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As a business owner, one of your highest priorities — and biggest worries — is how to attract new business.  If you sell products, your task is made easier by the fact that your customers can actually see and touch what they are going to buy, and without too much effort they know how they will benefit from buying your product.

However, if you are in a service business, your job is much harder.  You are selling an intangible item, so potential clients can’t really see or touch what you sell, and the actual benefit has to be imagined.  In an effort to overcome this, you may tend to oversell what you have to offer, unintentionally exaggerating exactly what you can do for your customers.  It gets to the point where it sounds like what you are offering is just too good to be true, so the prospect becomes skeptical and doesn’t buy.

Or you may go the other way.  Not wanting to make claims that the prospect won’t believe, you speak in generalities, so the client not only has no idea what benefit you offer, he doesn’t even know what it is that you do!

So what is the answer?  It is not really that complicated: just communicate honestly with your prospect.  Tell them specifically and simply what you can do and the exact results they can expect if they engage you to help them.  Of course, it helps if you have testimonials or case studies from past clients that can demonstrate a history of performance.

Unfortunately, this is easier said than done.  If you want further assistance, I recommend you visit Action Plan Marketing. For more than 20 years, the owner of this site, Robert Middleton, has been helping service professionals all over the world improve their ability to attract more clients. Much to his credit, Robert provides an amazingly extensive amount of free information, including a free program called “How to Win at the Game of Marketing”, which includes an audio tutorial and workbook. This program is only one of many well written articles in the free section of his website. Click on the “Free Marketing Track” tab (the purple one) and you’ll also find links to the seven marketing principles for attracting more clients, a scorecard you can use to determine how effective your current marketing is, and a lengthy list of marketing books that you can use to improve your marketing immediately.

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