If you help your customers to create a plan, don’t leave out this essential item

Once your customers have the master plan, what happens next? Photo CC by brandbook.de

If part of the services you provide includes helping people make a plan, be sure you don’t stop there. If you don’t address this pitfall, it’s going to hurt your sales and hold potential customers back.

The problem

Everyday people, like your customers, want to have a plan, but they have an important doubt. They fear they’ll never actually get it done. They already have too much to do!

They think they’ll fail to follow through, or they’ll get distracted, or things will change before they can get around to doing the things you so carefully planned for them.

That means they hesitate about buying. They hold back from signing up.

How you help

You probably don’t just help people design a plan, then say, “You’re on your own!” Of course not. You provide some kind of support in taking action.

Maybe you offer coaching or weekly check-ins to support their progress.

Maybe you can actually start carrying out the plan for them, with a “done for you” service. For example, you might help a customer create a marketing plan that includes advertising on Facebook, then you can actually start creating the ads for them.

How do you support your customers once you’ve helped them make the plan? Think through all the ways you do that so we can let them know.

The solution

In order to remove the fear for your customers, you need to let them know early on that you’ll be there for them after the plan is done.

Everyplace you discuss or describe your planning service, be sure to include how you can help them after the plan. If there’s an added cost, say so.

Your customers will be relieved that they won’t be alone with the plan. You’ll make more sales for the planning service and make more customers aware of the support services.

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About Becky McCray

Becky started Small Biz Survival in 2006 to share rural business and community building stories and ideas with other small town business people. She and her husband have a small cattle ranch and are lifelong entrepreneurs. Becky is an international speaker on small business and rural topics.