3 Sticky Tips to Grow
Growth is hard
One of the most difficult things for Virtual Assistants is getting and keeping clients. A lot of time and energy will be spent getting your first few clients. A Virtual Assistant can use many methods to grow their business, but one model is best.
3 Growth Models - One Choice For Virtual Assistants
The big problem is most assistants who are running their own business have a limitation on time and money. In The Lean Startup Eric Ries identifies three strategies for growing your business: Viral, Sticky, and Paid. You don’t have enough time to devote to developing all three, so what marketing strategy is the best for a Virtual Assistant business?
Viral growth is growth through your customers bringing in more customers. Think MaryKay or Tupperware. Every user has the potential to bring in 2 or more friends. While you do want referrals, the nature of Virtual Assistant services limits this module. Virtual Assistant services are normally one-on-one services the viral group would be difficult to implement.
Paid Growth is paying for ads or referral fees. The cost of getting the client needs to be low enough that over the lifetime of service the company earns a profit. Cell phone carriers do this with “free phones.” They give away a product and lock you in for 2 or more years earning a profit over time.
Sticky Growth is growth by keeping more clients than you lose. It’s about customer retention. This is the preferred model for Virtual Assistants.
Be Sticky and Retain your Clients
Sticky Growth
A Virtual Assistant needs to create a product or service that the clients love so much that they stay month after month. A service where you are vital to their success and it would be hard for them to leave. And a service where you give so much value that it would be crazy to change service providers.
Sticky Retention Through Quality Service
What are three ways that a Virtual Assistant can be sticky?
The first method to have a sticky marketing model is to deliver quality service. Nothing destroys trust and goodwill more than turning in a product that is flawed and full of mistakes.
Turn in Quality
When I was managing Virtual assistants having clients call me up with quality concerns was terrifying. Quality issues lead to trust issues and trust issues led to getting fired by the client. If a client has trust issues they feel the need to re-check everything. Soon they realize they were doing more work checking up on our services than if they actually did the work themselves. This scenario leads to the death of the contract.
Another reason to turn in high-quality work is it builds the trust you need to increase your responsibilities with that company. I often had companies say “I want to give your assistants more work they’re just not handling the work I’ve assigned them with quality.” If you can’t deliver on the baseline simple tasks clients lose trust and confidence that you will be able to take on more complicated and important work. In summary, make sure you turn in quality work. If your work is excellent you will get all the benefits of a client who trusts you with quality referrals and more of the work that you like to do.
Sticky Retention Through Excellent Communication
The second thing you can do to retain your clients in your Virtual Assistant business is to over-communicate with the clients. When working with clients major problems can be prevented through excellent communication.
For example, we had one of our customers call up with a complaint. Customers were not being called back by our Virtual Assistant. Since calling back was one of the major tasks we did this was a huge red flag and a giant concern to the customer. When we investigated further the assistant reported she was calling back with clients but not documenting the outcome of the call which was our procedure. Two sentences or even two words of documentation and communication could’ve prevented lots of angst from the customer and an hour of follow-up time with the manager. We created unnecessary worry because we did not communicate properly with our documentation.
Communication Tips
When starting a project don’t wait too long before you update your client. Our standard was to update them after our first task was complete on our first day. That way, if we did something wrong or misunderstood the assignment we would get instant feedback. It also calmed down the nervous client who was wondering if we actually cared about them. We also had a review meeting in the first week to catch any issues or problems. This prevented losing clients after 30 days because we solved problems early and kept them informed. There are many ways to keep your client informed even when you’re not working in the same office city or even time zone.
Recap emails at the end of the day or the end of the week are excellent for keeping the client informed about your progress.
Project management software often sends updated emails when you move the task from one column to the next which is a way to automate the feedback model.
Monthly check-ins are critical for keeping the lines of communication open solving problems quickly and getting feedback on the work that you’re doing.
My favorite form of communication now is telling the client that the task is complete. Never forget that the client is thinking about task completion until you tell them that it is done. The last step in any task is communication. It might be a text, it might be an email, it might be writing two lines on a document they check frequently. If it’s not communicated that the task is done, then the task is not done.
Sticky Retention Through Results
The last way to grow your business through sticky clients is to get them the results that they are paying you to do. If you’re working with another small business you know they did not have money to waste time on inferior results. You might be the nicest person in the world, but if you can’t do the job you will not keep the job. If you keep losing clients it could be you are not giving them results.
Results often trump other minor problems in a customer-client relationship. You can turn in quality work, and you can have excellent communication, but if you are not getting results you will not be in the Virtual Assistant business for too long.
Find one number or metric you can track that means a win for your client.
The key is to find out what the goal of the client is and work on tasks that achieve that goal. I often said something like this to my assistants “We are hired to fill schedules. Sending email is nice, getting paperwork completed is necessary, but the right client in the right spot with the right payment method is what our clients want. This one task made them more money, which allows them to afford our services.” If we wrote the best emails, completed all the tracking data, and answered every single phone call but converted no clients to appointments we would be fired. Results trump everything. Ask your client what is the number you should be most concerned about for success. Is your number to track calls answered, people scheduled, complaints solved, no complaints, or something else? Find one number or metric you can track that means a win for your client.
Take Action
Virtual Assistants should focus on creating a sticky product or service for clients. The clients are retained and they tell their friends because they are getting such great results.
If you are losing clients or just starting ask yourself these questions:
Quality: Do I have a quality product free from defects? Am I doing anything that is creating “Helicopter Customers” that are constantly rechecking my work?
Communication: Do I give early feedback on services delivered? Am I seeking out feedback? Do my customers know when my tasks are done?
Results: Does my work as a Virtual Assistant produce results for my clients? Do I know what the wins are for my clients and how my work supports the wins?
