Our Services are Not a Commodity
Attracting the Results Oriented Clients Your Company Needs to Grow
I'm a digital marketing strategist with a strong grasp of current marketing tools and trends across Social Media, SEM, and PPC. Over the years, I've lead and integrated digital marketing campaigns from concept to execution – I just happen to be a former private investigator.
I help companies understand their target audience, and then create and optimize online experiences by leveraging their owned media, new tools, and trends to help drive profits.
I help companies understand their target audience, and then create and optimize online experiences by leveraging their owned media, new tools, and trends to help drive profits.
As you continue to grow your investigations company, at some point of your growth, you will realize that there are only two types of clients:
- Ideal Clients: The clients that you want to service and are the reason you opened your investigations company.
- Problem Clients: The clients that will consume too much of your time, complain, manage the investigation, and cause you stress in the long run.
When you are starting a new company, you need as much capital as possible to pay your bills. This will often force you to take any client you can get. If you are not careful, this will trap you until you investigate your way out of business.
In the beginning, you will price match, sell your services at less than ideal prices, and will focus on selling services rather than your experience and time. The faster that you can get out of this trap, the better for your success.
When you first start your company, the first set of clients – the “ground breaking clients” – are the people that will help your company stay afloat. These first batch clients will become the future of your company, which is why many businesses reward them for their loyalty. However, as your company begins to mature, these initial clients will eventually start to cost you more bills to maintain than the bills that they help you pay. At that point, you will need to let them go.
Getting Started
A decision has to be made, do you continue to work 90 hour weeks or do you cut down work to 20 hours per week by sacrificing a portion of your clients?
When Investigator Marketing opened its doors 2013, I began to take in as many clients as possible. As clients came in the door, they referred me out to other investigators, which kept us afloat. At the time, I was working as a full time regional manager for a PI firm.
A short while later, I began to reach a point with the company where I was working 10+ hours per day answering e-mails, handling sales, building websites, and troubleshooting my first clients. I eventually reached a point where Investigator Marketing was consuming most of my time, but was not generating the amount of money necessary for me to quit my PI career and sustain the living standards that we were living at.
To attract more business, I had to either hire employees, or be selective with my future clients.
By January of 2014, I was working close to 90 hours per week (Monday – Monday), and while that was great because I saw it as “growth”, I was not able to charge for the services that I was providing at the time. As an example, a client was paying $24/Month but required 5 hours of upkeep to ensure his services were maintained. From that, he was closing 4 cases per month. I was spending more time talking to customers than I did talking to my wife.
Therefore, on a Friday night with my wife having a date by herself while I drank my third cup of coffee to pull another all-nighter, I pulled the plug and drafted the following letter:
Dear [Client],
After looking at our account and analyzing the long term goals for Investigator Marketing, we have decided to shift the focus of our company and have decided to work with a specific demographic of customers as we move into 2015.
With that being said, Investigator Marketing will no longer be able to assist you as you continue to work towards the growth of your company.
This change will be effective immediately. As you start to look for other marketing service providers, I would recommend that you use (Competitor) since they seem to be in a position where they can handle the needs of your company.
Thank you for your understanding and we wish you the best of luck as you move forward.
The letter went out at 1:30 am.
Before, I was having trouble sleeping because clients were calling in and deadlines had to be met. That weekend, I could not sleep because I was scared. For two days straight I desperately tried to figure out if my decision was a smart strategic move, or if it was a move that I pulled because I had given up.
Investigator Marketing’s income dropped by almost 20% in an instant. I needed to find a way to replace the revenue as quickly as possible, or close our doors and find the highest bidder.
Four months later, I stopped working as a full time investigator, and dove into the deep end with nothing more than the encouragement of starvation in my back pocket.
Finding Our Ideal Clients
Moving forward, I knew one thing. I had to avoid problem clients at all costs.
In 2015, we began to change the focus of our company and started to look for clients who focused on the results that we provided rather than the price of our services.
We created ready-made-sites to offer clients with limited budgets, and began to tailor our marketing and custom design services for customers that needed comprehensive marketing services and digital strategies. These were the clients we needed in our business.
Today, in 2016, Investigator Marketing has had a 285% growth since January of 2015. We are composed of a Creative Director (Pam), Web Strategies (Paulina), Web Developer (Ryan), Project Manager (Jeff), and Me. We contract Virtual Assistants from Pridegroupco.com, and Investigator Marketing is finally heading on the right direction.
Now, let’s focus on your company.
How do you find the right customers for your company?
Every industry, from website design to investigations and even dog walking, has four types of clients that range from Free Clients, to Result Oriented Clients. If you have been in business for more than a year, you’ve done business with most of them. Let me break them down in the section below.
Cost Focused Clients
If it’s not Free It’s Too Expensive | I’m looking for cheapest option
Free Clients: You’ve had them before. These clients are looking for an investigator that will work for future compensation. “I’ll pay you a % of the funds you help me get from a divorce, etc.” You want to avoid these type of clients since they are very difficult to work with, manage, and will end up trying to manage you.
Cheap Clients: These clients are not necessarily bad, but they don’t really value your time and have a gross misrepresentation of the time something takes. These clients want a hand crafted baseball bat from a tree that you planted 20 years ago, but they want to pay wal-mart prices because “that’s how much it should cost.”
Results Oriented Clients
Good results at fair prices | Get me results at any cost
Fair Clients: We’re all consumers and want to pay a fair price for good results. We shouldn’t expect anything less from our clients. These type of clients are going to keep you honest when it comes to price gouging, you really want to have as many of these clients as possible since they stay around if you continue to provide them with a valuable service at fair prices.
Result Clients: These are the dream clients that every company wants to have. They don’t care too much about pricing as long as you are giving them results. These clients are rare to come-by and don’t really shop around for services, instead, they let other people refer them to good service providers. With that being said, be prepared to under promise and over deliver.
So, you want to get results oriented clients. While these types of clients are difficult to maintain and please, you can rest assured in knowing that your hard work is going to be paid if you give them the results they need. An attorney is happy to pay a $2,500 invoice if you give them the results he was looking for. With that being said, that same attorney is going to be upset if he receives an invoice for $2,500 without any results or documentation to back it up. This is why we created “Report Templates and Guides” to help you explain your investigative results. This includes a failed delivery affidavit.
Attracting the Result Oriented Clients
Okay, so now that you know the different types of clients, you’re probably asking yourself how you can attract the right kind of customer?
We have written about several different strategies on this in the past (Attracting Insurance Clients as an example). If you’re a member of our newsletter, you probably received a few tips and tricks on how you can attract better attorney clients, and how to market to different types of businesses, along with different services you could introduce in your business circle. In this article we’re going to focus on the value of your experience, not your services.
We’re not necessarily going to go after the big clients, instead, we’re going to let them come to us, then sell them on the service.
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Step One:
Charge the right amount!
I have seen dozens of investigators get into the business charging four-five times lower than any other company around them. It was not until a few months back that I realized why these investigators were charging $20-$30 per hour, and really, after I figured it out, it made sense. Here is what a client said during a consultation hour:
“I was working as a full time investigator for a national company for 3 years. They were paying me $15.50 per hour and I drove up and down the state. When I was ready to open my company, I set my prices at double what I was making before, $31/Hour.”
Coming out of a churn-burn-turn company, this logic made sense to him. Before, he was getting paid pennies on the dollar, now he was making twice as much…. that is a 100% pay increase. This mentality is what causes companies to fail at an early age.
He thought that he was going to have 40 hours of work every week without a sales person, marketing, connections, etc. He also did not account for Insurance, travel, licensing, continuing education, equipment, gas, food, hotels, taxes, bills, database checks, maintenance on vehicle, and so-on. $31/hour is a great salary to have, after expenses, and assuming you have the hours to back it up.
A company that is just getting started should aim to offer investigation services at anywhere between $60 to $75 per hour. As you gain experience, the price will go up to $80, $90, $100, and even $200+ per hour. The last thing you want to do is price yourself at a premium rate, without the experience or quality to back it up. With that in mind, you don’t want to devalue your time and charge less than $60 per hour.
When it comes to private investigator pricing, there are dozens of variables to consider, but Brian said it best when he said:
“[a private investigator’s] cost range… based on location, specialty or the complexity. However, beware of comparing one provider with another on the basis of fees alone. The lowest hourly fees may not indicate the best value; an inexperienced professional may take twice as long to complete a project as an experienced one will.” – Brian Willingham
Complexity, location, specialty, equipment, and time lines, can affect the pricing of an investigation, but the main factor is experience followed by quality. As a solo investigator, you are going to provide a far better quality service than an agency that will probably farm out cases.
Your attention to detail and customer service matched with experience is an invaluable asset for a client. Charge for it. By charging what you are worth, you can expect the following things:
- Your client will know you’re offering a valuable service.
- Your company will increase its revenue.
- You’re going to screen off the “free” and “cheap” clients.
Step Two:
Get rid of “price matching” from your vocabulary
Price Matching means: “I want your experience and quality of work, at the rates from the guy who keeps on screwing up my cases”
I can’t tell you how many times we’ve received e-mails from people asking if we can price match our services to that of a competitor. The answer is always no. We know how much our services are worth and we have the data and references to back it up. From Port St. Lucie private investigators closing cases from a website that, before us, wasn’t getting any traction, to Maya & Maya in Miami receiving 10+ leads per week.
Our services are not a commodity.
A commodity is anything that can be provided to a person without any real difference from one another. For example; salt is salt regardless of who you buy it from. Televisions, however, have different types of components that make them better than others. Therefore, the better the television, the more expensive it will be. Televisions are not a commodity and neither are our services or our experience.
If we start to price match our services – as private investigators – we’re going to have to cut corners to make up for the difference. If you’re a background investigator, this means having to use less background databases, rely on old data, and cut into your budget hours to try and make a living.
Your job is to educate your clients about your worth. Can the work be done cheaper? Absolutely it can. If the client wants to receive the work for free, he can purchase a $800 camera and video recording equipment to obtain the video he needs. He has to purchase and download software to process the video he obtains. He needs to apply for a $1,200 company license and insurance certificate. He needs to take 40 hours of continuing education and submit the work to the state. He needs to make sure that he follows all the laws and regulations to ensure the video is admissible in court. He needs to prepare to take the stand when he gets called in to testify. Wake up at 4:00 a.m. to be on surveillance by 5:30 a.m. Wake up the next morning and do it all over again.
So yes, the work can be done cheaper, whether or not it’ll be done right is another story.
If you think it’s expensive to hire a professional to do the job, wait until you hire an amateur.
– Red Adair
Step Three:
Sell your experience over services
Stop selling your services and start selling your experience. That’s the bottom line.
When a person hires a private investigator to run a background check, they’re either going to get the amateur that re-sells a database check at an over inflated price, or the professional that spends hours and even days trying to dig up the information their clients are looking for. To a client, however, a background check is background check and when they see two checks stacked side by side, one with a $30 Price Tag and one with a $900 Price Tag, that first check is a helluva lot more reasonable to them.
If you’re thinking that a client will come back and use you after they realize they didn’t get the results they needed, you’re grossly mistaken. It’s the same thing as going to a doctor and getting your test results as being in A+ Healthy conditions. You’re not going to visit 3 different doctors to see if the results are all the same. You’re going to trust your doctor’s advice, the same way an inexperienced client will trust an investigator’s advice. This is also part of educating the client – see Step Two.
When a client approaches you, you need to sell them on your results and data. When people ask us for SEO services, we don’t sell them on SEO, instead, we show them results from the clients who have allowed us to share their data. Do we do SEO? Yes, here are 10 clients who are using us for SEO, here is where they were 12 months ago, here is where they are now, and here is where they are going to be next month.
You should be doing this for your clients as well. By focusing on selling your experience rather than selling a service, you can increase the bottom line of your business over night. If a client comes to you and asks for the cost of a background check, I would say something along the lines of:
“This is going to cost you $XX per hour, try to budget for $XXX. If the information is out there, I’ll find it. Here are my references and these are my proven results. These are my case studies, and this is what kind of information I’m allowed to get for you. I’d love to talk with you in more detail to see how we can get you the information you seek.”
Don’t worry about being the best. Every website we visit is either “the premier PI agency” or “We are the best investigators” or some other variation of that. Customers don’t care if you are the best investigator in the industry. They care about results. When you are selling your services to a client, you are applying for their private investigator position. Treat it like a job interview and sell your experience. Investigators are a dime a dozen, what makes you special?
Wrapping Things Up
If there is one major take away that I want you to get from this article, this is it:
Carry yourself in such a way that customers want to do business with you because you have the experience they need. When you’re talking to customers, figure out exactly what kind of category they fall into: Free Bargain Choppers or Results & Value Oriented. Then determine if they fall within your client parameters.
If the client would make a great addition to your case study and portfolio, add them to your client directory. If they would cause damage to your company in the long run, try to send them to your competitors… (that’s harsh).
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