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How to Lock-in Your Clients – 1: Listen to them

Many small businesses face this issue.

Listening skills for small business

“I want my customer to stay with me and not go to the competition. How do I do that?”

Many small businesses think that making their clients stay is difficult and complex. Nothing can be farther from truth. It’s simple, easy and, best of all, does not cost anything.

Most [means all :-)] people have a need-the need to feel important; the need to be acknowledged and understood; the need to feel valued and cared for. When you deliver a service, the above needs come to the fore. When a client’s need for feeling important is not satisfied, it hurts him/her and feel neglected. They complain – “service is poor.”

How do you make the client feel important and cared for? There is one simple way.
Listen to your client well. It’s as simple as it sounds. And it’s easy to implement.

How do you listen better? The first thing to do is to start with YOU. You must develop a desire to listen to your client.

DESIRE to listen

You must develop a desire to listen to your client. What does she have to say? Listen patiently and wait until he/she is finished. If something is not clear, ask him/her at the logical moment. The desire to listen must be as a receiver of information- not as a critic. The desire is to understand the client and not to make her agree to something or to change her opinion.

If you get this, the rest are all details. It’s just a matter of time you will be able to listen better. If you don’t it’s unlikely that you will improve. So I suggest that you check for yourself if you have the desire.

Once you have the desire, it is time to go beyond understand the how to listen better. I recommend these good resources that give you very good grounding on how to improve your listening skills.

1. How to be a good listener

2. Practicing listening skills

3. Eight barriers to effective listening

In addition, the table below (Source: Active listening: Skills Associated with Empathy ) summarizes what you should do.

It breaks down listening skill into detailed tasks. It’s a good check list of activities that you can do to improve your listening skills.

What you should do

What it means

Attending, acknowledging

Providing verbal or non-verbal awareness of

the

other, i.e. eye contact

Restating, paraphrasing

Responding to person’s basic verbal message

Reflecting

Reflecting feelings, experiences, or content

that has been heard or perceived through cues

Interpreting

Offering a tentative interpretation about the

other’s feelings, desires, or meanings

Summarizing, synthesizing

Bringing together in some way feelings and

experiences; providing a focus

Probing

Questioning in a supportive way that requests more

information or that attempts to clear up confusions

Giving feedback

Sharing perceptions of the other’s ideas or feelings;

disclosing relevant personal information

Supporting

Showing warmth and caring in one’s own individual way

Checking perceptions

Finding out if interpretations and perceptions

are valid and accurate

Being quiet

Giving the client time to think as well as to talk

Your clients will love you if you develop listening skills. That’s because they don’t have good professionals – those who care for them and value them-and so are looking for them. If you can show them that you are ‘good’ and are willing to listen to them, they will give you more business.

Before I close this post, I would like to tell you that having listening skills alone will not cut it. You have to perform. You have to deliver what the client wants. You have to do what the client is paying you to do. But you can expect better loyalty from them because you’ve listened better.

I hope you will be able to imbibe listening skills and delight your clients!

About the author: Chaitanya Sagar is an expert in small businesses and is the CEO of www.p2w2.com, an online marketplace for services like writing, business consulting, research, software, online-tutoring etc. You can find good service providers and collaborate with them on p2w2. He blogs at www.p2w2.com/blog. You can Subscribe to RSS feed here.

Picture: LifeDynamix

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Why Your Supplier isn’t Performing: Pitfalls in Supplier Relationship Management in a Small Business

Ever wondered why your supplier isn’t performing? If you had a great relationship with a service provider, she goes out of her Vendor Relationship Management way to further your business. Imagine a good ghostwriter who writes compelling copy for your blog. And your blog gets you hits through search engines. It saves you money and makes money! If you do that enough, Google traffic will be good enough to compete with your ad campaigns!A killer User Interface designer, a Search Engine Optimizer, and a good accountant can all contribute enormously to your business. The more each of them contributes, the better your business gets. They will want to if you have a good relationship with them. Did you invest to nurture the relationship or are you spoiling the relationship yourself?

You must also learn how NOT to spoil a relationship first.

Forgetting the individual behind the vendor

If you forget that there is an individual behind the vendor, you are mistaken. This gets manifested in several ways. You don’t greet them or wait for them to greet you. You wait for opportunities to yell at people. And when you get, you yell to your heart’s content. You don’t think what is ‘fair.’ You just think that you are the buyer so the service provider has to service you anyway.

Mistake. Big mistake. Look at the individual. Connect with them.

Squeeze too much

Some people want to squeeze as much as possible. If you ‘squeeze all,’ where is the incentive to delight you? Because, at the next opportune moment, they will look at replace you with more reasonable client. Always, aim to pay a little above average so more people want to work for you. The more they want to earn from you, the more they will

want to delight you.

Use ‘take it or leave it’ tactic too often

This is the bullet that many employers think will solve all problems. “Do this. Or I will give this work to someone else.” Don’t get me wrong. It is YOUR prerogative to get the kind of work you want done. But don’t use it too often. If you do that, your provider will lose interest in you. He/she thinks that it’s just a matter of time that you will go away and so, it’s better to focus on getting some other client who doesn’t threaten pulling off often. After all, a service provider works for you because he/she thinks you are going to give more work. Not because you can pull off any moment.

Asking for the moon

If something is not possible, or it costs too much money to the provider, don’t press for it. I guess the touchstone here is, is what you are asking reasonable? Once again, don’t get me wrong. You are absolutely entitled to high standards of work. You can demand that. But, is that reasonable given time, and the price you’ve promised to pay? These are questions you have to answer yourself.

Ego

Ego comes in big time. “I am the buyer. He/she is just the service provider. SHE must agree with ME!” How crude! You forget that both you and your service provider are partners in achieving the same goal. YOUR goal. Make sure you further your goal. Not just your ego.

If you remove these value drenchers, you are set for the positive factors of your relationship to kick in.

If you employ professionals on P2W2.com, the world’s best marketplace for freelancer professionals (which will go live soon), you will realize that there are wonderful tools to work together. In addition to those, you will be able to get more value out of your supplier relationships if you manage them well. From time to time, we will bring to you all the knowledge and insights you need to get your vendor relationship work for you.

 

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Hire a ghostwriter. Drive traffic to your blog.

Setting up a blog is a five-minute job. It takes nothing from you… and gives you nothing. It’s like buying gym. It does

not matter if you have it. But it does if you work out. Updating your blog is like working out. It does not matter if you have a blog. It does if you update it.

Updating your blog is important because it lets you talk to people often and on topics relevant to you and your business. The other reason is because search engines drive more traffic to blogs that are frequently updated. Not to stale blogs. You tell search engines that your material is fresh by updating it regularly.

I wish updating a blog is as easy as writing this. (sigh) It’s not. If you want to keep your blog updated, you have to have discipline… to publish regularly. If you don’t have time to write, you could hire a ghostwriter. (Huh! Let me rephrase that…”delegate.”) Delegate to those who have competence and time.

I will write more about how to hire a ghostwriter, dos and don’ts etc. But for now, if you decide to hire a ghostwriter, p2w2 is a great place to begin. Because we help you make it easy to find the right ghostwriter for you and we give you tools that will help you collaborate with your ghostwriter.

Have a successful blog and a successful business.

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How to Become a Ghostwriter?

Ghostwriting is a great opportunity. You can research andGhostwriting learn what you like and earn as you do that! How cool is THAT!

I have been ghostwriting for about a year now. I had fun and learnt about internet marketing, electronics and real estate. Strangely, ALL the topics helped me in my career and life and of course in earning a living!

If you want to ghostwrite,

you can. Do you want to know how to become a ghostwriter?

It’s easier than becoming a ghost and then becoming a writer! You can find a lot of projects on P2W2 (when we go live). But before that, you must understand buyers’ (potential employers’) decision-making process when they hire a ghostwriter and acquire the skills that they look for. That’s all you need.

Most buyers apply the following criteria to hire a ghostwriter. The ghostwriter must:

1. Be able to express their message in their preferred tone and style
2. Have the ability to research the Internet to figure out the content that must be written
3. Have the domain knowledge (i.e. understand their business/topic)
4. Be able to write good English
5. Be affordable (not necessarily a low price tag)

The most important criterion is that you must be able to write in the style and tone that they would like to convey the message. If you want to have multiple clients, you must be able to write in various styles. At the least, you must be able to write well in the style that you are comfortable with. (Check out this video). The good part is, if you have decent English, you will be able to change your tone to suit buyers’ needs.

Second, buyers hire ghostwriters either because they don’t have the time and/or the writing skill. Using your skill and time, they want to achieve their goals – like writing a book, market their company etc. You must convince them that you can provide what they want. And the best way to do that is to provide appropriate samples. Not a rant about your skills but good samples. So, pick the best of your work and display it in the samples section of your profile. Make sure you don’t violate intellectual property rights of your past clients.

Third, have patience to develop ‘domain competence.’ If someone asks you to write on a medical topic, can you do a good job? If you can’t, don’t bid on such projects because the buyer anyway won’t select you because you don’t understand the topic. As a result, your project win-ratio will fall and buyers filter out your bid. So, have the patience to develop the competence and bid on the project that you understand and can deliver.

Next, you must be able to write good English. Most people forget basic grammar and punctuation. If your writing has grammatical and punctuation errors, buyers won’t accept your material. Thankfully, you can learn good English at Purdue University’s Online Writing Lab. Check it out.

I will talk more about pricing and bidding techniques so you can have a successful career as a P2W2 professional. so those are all the criteria buyers look at.

If you want to become a ghostwriter, you must have what it takes. If you don’t, even if you land a project, that won’t help you in the long run because it is just a matter of time that the buyer will give you negative feedback and others will know about it. So it’s better to get what it takes and be the ghostwriter that you want to be!

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