The Trifecta of Growing a Service Business
How do you achieve service business growth?
Become a Warrior with CEO Warrior to learn
how to put the service business trifecta into practice.
Almost everyone reading this article has one thing in common.
You own a service business and you want to scale up.
But maybe you’re finding that it isn’t as simple as you’d hoped. Every action that you take seems to just pile more pressure onto your shoulders. The culture isn’t where you need it to be and you’re feeling burned out.
Sometimes, you think giving up and doing something else would be the easier option. It would certainly leave you with more time to spend with your family.
But don’t act yet.
You can achieve service business growth without destroying your personal life. All you need is the service business trifecta.
What is the Service Business Trifecta?
There are three components to growing a service business:
- Marketing
- Sales
- Leadership
You can’t focus on one at the expense of the others. A great marketing strategy won’t mean much if your sales team can’t convert the leads.
And a poor leader will limit both their sales and marketing teams’ performance.
All three parts of the trifecta need equal focus. And that means you need strategies in place for each of them.
That’s what we’re going to focus on here. This article offers some tips for each section of the trifecta directly from experts in each field.
Let’s start with marketing.
Marketing (With Jay Abraham)
On an episode of the CEO Warrior podcast, we had the privilege of speaking to Jay Abraham. He’s one of the world’s most important and successful marketers. Jay’s worked with major companies and a whole bunch of coaches, including Anthony Robbins and Brian Tracy.
And he charges $5,000 for just an hour of his time.
This is a man who knows how to sell a product. And during the podcast, he shared some of his most important marketing tips for service business growth.
Tip #1 – People Want to Trust You
Trust is such an important part of service business marketing. That applies to both your recruiting marketing and your marketing to clients.
If potential recruits don’t trust you, they won’t follow your lead when they work with you. And a potential client who doesn’t trust you will happily look elsewhere without a second thought.
But Jay also points out that these people want to trust you.
And that’s what your marketing needs to focus on. Turn yourself into an authority for your niche. Where others talk about what makes them so great, you can focus on educating your audience.
Show people that you know what you’re doing and that you have their best interests at heart. That builds trust, which powers both your recruiting and client-facing marketing.
Tip #2 – Focus on the Reason Why
Jay says there are three words that describe what every potential client wants to see in your marketing materials:
The reason why.
They’re looking for a reason why you stand out above the rest of the service businesses in your location.
What makes you different?
If you can’t give a good answer to that question you need to go back to the drawing board with your marketing strategy. Growing a service business isn’t possible if you just do what everyone else does.
Tip #3 – The Headline is the Most Important Part of a Marketing Campaign
Jay often says that a marketing campaign’s headline determines 80% of its success.
And it makes sense. A good headline encourages somebody to read on. Quality content can then encourage them to get in touch.
But a crappy headline isn’t going to make people care. They’ll skip over it and never even read your content.
According to Jay, your headline needs to tell the reader exactly what self-serving benefit they get from your content.
If you’re fulfilling a need or answering a question, the client’s going to keep reading.
Sales (With Mike Agugliaro)
CEO Warrior’s own Mike Agugliaro chimes in with some sales advice.
And here’s the first thing to remember about sales. At CEO Warrior, we prefer the word “serve” instead of “sales”.
Why?
It’s all about mindset. You achieve sales if you approach customers with a serving mindset. Find out what the client needs and then serve that need.
For the sake of clarity, we’ll use “sales” for the rest of the article. But when you think “sales”, you should immediately think “serve”.
Here are three sales tips direct from Mike.
Tip #1 – Do Your Due Diligence
You need a great sales strategy to scale a service business.
But this great country of ours doesn’t always make it easy. Every single state has different rules in place that relate to how you can sell.
Something that’s allowed in one state may not even be legal in another.
That’s why you have to do your due diligence for any sales idea you come up with.
Just make sure that whatever strategies you use are legal. It’s just not worth the headache of dealing with the fallout if they’re not.
Tip #2 – Sales isn’t About the Best Decision for You
What is a sales process?
The conventional wisdom is that a sales process is a set of steps that you follow to get someone to buy from you.
But that’s not it at all. This mindset leads you to think that selling is all about getting the customer to make the best decision for you.
It’s not.
Remember that distinction we made between the selling and serving mindset earlier? That comes into play here.
A sales process is something that you use to lead a prospect towards making the best decision for them.
And once they’ve made that decision, you show them how you can serve their need.
Tip #3 – Sell From Your Why
Jay Abraham established that your reason why is a massive part of your marketing.
But it also plays a huge role in your selling strategy. You can’t just have a reason why. You have to build your entire sales process around that reason.
Otherwise, clients will see a disparity between your marketing and your sales efforts. You’re telling the client in your marketing material why they should trust you. But your sales team doesn’t seem to care about any of that when they talk to the client.
You can only achieve service business growth when you make your reason why a part of your entire culture.
Leadership (With Brian Tracy)
You may remember Brian Tracy as one of the guys that Jay Abraham has worked with.
Brian is the author of over 70 books and he is one of the major voices in leadership coaching. We can’t think of anyone better to discuss the leadership aspect of the service business trifecta.
Here are three tips from Brian, some of which come from his appearance on the CEO Warrior podcast.
Tip #1 – Build Your Goals into Your Business Plan
Brian has a pretty simple description of what makes a great business plan.
It’s an outline of all of the goals that you hope to achieve with the business. You get them written down and use them to lead your people.
Yet Brian says that 80% to 90% of small and medium-sized businesses don’t even have a plan.
If you’re one of them, think about how that affects your leadership style. You’ve got no idea where the business needs to go.
How can you lead other people to an objective that you haven’t defined?
Figure out where the business needs to be and use that to build goals into your business plan.
Tip #2 – Stay Optimistic
You’re burned out and constantly looking at the negatives.
Just think about the message that this sends to your people. They can see that you hate turning up to work. That’s not exactly going to inspire them to give you their all.
Brian says that truly great leaders maintain a positive attitude. Even when things start to grind them down, they remain optimistic.
That means they never experience failures. Instead, they experience “learning opportunities”.
Tip #3 – Accept Responsibility for Results
Brian’s written over 20 books on the subject of leadership. That means he’s narrowed down the definition of a leader to something really simple:
A great leader is a person who takes responsibility for the results.
They don’t disappear when the going gets tough. They don’t look for someone or something to blame when things go wrong.
Great leaders make decisions and stand by them. And if things go wrong, they hold their hands up and take responsibility for the error.
Achieve Service Business Growth Today
The service business trifecta will help anyone who wants to scale a service business.
You have some great tips from some of the world’s leading authorities on the three parts of the trifecta. However, this only scratches the surface. There’s a lot more to learn about the trifecta and how you can apply it to your business.
CEO Warrior can help you to put all of this and so much more into practice. And in doing so, you’ll enjoy massive service business growth.
We just have one question:
