How do you sell yourself to clients?
What do you do well that’s unique from other businesses in your market?
If you are going to explain your unique strength to prospective clients, you need to understand what it is.
Our strengths aren’t always apparent to ourselves, so you may need to do some strategic thinking.
Examine Your Experience to Identify Your Abilities
Go over your experience working in this area.
Where have you spent the greatest time working?
Whatever you have done most is probably something at which you are good.
You have accumulated knowledge and expertise through doing it.
You have also learned lessons from making mistakes.
Lessons you can pass on to others to help them avoid making the same mistakes.
Look at Your Biggest Successes
Go back over your history and look for your biggest successes.
Identify the times when you really achieved something fantastic.
For each time, think about it was you did that made the big success happen.
It could have been that the timing was good, you were lucky, or it was something external to your business.
So, look for the instances where it was something you did that brought about the success.
Even better, is to find something you do which always brings repeated success.
That repeated something is your core strength, your unique ability.
Consider Your Soft Skills
Don’t just look at topic areas you know about or hard skills you’re good at.
Look also at soft skills like communication, problem-solving, reliability.
There are many other facets of your personality that affect the way you work and which influence your success.
One of your natural strengths might be that you always deliver work on time or you’re always open to new ideas.
Know Your Reputation
What do people say about you?
When people have praised you before, what did they say was great about your services?
Try to find comments where a customer or client expressed their satisfaction for the work you did.
Ask them what they were happy with specifically.
Gather as many as possible and look for patterns.
If you can’t find many, reach out to current clients with a survey asking for their feedback.
Focus on the Positive
Focus on positive aspects of the work you do, not the negative.
For example, “I don’t turn work in late,” isn’t a good natural strength.
You can frame it positively by saying, “I always turn work in on time.”
Don’t make a list of things you don’t do.
Positive statements are far more powerful and attractive.
Sample Other Services
No business exists in a vacuum.
Everyone has competitors.
Let me rephrase that.
Everyone should have competitors.
The chance that you are the only person offering a product or service is vanishingly small.
If you have the resources, seek out and use other services that are similar to yours.
Observe what is different about your competitors.
You might discover some natural strengths through this.
For example, you might find another online store’s ordering process to be clunky and awkward.
This observation will lead you to realise that your own ordering process is smooth and simple.
Note down this “smooth and simple order process” strength.
Make a List of your Strengths and Abilities
Continue to list of as many natural strengths as you can.
You may know some off the top of your head, but try whenever possible to use actual feedback from the market or clients.
Use what you discover in your marketing materials.
After all, these qualities are the reason people choose you over another similar business.
Knowing why your customers like you will help you maintain an understanding of your natural strengths.
Make the collection of feedback from customers and clients a regular task, n case they change in the future.
Build Your Personal Brand
Once you have identified your core strengths and abilities, you can turn your unique combination of personality, achievements, hard and soft skills, abilities and experience into a compelling personal brand that communicates what it’s like to work with you.
