A client of mine runs a training company. She has an enormous amount of experience and employs other trainers to deliver her content. Things were going well.
That is, until she began to lose business to her competitors and work was not coming in as usual. With a sinking feeling in her stomach, she called me and we talked it through at length. We compared the various business models, websites, marketing efforts, client portfolios, training topics and so on. There didn’t seem any obvious differences between her business and those of the competition.
So we looked at it from a different angle. I asked her to explain the evolution of her business. How had it developed? What did you do to expand?
It turns out that as the years had gone by, she had added new services and new ways of doing things. Progress, you would think, as she increasingly met the growing demands of her client base and target market. The problem was that her pricing structure had become opaque. There were layers and layers of combinations and corresponding fees. It was really difficult trying to work out the costs of anything.
Neither her clients nor prospective clients thought to tell her, they simply went elsewhere.
Once we had identified the problem, she simplified her fee structure and made clearer what she offers and how she delivers. She then used the opportunity to get back in touch with people to bring them up-to-date and work picked up.
Are your prices clear? Have you made it easy for your customers to see where they stand financially? Sometimes we lose sight of the obvious, don’t you think?
If you’d like support to ensure you haven’t lost sight of the obvious, I offer a focused on-to-one Communication Clinic, over Skype. Contact me to find out more.