 Be sure you profit from the experience
You do great work. You know that. Your clients know that. But does the world know that? It certainly should. While there are many ways to promote your practice, nothing succeeds like success. So don’t keep those client victories a secret. But this isn’t as simple as it sounds. You’re probably under NDA with your client. You can’t reveal competition-sensitive information. Many times, the client won’t want the world to know you’ve solved a problem of theirs, since that’s an admission that they even had a problem in the first place. Hmmm. So what do you do? Time it right Just when you and your client are basking in the glow of a job well done, is the time to tap them for a little favor, in terms of a testimonial request. “Dear Jan, It was such a delight to work with you and your great team on this project, and it got such great results, would you mind writing a sentence or two that I could use on my site as a testimonial?” Here’s the part where you can help them along. Depending upon their personality/time constraints, you might add something like: “Just mention things like how long we’ve worked together, the value you got from our project, what it was like to work with us, and so on. You can just jot a few bullet points if you like, and I can clean it up for you, if that’s easier for you. I’d love to use your name, title, and company as attribution, but if you don’t feel comfortable, we could anonymize it, along the lines of ‘COO of a Leading National Financial-Services Firm.” You can pick and choose among the various elements that were used in that imaginary example. Get your clearance, Clarence Even if that Airplane! reference flew over your head, don’t forget to get your client’s blessing on anything with their name on it (anonymized or not) before you use it. That’s even more important if you’re going to copy-edit their input, per the “bullet points” suggestion above. It’s more than a courtesy. It’s ethical behavior. And not doing it could land you in trouble. So don’t go paving the road to Hell. Tell a story We like the term “client success story” a heckuva lot more than “whitepaper.” Everyone wants to hear a story. By contrast, who, honestly, gets excited about the prospect of reading a whitepaper? Just as you carefully and tactfully solicited client input and permission for the brief testimonial quote, so, too, can you solicit their help when it comes to a success story. Clearly, the more info you can reveal, the better, but even if you have to anonymize it, you can use that to your advantage. We’ve worked on some incredibly sensitive projects over the years, ranging from headline-grabbing court cases to countless projects in the national-security realm, and we can’t—and won't—go into any more detail than that. So sometimes the body of work will need to stand in for details. It may seem like a fine line in the abstract, but when you need to decide what to reveal or not reveal, it’s actually very clearly delineated when you get there. Once you know your boundaries, craft your tale. The structure is straight out of Harvard Business Review: Open with the seemingly-insurmountable teaser of a problem, then lay in with the brilliant thought process that led to the breakthrough solution. We’ve posted about this process before (both here and here, for example), so we won’t belabor it here. Leverage it “Content marketing” is one of the hot buzzwords du jour. It simply means “genuinely good information that people want, in contrast to trying to trick a search engine with regurgitated garbage.” So guess what? If you can pull together good testimonials and good client success stories, they’ll aid your cause. Big time. You simply need to push them out through all your available channels. Post the testimonials on the “Testimonials” page (duh!) of your website. Publish your client success stories on your site and on LinkedIn. You can transform a success story into a press release (see our related post) if it’s timely and newsworthy enough—meaning you could then release it to the wire services (many of which are free these days). Heck, you could even call it a “whitepaper” if you like. See if we care. Save time Doing all this yourself, and doing it right, will really pay deep dividends. But it may not be one of your core competencies, or you may simply lack the time to do it right. Not a problem. Contact us. We tackle these kinds of assignments all the time, and would love to avail you to their business-boosting power.
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