📢 Do and tell

In business, being good isn’t good enough. You need people to believe you are good. Perceptions trump reality.

As an entrepreneur you cannot just deliver great results, you also need to tell your clients and your leads how your help led to the great results.

My clients often tell me that one of the most frustrating things they find while running their service businesses - be it coaching or agency work - is their clients not properly attributing their success to the work they do together.

Imagine helping a client lose a tonne of weight but they attribute the success to an unrelated minor change, or helping someone make a tonne of money but they think it is solely because market conditions changed. That sucks. Your efforts are overlooked.

Chances are, you experience this both in your business and personal life.

If you want people to achieve lasting change, if you want people to appreciate your efforts, and if you want people to want to work with you then you need to communicate how your efforts are what led to the change.

Regularly tie back your work to the results. Remind people of their “before” and “after” situations. Provide evidence that what you did mattered.

Some ways I do this:

• When a client achieves a milestone, such as revenue goal, I take a moment to celebrate the win with them and make a conscious effort to contrast that win against their previous situation. E.g. “Wow, great work on x! Do you remember 3 months ago when you did/were/thought Y? You have come such a long way!”

  
  

• I ask for feedback in a way that highlights change. E.g. “We have been working on x, how is that going? What has changed? What do you do differently now?”

  
  

• Show proof. E.g. Remind clients of specific actions we took together and what happened, collect evidence like data from before and after, share clips/photos/data of client successes. "Three months ago, we implemented X strategy, and since then, you've seen Y% growth in revenue. What do you think caused the improvement? OR That shift made a huge difference because of X".

  
  

It can be complex for people to tie correlation to causation, it is unreasonable to expect people to just know that you helped. A core part of your help should be to help them understand how you helped.

This not only reinforces your role in their success but also makes it easier for them to share their experience with others.

When you communicate how you created change your current clients will stick around for longer, your past clients will be more likely to reconnect, and your potential clients (your leads) will be more likely to want to work with you.

Make a conscious effort to both do and tell, it is a small tweak that makes a big difference.

An email I received from a client with evidence of the impact of our work, Which I

immediately saved for future reference.

I shared this in my Work Smart Wednesday newsletter. Want the full set of related insights? You can read them here: https://worksmartwednesday.substack.com/p/work-smart-wednesday-january-29-2025

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