Portraying Your Passion to Clients

This week, let’s talk about portraying your passion to potential clients.

There’s a great quote by Theodore Roosevelt…”People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.” While this statement may seem a bit cheesy to some, I think it’s really valuable and speaks to the real drive behind why a client chooses a particular person and/or company. They need to know you care.

We tend to share how much we know; the classes we’ve taken, the training we’ve received, the specialty we practice, the techniques and modalities we can do…but people need to know you care about them. A doctor can be great at what he does but if his bedside manner is horrible, people aren’t going to want to go to him. In fact, studies have shown that people speak more fondly of doctors with better bedside manner REGARDLESS of outcome than those with better results, but worse bedside manner. How crazy is that!? And it seems to come down to empathy…a doctor being able to put themselves in a patient’s shoes, understand their problem, their apprehensions or fears, their need for more explanation, things like that. That empathy deepens the connection between the doctor and the patient, resulting in far more trust and a better view of the doctor. We have to empathize in the same way.

Let me give you another example… We have a lot of home renovations and projects that need done; much of which we’re doing ourselves, but some things require us to bring in the professionals. I tried to schedule with at least a dozen contractors; half of which never even returned my phone call and most of the others never showed up for the estimate when they said they would. Both of those things show me that they don’t care. They don’t care that I need help. They don’t care that they wasted my time. They don’t care how their business is perceived. They don’t care if they get my business or not. All of which makes me assume that they don’t care about the kind of work they would do anyway, so I’m never going to trust them to work on my house! Finally, I found a guy who not only returned my call really quickly and who came out when he said he would, but completed the job perfectly! I now recommend him to everyone. He’s already done work for my parents and a couple friends. Even when he just came for the estimate, he was great about answering all my questions, explaining why some things needed to be done that I hadn’t expected, but gave me plenty of options, things like that. He even called a few weeks after the project was done to make sure we were still happy with everything. He was obviously passionate about, not only WHAT he does, but WHO he does it for. And that’s the key.

You can’t just be passionate about massage. You also have to be passionate about the people you’re helping. So how do you express that? Think about it… Do your social media posts convey that passion? Does your website show that passion? Does all of your marketing speak to that passion? A big part of this is in your copy. Saying something like “massage helps to reduce pain” doesn’t convey any sort of passion. It’s just a statement. But if you reword that to say something like “There’s nothing like seeing a client walk in with pain and walk out completely free from that burden.” brings you into the statement and shows you care, but still keeps the focus on WHAT you do and WHO you do it for. Sharing client testimonials and expressing that the results this person is so excited about is exactly why you do what you do. Some of the best feedback I’ve seen therapists get is when they share those little things…how amazing they felt when they saw a client walk out pain free after struggling to stand up straight on their way in, or whatever the specific case may be.

It’s when you can convey that passion clearly; not only showing that you can help someone, but that you sincerely care at every step that they get those results, and that that’s your purpose in business. So how can you show how much you care? What can you start sharing in your social media posts, newsletters, blog posts, brochures, on your website, or any other client communications? Let your clients see that passion!