by Tony Vidler       

Sometimes when professional advisers are struggling to engage meaningfully with prospective clients, or struggling to get them to engage at all, the solution is to go back to the very basics and question whether YOU are delivering value in their minds.

In the continual battle to be relevant and valuable there is a tendency in professional services to conjure up increasingly complex language, or worse, stuff which is total “non-news”.  For example:

….and I would suggest that in the average prospects mind this headline reads “breaking news: nothing changed….”

Hardly something which is going to be perceived as valuable by most prospects I wouldn’t think.  So, rather than “add value” it is more likely that this suggests we have “no value to add“….not quite what we were hoping for.

In my own simple terms from an advisory perspective “value” is something useful and unexpected which has the ability to change the circumstances or possibilities for a client or prospect.

Consider these three simple steps to delivering value:

1.  Are you delivering when people want you to?

2. Are you delivering where people want you to?

3.  Are you delivering how people want you to?

These raise a multitude of possibilities for consideration such as frequency of contact, and method of contact, supporting information, useful tools and resources and information, the method of delivery or accessibility, your service offer and levels, the mix of online and offline delivery vehicles, providing immediate simple solutions to problems and so on.

The list can go on for quite some time of course…and that is the point.  The list can go on for quite some time….and we can exhaust ourselves exploring every possibility to decide whether it fits or doesn’t fit well, or whether its perceived value is sufficient to merit its use….and suddenly we are unsure and probably no further ahead.

An easier and perhaps far more practical way of staying on track is to simply test every engagement marketing idea or service offer with these questions:

• will this give them what they want, when they want it?
• is this being delivered how and where they want it to be?

If the answer to either is NO, then go back and work out what the customers do want.  Then do that.

If the answer to both is YES, then you are delivering something valuable to prospective clients.   Do, this, and more will engage with you.