Much like attracting a new partner, you can’t attract new clients when you’re swimming in a pool of low self-esteem.
Putting yourself out there as a business owner is hard. It can bring up a lot of feelings of inadequacy and doubt, especially if you’re new to the game. But if you want to stand out from your competition and connect with the people you want to serve, you have to play to your strengths.
That being said, our strengths aren’t always apparent to us. So if you’re struggling to figure out what the heck you’re even good at, it’s time to do some strategic thinking.
Examine Your Experience
Start thinking about your industry experience. Where have you spent the most time working? What fields have you been in? What niches do you have professional and personal perspectives to share?
Whatever you’ve done most is probably something you’re good at. And even if you didn’t win a gold medal for it, you still accumulated valuable knowledge and expertise just by doing it.
Look At Your Biggest Successes
Go back over your history and look for your biggest successes. Find the times when you achieved something fantastic, and ask yourself: what was behind the big success that made it happen?
Sometimes the timing was good, you were lucky, or it was something external to your business, but look for instances where something you did bring about the success. Then start to brainstorm how you can replicate that into an offer to help your clients do the same.
Consider Soft Skills
Don’t just look at topic areas you know about or hard skills you’re good at. Soft skills like communication, problem-solving, reliability, or other facets of your personality are just as important. One of your natural strengths might be that you’re incredibly organized or you’re great at small talk. Both of those things can translate into skills that other people would benefit from learning.
Your Reputation
What do people say about you? When people have praised you before, what did they say was great about your services? Try to find comments where a customer or client expressed their satisfaction with the work you did and see what they said they were happy with specifically.
Gather as many as possible and look for patterns. If you can’t find many, don’t be afraid to reach out to current clients or bosses and ask for their feedback.
Focus On The Positive
Focus on the positive aspects of the work you do, not the negative. For example, “I don’t turn work in late,” isn’t a good natural strength. You can frame it positively by saying, “I always turn work in on time.”
Whatever you do, don’t make a list of things you don’t do.
Sample Other Services
If you have the resources, use other services that are similar to yours and see what’s different about them. You might discover some natural strengths through this.
For example, you might find another e-commerce store’s ordering process to be clunky and awkward, leading you to realize that yours is smooth and simple.
After you’ve gone through this process, I want you to make a list of as many natural strengths as you can. You may know some off the top of your head, but try whenever possible to use actual feedback from the market or clients. Use what you discover in your marketing materials and as you create new offers. After all, these qualities are the reason people choose you over another similar business.
Get into the regular habit of collecting feedback from customers and clients so that you can maintain an understanding of your natural strengths in case they change in the future. This is a MAJOR part of target market research — which just so happens to be one of my strengths. If you need help learning more about this biz skill, check out my Market Research Mastery Course.
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