Don’t be invisible to the people who are out there looking for you.

I love to buy professional services. To pay others to help me with something I don’t (yet) know how to do myself. Or, to pay someone to do something for me that I have no interest in learning (thank God for accountants 🙏🏼).

So, this post is a bit of a rant about something I see service providers doing wayyyy too often. It drives me a little crazy sometimes as someone trying to buy their services. So, if you can sense emotion behind this post, it’s because there is.

So, here we go.

Whenever I start contemplating buying something, I expect to be put on a customer service journey. I don’t mind people adding me to their email lists (just as long as they don’t spam me with seven emails a week), and I don’t mind being sold to.

Selling isn’t offputting if it’s done gracefully.

The thing that bugs me much more is playing hard to get.

Oh my, I could go on and on about this one.

Playing hard to get means someone hasn’t thought about their customer service at all OR they are very good at hiding it.

There might be no website, no service catalogue, and no pricing anywhere to be found. They respond very slowly to messages and basically make it seem like they don’t want me as a customer.

If somehow magically, I end up buying a service from them, there’s often zero follow-up.

Now, I don’t think playing hard to get is a strategic choice on their part. Rather, I think it’s a lack of effort and/or a fear of selling for real.

By the latter, I mean people who offer a service as a side hustle.

Because they have a job that pays their bills, they don’t take their side hustle seriously. They might not believe it could ever be “a real job” and haven’t put any effort into building a service. Instead, they sit around with a skill.

But a skill doesn’t become a service without acknowledging it as such.

I think we (and by we I mean multipassionate entrepreneurs) spend too much time thinking about:

1) our impostor syndrome and

2) our marketing (or lack of marketing).

Because of this, we spend too little time thinking about what we do with someone when they are actually interested in working with us.

So, let’s investigate what a good service journey looks like.

Good service feels like a warm hug

The one thing I’ve learned in my career as a service provider is that most people are busy and want to feel cared for. They don’t have time to google your expertise, exchange a dozen messages about what you might be able to offer or wait many weeks for a price on what collaborating with you might cost.

They want to get a picture of what they might be buying very quickly.

For example, let’s say a person is trying to buy a photographer for a birthday party and they’ve heard good things about you. Before they can make any decisions, they’ll likely want to see your portfolio, understand how you work, when you are available and what your services cost. All of this information should be available easily or otherwise, they’ll move on to explore other options.

So, having an understanding of how a potential client becomes a paying client is crucial not only because it makes their life easier but also because it makes your messy brain more streamlined.

Once you know how you work, it’s easier to find the right clients.

This type of business strategy isn’t there to constrain you – it’s there to liberate you.

The pre-purchase phase

This phase of the service journey might include things like:

Up-to-date contact details on your website.
A booking system on your website.
A timely response to booking queries or questions.
A menu/leaflet about different products with prices.
Clear instructions on how to use your service if they choose to buy it.
A gentle reminder to ask if they’re still interested in your services.

Now, if you’re an experienced service provider, these sound like no-brainers to you.

But I’m telling you, many providers will skip the basics and forget about the simplest things. Doing the boring work is actually what might make you different and successful.

The ongoing-project phase

When someone becomes a client, the quality of the service journey should be similar or even higher than before purchase. The service you offer will be unique to your field of work and type of product. Here are a few questions to help you understand what this phase could look like for you:

How is the client made feel good about their purchase? Many of us feel a bit scared after we’ve bought something, especially if it was expensive. How do you help your client feel like they made the right choice?
How are they introduced to your services? What do they get upon entry to help them feel like they’re being served?
How are they reminded of the most important materials, dates, deliverables etc?
Where and when will they find the outputs of your work?
What should they not expect to get from you?
How can they reach you in an emergency?
How will working with you make their life easier for the time being?

The post-project phase

Many people buy services because they want to a) take a load off their shoulders b) feel taken care of c) achieve excellence they couldn’t on their own.

This need doesn’t disappear after a job has been completed.

Also, if the job was completed successfully, the client will likely want to keep working with you. So, if you do this phase well, you’ll likely have returning customers.

In practice, it can be very simple, like:

A catch-up message after a few weeks or months. Sometimes, “How are you doing with X?” will be enough.
A special offer or gift to past clients only.
Reserving a moment to investigate something that could be relevant to them and sending it their way. If you’re a business strategist, for example, this could be something simple like “Hey, I found this interesting company in Iceland with a really cool annual report, you should have a look.”
A free meeting or lunch date to see how they’re doing.
A celebratory message about whatever wins you see them making via their channels.

If you know all this but are held back by the fear of making your services real…

I’ll say this once: If you have a gift or skill that you enjoy expressing, please let people access it.

Even if for now, you’re just doing it for fun, and you think you don’t have time to make it look and feel professional, ask yourself: Wouldn’t it save my time if I had a clear structure around what I offer? Wouldn’t it be creatively challenging and enjoyable to build a service even if it’s for the two clients I have? Wouldn’t an understanding of my skill as a service be useful also if one day I want this side hustle to become the real thing?

Doing things professionally doesn’t require that you have 10 years of experience or an academic degree in your field.

Many people will leave you raving reviews based on the quality of your service but won’t even notice whatever certificate you have hanging on the wall. I don’t mean certifications don’t hold value, but in many cases, you convince people with your attitude and attention to detail more than you do with your CV.

Also, think about the psychological side of things, too: Making your services look and feel real for your potential clients might be what you need to start believing in them yourself.

You don’t have to fake it or make people think you run a million-euro company when in reality, you only have one client. Instead, you can be in whatever stage you’re in and still have an impeccable service mentality for every client you have.

And once you know how your service operates, it’s easier to automate or hire people to help you in the longer run.

An example of a service journey gone right

As you might know, I currently live in a small village in southern Portugal. So, we drive to Lisbon whenever we need to handle administrative tasks.

For this trip, I booked us a night at a small boutique hotel.

And oh my, let me tell you, it was a night to remember.

The service was the friendliest I’ve experienced in a long while. The hotel’s design was gorgeous, and the attention to detail was immaculate.

Let me give you some examples.

As we arrived, we were greeted by two customer service representatives who seemed genuinely happy about our stay. On the reception table, there was a complimentary homemade banana-chocolate cake, tea, coffee and icetea.

The service staff helped us get all our luggage (omg the amount of stuff you need when travelling with a baby) into our room. Our room smelled of lemon grass and had homemade biscuits on the table, along with a handwritten welcome note. The balcony connected to a small courtyard garden with jasmine flowers and pine trees. The bedsheets were made out of some type of magical brushed cotton that felt like a hug against your skin. In the toilet, you could find handmade, ecological hand soap in a beautiful glass dish, a makeup remover with a handwritten label, and some reusable cotton washcloths for minimum waste.

After we’d settled in, we were given a tour of the hotel premises. Every floor had a theme with matching decor (think Bauhaus meets art deco meets modern Portuguese design). There was a garden that hosted an Honesty bar. There, you could pour yourself a glass of wine and write what you’d taken to a small notebook to be charged at checkout. The top floor consisted of a communal kitchen for your personal food and drinks and a big library-type lounge to chill out in, or, play the piano if you had the skills.

The hotel’s sustainability booklet shared how they used leftover hand soaps to make their own laundry detergent to clean their sheets and towels. They also shared how they water their plants with leftover drinking water from the rooms. They encouraged you to borrow isothermic water bottles from the reception for your day trips to minimise the need to buy plastic bottles when you were out.

I mean, come on. They already had me at the homemade biscuits.

Oh, and did I mention, there was also a cuddly golden retriever who greeted us with a happy tail wag.

Now, how did all of this make me feel? Beyond joyful.

The fact that the hotel gave me feelings to begin with is a lot in itself.

And, as a result, I felt like I could have paid more for this experience.

Also, I want to tell all my friends about it.

(Just to be clear, I am in no way affiliated with the hotel or get anything for writing about it.)

This is how I think every service and product should feel.

This is how one stands out in a competitive market.

By actually giving a sh*t.

Would this hotel need to spend all this effort just to get bookings? Probably not since Lisbon is already such a tourism hotspot.

But does the effort help their marketing and make people want to come back? Without a doubt.

Caring about your product or service makes that product or service stand out from the clutter of average.

In a similar way, caring about your job will make you stand out.

Even if you work for someone else and make a salary regardless of your effort, putting your heart into what you do will always be noticed.

And caring about what you do will always feel more rewarding than just working for a paycheck.

Caring isn’t just aesthetics or appeasing the crowd.

Creating something with a soul takes effort and commitment but will move something in the people who get to experience it.

And emotions are contagious.

You can’t fake them.

So, a good way to become successful is to find something you seriously care about to the point where you’re willing to go above and beyond.

And if you think you’ve found it, ask yourself: How am I communicating my love for what I do to my clients/the people I work with?

Make your caring known. See what happens.

What a good service journey looks like