What is in a name?

Most business owners are aware of “branding” as it applies to the business name but many service based businesses do not appreciate how important it is to name services.

If you offer a service, like Sackmans Accountants North London, you have four key issues to address:

• A service cannot be seen, heard or touched
• The benefits of a service are sometimes only felt days, weeks, months or even years later
• Prospects think that all services providers are the same and focus on price
• Prospects find it difficult to assess the benefit before they buy the service

These issues often prevent people buying the service to spending more than the lowest price. However, packaging can help and here is a three step process how to do it with your service.

First, you need to name the service. There are different ways to go about this including thinking about key benefits and outcomes the customer gets.

At Sackmans we have a business advisory side of service but rather than just calling it “business advice” we have name it “On-Track“.

Naming your service is a key part of your differentiation strategy which is vital if you want to stand out from the competition and help people focus on the value rather than just the cost.

Next, you need a process. This could be a step by step process, flow charge or a checklist. For On-Track we have the Triple R process – Review, Recommend and Results.

The first thing we do in On-Track is help business owners Review their personal and business plans. When they have this so they know bother their long-term goals and what to do tomorrow we Review their progress.

The Review is a monthly or quarterly meeting where we look at the financials like sales, profits and cashflow but we really focus on the key drivers.

The Recommend phase is where we suggest ways business owners can improve their results. This can be explicit advice based on our own experience or what other business owners have done. Or, it can be recommending some third party.

Results is the final part. This is where we calculate the outcome of the work and report to the client.

When you have the name and the process you can start to create collateral. Perhaps a service sheet and/or a diagram of the process.