Attract More Clients by Knowing Your Strengths

How do you sell yourself to clients? What do you do well that’s unique from other businesses in the market? In order to explain this to prospective clients, you need to clearly understand your unique strengths. Our strengths aren’t always apparent to ourselves, so you have to do some strategic thinking.

Examine Your Experience
Go over your experience working in this area. Where have you spent the greatest time working? Whatever you’ve done most is probably something you’re good at. You’ve accumulated knowledge and expertise through doing it.

Look at Your Biggest Successes
Go back over your history and look for your biggest successes. Find the times when you really achieved something fantastic. For each, what was behind the big success that made it happen? Sometimes the timing was good, you were lucky, or it was something external to your business, but look for instances where something you did brought about the success.
 
Consider 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, or other facets of your personality that affect the way you work. One of your natural strengths might be that you always deliver work on time and you’re always easy to reach.

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 and see what they said 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.
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Sample Other Services
If you have the resources, use other services that are similar to yours and see what’s different about them. You might discover some natural strengths through this. For example, you might find another ecommerce store’s ordering process to be clunky and awkward, leading you to realize that yours is smooth and simple.
Make a 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.
Get into the regular habit of collecting feedback from customers and clients so that you can maintain an understanding of your natural strengths in case they change in the future.

Reflection Question:
What are three strengths your clients consistently appreciate that you should highlight more often in your marketing?
 
Understanding your strengths is only the first step. The next step is making sure the right people know about you.

Once you've identified what makes your business different, the next step is sharing those strengths with the people who are most likely to value them.
Download the free Ideal Client Location Checklist to identify the online and offline places where your ideal clients spend their time so you can confidently put your message in front of the right audience.