5 Easy Peasy Ways to Let Your Clients Teach You Something New ↔️ (3/6)

There is another important way to keep your business innovative. 

It is a single, simple thing to keep in mind. 

And it is not about you at all. 

It is: always be looking for ways to make your clients’ lives easier. 

Simple, yes, but not always easy. Here are a few tricks you can use to let your clients drive change. 

Know what else they want

We already know that nothing your business does matters if it isn’t what your clients want. 

As you collect client information, news, requests, and feedback, remember to capture the details about what they want, rather than what they need. Get to know how and why they use your service. 

Role-play

Get your team together and role-play a discovery meeting, a client pitch, and a progress update. 

Let them get inventive: let the clients be demanding and the service providers get creative. 

See where the ideas lead by working through the whole scenario.

Challenge your ideas

You know your clients are using you as a solution.
But what if they didn’t use you? What other options would they have?

Why didn’t they select those options?

What do those options offer that you don’t, whether for better or for worse?

Pretend you are gone

And what about if your business didn’t exist at all?

What if your type of product or service didn’t exist at all?

Then what would clients do? 

What conversation do you never want to have again?

This is one of my favorites. 

What is a conversation you often have with clients that you wish you never had to have again?

What are questions that they ask, that you wish they would never ask again?

Explore ways to adjust what you do to eliminate the need for those conversations. 

What next

Perform one of these exercises every quarter. What do you learn? 

Or, bring me in to run a 2-hour, $900 workshop with your team.