You serve your clients best when you see what they don’t.
Here’s the point — you need to know your clients’ business as well as you know your own. Only then can you provide useful, insightful information that can really help them. You can do this today.
When I was a child, I loved to walk past construction sites to see the dump trucks and “diggers” doing their work of moving dirt and making way for something new. Honestly, I still really like it, and I often take the opportunity to stroll past these sites with my excited and interested children by my side.
Little did I know that these powerful machines have an Achilles’ heel of sorts — almost all have massive blind spots.
These blind spots are located in the places you would expect, like behind the vehicle in areas that can’t be seen with mirrors, but they also occur in shocking locations with many large loaders and trucks — right in front! In reviewing a number of these 360 degree diagrams (crazy that I did this), it is extremely dangerous to be anywhere near these machines — unless you’re in the driver’s seat!
Like construction equipment, your clients — and prospective clients — have blind spots.
Blind spots are things that your customers don’t see about their business, not yours. They are hidden issues or unseen opportunities that might be nearly impossible to spot or sitting in plain view — right in front.
Your knowledge of your profession and your mountain of experience aren’t important unless it can turn some of those orange areas in the diagram to white.
This is the power of insight. It’s not your most recent thesis on your new service offerings. It’s not the self-congratulatory award that you just won.
True insight comes from knowing your clients’ business deeply. It understands what keeps them up at night and what is most important to them at any moment in their business. It’s not only enough to know your work — in fact it’s assumed that you know your profession at a very high level.
Think about that. The expectation is that your firm, just like every single one of your competitors, will deliver its services at an exceptional level. You are expected to hit a home run, so to speak, every single time.
The differentiator — the true competitive advantage — is how well you know your clients’ business. And this is not just during your client engagement, but long before in the marketing and sales process. How do you use your insights early enough to stand out as a valuable resource?
This is not content marketing or thought leadership. How many of your blog posts and comments on social media fall well within the “glaringly obvious” white-colored areas in the diagram above? What issues exist with your prospective clients that sit in their blind spots? What are the orange-shaded areas that you can see that they don’t — or can’t?