Silly Season in business is a great time to stop for a think. Before everything kicks off for the dash to Christmas There is a magic question to ask. Who are your customers? Who do you want as your customers and the answer? There are a MULTITUDE of customers. But from among that multitude there are a customers you want to foster and customers whose business you’ll happily take but perhaps they are difficult or lower margin and if you could get a better type of client / customer you would prefer that. This is where customer profiling comes in.
Many businesses are developed on the basis of ‘we can make it / provide it lets sell it’. This leads to being focused on US; whoever US is. You will see this all the time when you read the text of a company website. It reads we do this we do that we are whatever we we we.
Let’s try to flip that completely on its head. Can we be led by our customers want? Instead of we can do so we will sell it, we start with what do our customers want from us that so far we do not provide? It’s whole new headspace. The website changes to You You You and the possibility of being client centred rises to 90%. If you are constantly listening to your customers then you will be ahead of the curve on changes in the market rather than following the crowd. You have constant market intelligence before your competitors do and the likelihood of losing a customer is much lower. After all, a satisfied customer is very unlikely to change supplier.
The cost of getting a new customer is enormous. when you factor in all the different elements in terms of hours, money, marketing advertising, brand awareness and so on you realise that it is way easier to upsell the existing clients; to get them to buy more from you; than to go out and try to generate a new client. You already have their trust, you already know if they are good payers, or not. You are pushing an open door.
So now instead of following the crowd (the MULTITUDE) you are at the forefront of demand you have happy customers because you make things easy for them – You are the paracetemol for their headaches and problems.
So where to start.
- Identify your top 10 or 20 or 50 customers. Who are they? Where do they fit into the world Men, women, a specific age bracket, a socio economic group, a specific type of company, businesses in a specific industry Identify them. Most people discover that they have a ’type’
- Once I know what my type is: How do I find out what those customers want? The answer is: Listen to them. They drop all kinds of little hints about their point of pain. What are they complaining about? Is there an opportunity there?
- Next your sales people (or you) need to change the way you relate to your customers, foster the skill of asking the right questions. They call this consultative selling
- Once you have the top customers on track (your sales and profits will be up at this stage – substantially) you should be asking how can you duplicate the process.
But that’s about up scaling. There is enough for one month in this. There are a MULTITUDE of customers with a MULTITUDE of problems out there but you are the paracetamol to ease that pain and grow your business