5 Steps To Select The Best Add-On For Your Clients
How we help clients select the best add-ons is one of the most common questions we get asked as a business. Over the last few years, it’s been perceived as a sort of magic when it comes to choosing the right add-on for a client and we repeatedly see the same problems with how this is addressed with practices.
Some practices work with particular add-ons and as a result, try to shoehorn clients into implementing these add-ons, rather than investing the time to understand their unique requirements and identifying the right add-on to fulfil their needs. The approach is also different across departments and offices but it’s important to have the same approach to this to ensure consistency.
Here are the five steps that will help you with the process to ensure this runs smoothly and fulfils the needs of your clients.
1. Educate the Prospect
To ensure you can educate your prospect and show them the process you’re going to take; you need to be clear on the process yourself. Not just from your overall knowledge but also in regard to understanding how much time you’re willing to invest in the prospect. While it’s easy to let your client know about all the positives, you have to educate them of the potential issues that may arise later down the road – this could be a change in software or the process itself. Another problem which may occur is there may not a solution for the client’s situation. At these times, you have to be transparent during the education stage and inform them.
2. Triage the Prospect
You must make sure you assess your client before taking on the work. Will they put the time in? How difficult will they be to work with? To do so, you need to gather all the high-level requirements for the process. Once you’ve gathered the information you need, you need to ask yourself if the task ahead is either simple or complex. This could be useful if you’re working on more than one add-on for your client. The task is more than likely going to seem complex at first but will get easier as you complete stages. From there, you’ll be able to work out if the gathered requirements are viable, and whether those goals can be achieved or not. This is for the benefit of your client, as it sets their expectations accordingly.
3. Document Requirements
Choosing a format is imperative to this stage. As this is a formal and internal process, you’ve got to ensure your format is suitable for your requirements and used throughout your work. In fact, consistency will be crucial to your success in this instance. Everyone involved in the project should be completing their tasks under the same style and formats. It’s easy for your client to get greedy when deciding which add-ons they want to include – at this point, you should remind them of the initial expectations set, identify what they need and prioritise that over what they want for the time being. Non-essential add-ons could be saved for a later stage.
4. Research Option
Using your primary research, you can compare this to the general market, analysing how much everything will cost. At this stage, you potentially look at whether you can accommodate for any of the client’s non-essential add-ons. There are areas of your task which will need more research than others; if it’s a simple request, it could just be a case of recommending an existing solution to your client. However, for those that are more complex, additional research and scope will be required, as well as extra fees. After you’ve completed your research, you’ll have to consider how you’re going to present your findings to your client. This could be as simple as an email, or you could show them your results in a meeting.
5. Recommend Solution
You’ve conducted your research and shown your client what you’ve found. Now it’s time to recommend your solution. To give them a first-hand look, consider providing a demo for the selected add-ons. Make sure to set up a follow-up meeting at the same time, so that you’ve got plans set to carry on with the project.
If you need more guidance on how to select the best add-on for your client, get in touch with our team or see more of our helpful blogs with helpful tips and guidance.