How to sell more of your service-based offerings

I truly believe branding is an essential part of creating a profitable service-based business. And the further up the pricing scale you go (a goal for many of us!), the more important it is. When you’re selling high-ticket offers, you’ve got to have a strong brand supporting your marketing and sales strategies.

Branding helps you sell your service-based offers in a few ways. It helps you to establish trust with your audience, differentiate what you do from competitors, and shares your story. I’m going to get further into how branding helps you do that in this post.

To sell services, you need your client’s trust

In the world of services, trust is incredibly important. Many of us work very closely with our clients, and we need them to feel totally comfortable with us in order to gain the most benefit from our services.

Whether it’s life coaching, design work, wedding photography, conversion copywriting… when a client comes to us for some sort of service-based offer, they’re taking a leap. They’re putting their faith in us that we can help them with what they need. And the bigger the investment they need to make, the bigger that leap of faith! It can feel like a lot.

And that’s why it’s so important to build a brand that shows your prospects why that trust will not be ill-placed.

Demonstrate professionalism

From a visual perspective, a consistent, carefully-designed brand identity can convey a high sense of professionalism. It helps your business look legit. Ensures your business is taken seriously, and not seen as a little side-hobby.

Maybe it seems superficial. But rightly or wrongly, people are going to judge your business by what they can see. So, an amateurish logo might lead people to think your business is inexperienced. A clean, professionally-designed logo sets an entirely different tone.

Also read: Why brand identity is important for your business

Communicate your value

Of course, branding is much more than just the appearance of your business. Good brand development goes deep into identifying why your services matter. Specifically, why they matter to your ideal client.

To do this, you need to identify your ideal client’s desired outcome and then match those desires with the deliverables you offer. This is what I define as your brand purpose. Why you do what you do. Try out this post to learn more about the process of defining the purpose for your brand.

Once you know what your purpose is, you put it everywhere. The copy on your website. In all your marketing. Knowing exactly what your purpose is helps you sell your services when you talk to your potential clients.

Differentiate from competitors

There are a lot of pieces to your brand:

purpose
core values
brand personality
message
logo and brand identity, etc.

And when it all comes together, what you have is something that’s unique to your business. By drilling deep into the components of your brand and being able to express them to your audience, you naturally set your business apart.

Your competitors are businesses that offer similar deliverables to you, or tackle a similar problem for your clients. But they won’t do those things in precisely the same way. When they speak about their “why”, it won’t be the same as you. They won’t place importance on exactly the same values. Their tone of voice won’t match yours.

All these things are going to make your business a better match for certain clients over others. Your ideal clients. Your brand is why they’ll choose you.

Tell your brand story

A big part of selling is based on emotion. We’d all like to believe we’re good thinkers and highly logical in our decision making. But the reality is, a lot of the decision making we do is based on how we feel in the moment.

Remember that branding is about building relationships. In other words, it’s all about emotion. We use branding to create an experience that shares a particular message and makes our audience feel a particular way.

By knowing our client’s desired outcome, we can explain to them what it’ll be like to use our services. How we’ll lead them from where they are now, through their struggles, and finally to that result they’re looking for. Bring the feeling into it. Paint the picture of how their life will be improved by what you’re offering.

In the end, the brand story you want to share most, is what their story could be.

Also read: How to create a brand story that captivates your clients

Last thoughts

One of the biggest benefits of good branding is that it helps you to sell your service offerings before you’ve even spoken with prospects. By projecting a cohesive, professional image everywhere from your social media presence to your website, you’re able to take control over how your business will be viewed.

It can set the right tone, express your value, and start convincing your audience of their need for your services, all before they’ve reached out directly. No matter what stage of business you’re currently at, if you’re selling services, make sure you’ve developed a strong brand.

If that’s something you’re working on right now, check out my Core Brand Pillars Workbook for a free step-by-step guide to branding. It’ll take you through the process of defining those all-important foundational components, like your brand purpose and core values.