Article • 4 min read
Strategy for selling services: 6 tips to increase the purchase of your solutions
By Douglas da Silva
Last updated June 22, 2021
Do you know how to offer quality services?
Do you believe your company is an excellent service provider?
And do your clients agree with you?
According to a survey by Bain & Co. 80% of large companies believe that their services are of the highest level, but only 8% of their customers corroborate this impression of the companies.
Therefore, in order to sell more, you need to change your customers’ perception.
However, the challenge is that the strategy for selling services is somewhat different from the strategy applied to marketing products. This is because service is more abstract, which requires the seller to have a greater ability to “illustrate” the solution being offered and to pique the customer’s interest.
Continue reading below to discover the 6 strategies that you should adopt to increase your conversion rate:
6 strategic tips for selling services
Selling services can be much more complex than selling products, because you need to make the benefits tangible. Here are some ways to overcome this challenge.
1. Understand what problems your service can solve
The service you offer needs to be viewed as a solution. In this sense, a strategic tip for selling services is that it is essential to understand what problems you intend to solve.
You need to have thoroughly established how your services can make the customer’s life easier, and what pains they can heal. From here, it will be easier to convince the customer to close a deal with your company.
2. Identify and highlight what makes your service different
How is your service different from the service offered by your competitors?
Besides just knowing the answer to this question, it is extremely important for you to prove it to your audience.
With increasingly competitive markets, you need to find what makes you different and focus on that.
Namely, if you want to know how to sell your services, try to answer:
Why should your customers choose your services and not the competitor’s?
What is so special about your solution?
Find the answer and focus your efforts on that. Customer satisfaction surveys and interviews with key customers can be very helpful in doing this.
3. Keep the profile of the ideal customer in mind
Under this strategy on how to offer services, you will need to create a profile of the ideal customer.
To do this, you have to understand the demographic characteristics of your target audience’s behaviours.
When you create a buyer persona, you can be more assertive when directing your efforts and defining what arguments to use in your business approaches.
4. Choose your communication channels wisely
Another fundamental aspect of the strategy for selling services pertains to the communication channels used to publicise your solution and to maintain a relationship with your customers.
The choice of the most suitable channels needs to be inconsistent with the profile of the ideal customer, as well as the type of media they consume the most. Thus, you will be more efficient when you take your message to them and also when they come to you to ask any questions or to purchase your service.
E-mail, chatbots, social networks, blogs, and telephone contact are a few examples of channels that you can implement in your communication and marketing strategies.
Also read: How to increase your sales success rate with a live chat option
5. Adopt an emotionally focused B2C sales pitch
You can’t get customers with a B2C service sales strategy that doesn’t reach the decision maker’s emotions.
With this in mind, sales pitches need to go beyond the practical and objective solutions that the service has to offer. You also need to appeal to subjective aspects.
An accommodations company, for example, doesn’t just sell “a place for guests to spend a few days.” They sell the entire experience of the service, as well as comfort, a deserved break, time with family, etc.
Therefore, be sure to adopt a sales pitch that focuses on the emotional aspects, while also mentioning the more objective and rational elements as well.
6. Offer a free trial period
Depending on the type of service your company sells, offering a free trial period can be a great strategy to boost sales.
Before purchasing a service, customers need to be sure that it is, in fact, the solution that they need. Therefore, it is only fair to allow customers to try the solution for a certain period of time before making a decision.
Streaming platforms and companies that sell Software as a Service (SaaS) often adopt this strategy. Generally, these service providers make their solutions available for free for 7 to 30 days; then, if customers like it, they proceed with the purchase.
These are our 6 strategic tips for selling services. Review them carefully and implement the ones that best match the characteristics of your business in order to leverage your results. Zendesk has more than 125,000 customers using two integrated solutions for customer service and engagement. These tools will grant your company access to complete information in real time and, thus, you can plan your strategies with much more assertiveness and efficiency.