unseen. Because this work cannot be seen or evaluated by our clients, it has no counter balancing weight to offset any negative experiences they might encounter with our service. It may be unfair, but hours of diligent coding will never make up for one occurrence of being inattentive, in terms of our clients experience with us. If a client does not feel like they are being listened to, or that we aren't working hard enough to communicate clearly, the actual work we do will not offset it. They will remember the flavor of our interactions at meetings, in documents, emails, and conference calls, not how well a graphic is compressed. The actual service and work we do are not the main things our clients can see, understand, or measure.

Unfortunately for service companies like us, we cannot simply rely on a prospect's ability to recognize our skills and capabilities. Rather, we need to realize that it is the more intangible (invisible) aspects of how a prospect feels about us that will drive their decision, much more than their evaluation of our talent. Selling a service is really selling a relationship, and relationships are based on building trust. In addition to pointing these principles out to us, Beckwith provides example after example of ways to either lose trust, or build trust with our clients and prospects.