It’s difficult to find new engineering clients. For that reason, it’s growing more important than ever to maintain the engineering clients you have. It is more expensive and time consuming to try to find new clients to work with than to take steps to retain the ones you have. Doing this may seem difficult to do initially. However, with a concentrated effort on the way you operate your business, you may see improvement.
How To Hold Onto Your Clients
When it comes to maintaining engineering clients, consider the following tips. You may just need to readjust your methods slightly to see improvements.
- Know your clients well and understand what they need from you. Find out what your clients actually need, not what you can provide to them. To do this, you must understand the client’s goals. This is part of maintaining a positive relationship with the client.
- Be specific about what you will deliver. It is essential to have clearly defined expectations. If you are writing an engineering proposal, ensure it is very specific about the services you will offer, how they will be delivered and what the expectations should be. There’s no room for misunderstandings then.
- Deliver what’s realistic. There is no benefit to your business or the client by overpromising. Be specific on what you can and will deliver and then deliver it. If you fail to achieve those overstated promises, the trust is broken. It is very hard to regain this trust again.
- Show that your service is valuable to the company. To do this, you need to show that your service is benefiting the company’s bottom line. To do this, you may be reducing costs, improving profits or eliminating some type of cost to the client in another way. When you are valuable to the bottom line, you are likely to stay onboard.
- Provide something more than the next guy. This does not mean you have to give away your services. Rather, find a way to add value to what you are offering. For example, you may want to improve the speed of completion or add in something different to the proposal. This value added bonus is a nice attraction feature for the company.
Overall, you need to work to build relationships with those who you will work with within the company. Doing so can make a big difference in whether or not you get to stick around or if you are the next one cut off the contractor’s list. By showing your worth, you’ll be able to maintain that engineering client long-term.
Venteon can help you to develop positive working relationships with the engineering teams you need to stay on top of your market. By providing you with access to high quality engineering staff, your projects will excel client expectations. In Michigan and Minnesota, work with Venteon for engineering staffing support.