What is Becoming Valuable?

Becoming Valuable

What is Becoming Valuable?

Becoming Valuable is a process you can learn that increases your value to your clients over time. Rather than just provide your service for a fee on a one-off, or even regular basis you can learn how to become valuable. This means you increase the number of times you interact with your client and at each interaction, you add more value to them. Stacking value upon value to the point where you become almost irreplaceable.

By adding more and more layers of value, you will be able to generate more and more income for yourself. You will raise the barriers for any potential poachers of your clients by demonstrating to your clients that any competitor of yours would need to add the same or greater levels of value than you offer. This in turn protects you from client loss or churn. This is turn means that you need to spend less time and energy finding new clients because your current clients use your services on a more regular basis and will ultimately pay you more for them than they do now.

Why Become Valuable?

There are many benefits to becoming valuable, both for you and for your customer.

You would want to become valuable to:                                                                   

  • Create a more stable business for yourself. To have more certainty of revenue flows.
  • Have better, longer-lasting relationships with your clients.
  • Protect you from competitors trying to poach your clients.
  • Reduce your marketing costs.
  • Develop a stronger personal brand for yourself.
  • Provide better quality service to your clients.
  • Assist your clients to improve their business.
  • Help clients build more sustainable businesses.
  • Generate increasing revenues for your clients.
  • Help your clients build better brands for themselves.
  • Help protect your clients from their competitors.

These are just a few of the benefits you offer to yourself and your clients when you become valuable.

Becoming Valuable

How to Become Valuable?

There are many ways you can become valuable but the key component to understanding is what it means to become valuable. Value, in business terms, is measured by revenue and profit. Mostly profit. The more profit you are able to generate for your clients the more valuable you become to them. This is true of employees as well as coaches, consultants, and service providers. Value measure in non-business terms is measured in results. Did you solve my problem/challenge? If you did, you are valuable to me. If you did not, then you are less valuable to me.

In terms of business value, as in making more profit, you will need to understand the process of profit generation. Profit is the amount of money a business has left over after all its operating costs have been met. If a business spends more money than it earns, it will make a loss. If a business spends less money than it earns it will make a profit. The key components are revenue-generating activities and cost reduction activities. If a business can increase revenue without increasing costs it will increase profits. If a business can decrease costs it will increase profits, even without increasing revenues.

One of the key cost centers for most businesses is marketing and sales. It oftentimes costs a lot of money to generate new customers for most businesses. More than it costs to service existing customers or to sell more goods or services to existing customers. Given this truism, one of the best ways to help any business owner increase their profit is to increase their customer interactions, which means make more sales and reduce the marketing and sales costs that are not needed when existing customers buy more goods or services.

Reducing the cost of sales will always add more to profitability.

Upsell, cross-sell, refer, and bundle products/services are all ways to increase sales without increasing sales costs. These are all techniques that expand on the dollar value of sales whilst satisfying more of what the customer is seeking in goods or services. These are skill sand processes that when implemented can become major profit centers in their own right. The most famous phrase I can think of to demonstrate this is from the McDonalds fast food saying, “Do you want fries with that?” This is an example of an upsell and reports suggest that McDonald’s’ sales have substantial increase when the staff was trained to ask this question of customers when they were placing orders or hamburgers. What type of upselling could you teach your business clients to use in your efforts to become more valuable to them?

Without trying to provide answers to all of the different ways you could add value to your clients in this blog post suffice it to say that learning how to become valuable is in and of itself a very valuable thing to do.