Then ask your clients better questions, and focus on outcomes, not tasks and assignments.
You’re worth more to your clients when you ask them questions that lead them to new insights about themselves, and how they can achieve their personal aspirations.
Your best marketing is your customer experience, and I can’t think of a better way to get someone to talk about you than by teaching them something that they find interesting and that helps them personally.
The question that your clients most likely ask themselves about you when weighing your value is: Who do you help me become? You better have an answer!
Below I have listed a whole bunch of questions that, if you asked your clients, would lead to a whole bunch of discovery and opportunity for you. Become a brand that your clients buy into and not from.
Guide them, shepherd them, teach them and help them discover the outcome they are looking for. Or don’t. You could always be “just an advisor” and compete on price. Not a lot of fun, but hey, I just write the blogs around here.
· We learn from our mistakes, but we’re afraid to make any. Where is this true for you?
· What risk would you take if you knew you couldn’t fail?
· What is your greatest strength?
· What are the 5 things you cherish in life?
· How old would you be if you had no idea how old you are?
· When do you stop weighing risks and rewards and ‘just do it’?
· At what time in your recent past have you felt most passionate and alive?
· What idea do you most connect with, and why?
· What is one bit of advice you’d offer a 20 year old?
· Which is worse, failing or never trying?
· Why do we do things we dislike, and like the things we never seem to do?
· What are you avoiding?
· What is the one job/cause/activity that could get you out of bed happily for the rest of your life? Are you doing it now?
· When it’s all said and done, will you have said more than you’ve done?
· What are you most grateful for?
· What is one thing you’d like to change in the world?
· Do you influence your world or does it influence you?
· Are you doing what you believe in, or settling for what you’re doing?
· What are you committed to?
· What brings you joy?
· Are you the kind of friend you’d want to have? Child? Sibling?
· What is something that used to really upset you that no longer does? What changed?
· Would you rather have less work to do or more work you enjoy doing?
· Are you waiting for some kind of permission?
· That idea you have been sitting on … What do you really have to lose by going for it?