What does the term PROFESSIONAL SERVICES mean to you?
Diplomas and certificates? Expertise?
I have news for you: no one cares about these.
Why?
Because wherever diplomas and certificates are required, say by law or regulations, the public simply takes them as a given.
So, if diplomas and certificates don’t help us here, what defines PROFESSIONAL SERVICES for our purposes?
Examples
To find the definition of Professional Services, let’s be more specific:
The most typical examples of Professional Services are Lawyers and Accountants.
For these, certification and expertise are taken as a given. We don’t even have to talk about it.
Next in line would be Coaches and Consultants.
In these cases, expertise is taken absolutely as a given while certification is a little more difficult to establish if at all.
Much further afield are specialist professions such as specialist builders or, for instance, experts who sell high-value items like restored cellos.
For those, expertise is absolutely indispensable but needs to be established, while certification is generally not relevant at all.
All of these are examples of Professional Services even though they are in totally different industries where expertise and certificates play completely different roles. So, what unites them?
What do they have in common?
All the professions in the examples I have given have to provide two things up front:
They have to connect with their prospective clients, and they have to build trust with the people who want their services before these will consider becoming their clients.
In other words, they all have to be regarded as Trusted Advisors before their clients will buy from them.
Establishing trust, therefore, is at the core of Professional Services as we use the term here.
This brings us to the obvious next question:
What is the best way of establishing trust?
It is, of course, talking face to face.
How does this help us online?
It is straight forward. We can transfer this connection online by using video provided the video is done right.
This is at the core of my A-Z of Video for Professional Services:
Providing you with the information that empowers you to connect and build trust with your online audience; that helps you get your message right and get it out there with the most powerful online tools available; that helps you come across as a Trusted Advisor on your website and on your social media properties.
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