Ep 16 - What If Your Clients Don't Want to Work With Anyone But You?

Power Up Your Team Podcast

This episode of Power Up Your Team podcast is for women business owners who want to broaden the great reputation associated with their name to their whole organization.

In the early stages, you are often the face of your organization. You are the only interface to your customers. Especially in consulting or project-based businesses you are managing all accounts yourself and delivering the work.

Over time, you have created trusted client relationships, repeat business and a strong pipeline of work. You are very busy and ready to let your team take over important customer facing work.

But you realize that your customers translate the promise of high touch, high class service to receiving personal VIP delivery from you. And only you!

It’s easy to get into this situation as business owner or founder: To get your business off the ground you had to roll up your sleeves and deliver all services yourself.

You know how critical it is to free yourself up from being involved in every detail so you can guide your business at a strategic level. It’s important that your reputation is not just tied to your own name but to that of every member of your organization.

So how can you create this new reality? How can you ensure your clients don’t feel let down when other members of your team step into account service or project leadership roles? You might be worried that you lose a valuable client.

Here are 5 tips how you can pivot your engagement strategy with your key accounts.

1. Engage team members for training and development

There is a good chance your clients will not only understand but appreciate that. That’s because they know how important development is for their own employees or even their kids. It also strengthens your reputation as a leader – not just as a doer.

Once your customer has agreed, you delegate aspects of the work. That includes follow-up calls, obtaining information, giving a presentation or other tasks.

You are servicing the account as a team. On first sight that sounds like extra work. But soon, you have someone who has built a relationship and can manage the account independently.

2. Build a team of experts

Another way to make the customer feel valued is to build specialties on your team and introduce them as experts on one aspect of service delivery.

Think about all facets of your services and leverage opportunities to elevate the individual talents on your team.

3. Raise prices for your VIP services

If people are really vested in their VIP status, they will gladly pay the higher price. Then you have more revenue to be proud of but you are still burning the midnight oil to get all the work done.

4. Create relief through work structure

In this scenario, you remain front and center to the customer. You level up by structuring the work and identifying non-customer facing steps such as research, information gathering or proposal making that your team can handle. You supervise the work so you can represent the collective work to the customer.

5. Be upfront and re-define your role

Introduce a team approach where your team delivers the services to your customer and you take on the role as a mentor and coach. You stay engaged and get feedback from the customers on how you team is doing. You are present in a different way.

If this episode resonates and you realize that this issue is holding you back from the results you want, let’s book a strategy session.

Read on at www.PowerUpYourTeam.com