As a consultant, I provide a soft service; I provide information. If you also provide a soft service, in order to successful, you must have a hard deliverable. Memory is a terrible thing. If you don’t provide your a hard deliverable, the client quickly forgets your value to them.
My hard deliverable is the report I generate at the end of an assessment. It’s 15 pages. I bind it; I review it with my client and when I go to visit my client, it’s sitting on his shelf. It’s material.
Six months later if somebody asks about you or the work you did, you don’t want your client scratching his head and saying, ‘You know what, I can’t even remember what that guy did for me…” If there’s something sitting on the shelf, they’re going to know what, you did and be in a position to show someone else. My assessment describes the process that I use because in six months, they’re going to have forgotten what I did.
Any time I’m doing work that’s not documented with a client, I am in a failure position because somewhere down the road someone’s going to ask, “What is Mark doing here, I can’t figure it out.” My client has a binder that I fill in with the information that we gather throughout the process. If I’m doing work on a much larger scale, that client is gaining an email summary of my activities for the week. I’m keeping them in a binder. They can keep them wherever they want.
The same thing applies in reverse. If I have a hard product, I have to have a soft service. We call it a value add when you do hard products. So if I sell you a piano and that’s all you do, there’s no soft service associated with that piano. Now, if I sell you a piano and I bring it to you, I show you how to operate it, I spend some time with you, and I give three free lessons, that’s the value added soft service on the other side of a hard deliverable. If you look at successful companies, this combination is always present. They hit the marketplace with one side, but they provide as additional value, the other side.
What soft service or hard deliverable can you add to value add to your own business? Leave a comment below.