HOW TO Be A Great Professional Services Partner

If you are an information technology (IT) firm, marketing agency, consultant, lawyer, accountant or social media strategist, your success comes down to your knowledge and the value you create with it for your clients.

Since Incept is both a provider and procurer of professional services, I have the benefit of seeing the process unfold from two different angles. We are trying to provide the best services for our clients while concurrently ensuring that we are hiring the best people to provide exceptional solutions.

Based on this experience, I believe the best professional services firms focus on creating concise answers to the following questions for their clients:

  1. What should I (the client) be most focused on?
  2. What should I (the client) be doing about it?

When people hire you, they are looking for your specific expertise and guidance. They are looking for you to put yourself in their shoes, understand their pain, combine it with your expertise in the specific area and help them understand what they should be focusing on.

Once you have agreement on the area of focus, provide proactive and direct suggestions on how they can leverage this focus to improve their business.

It is very easy for all of us to fall into a trap of just reacting to the specific requests of our clients. However, that is not why most of us were hired. Our client is looking for thought leadership and expertise more than just the execution of their own ideas.

Before your next client visit, take a look at the questions above and rate yourself on how you have them answered. Let us know what you think. Are these the two questions that you are answering for your customers?