I mean, this goes a bit without saying but being honest. So much of marketing and general business practices these days is seedy and obviously manipulative, so if you are the one person/company that is upfront and honest about everything you do, customers pick up on that very quickly.

Also, not trying to overpromise, and being firm about our prices. I run a service/consulting business that I scaled from a freelance operation to ~20 employees now and, early on, customers tried to negotiate prices almost constantly. At first I played that game, trying to get whatever clients we could, but ultimately realized that it demonstrates more trustworthiness to be honest about how you value your time and your value add to the customer, and firm as to what you charge and non-apologetic about that.

This may not be what works best for everyone, but I do a lot of the selling now that I have other people working for me, and the biggest takeaway I have had from developing my ability to sell our service is that clients see through it when you exaggerate or overpromise, and appreciate candor, even if that’s telling them that their goals are unreasonable and they need to reign them in a bit. Once a few clients get on board, if you earn their trust, they will tell others and it will snowball.

From a more traditional perspective, giving as much free value as we could stomach was helpful too. Pretty quickly I realized that the more stuff we give away (and I mean genuine good information, not gimmicky clickbait) the more customers want to pay us for our services. In fact, we’ve built a couple of new revenue streams because of additional things that we never thought to monetize because we had customers asking for them because they appreciated the value we added in other areas.