Both you and your customer want the same thing: but it’s super hard to make this happen.
The key question is:
How can we not only blow the customers’ socks off with our consistent and continually improving customer focus, but also make good profits and grow our business?
After all, it’s relatively easy to wow the customer by charging peanuts for a VIP experience … but it’s not sustainable: you need to ensure as well as the customers raving about you and continually coming back for more, you’re also making good profits, growing and innovating.
The answer, of course, lies in understanding your customer’s needs really well, and then honing your beliefs into strategies that produce a win/win outcome:
- you need your customer to ‘win’ so they come back and tell everyone about you,
- and you need yourself to win so you can make a good living and invest in and grow your business.
It’s no help to the customer to be blown away by excellence one time, and then to come back for more to find that you’ve had to cut back in order to survive, or that you’re no longer there!
The idea is to develop a deep and continual understanding of your customer, to get really smart and develop systems that find and focus on this sweet spot; where not only do the customers love you, but where you make consistent good profits and can afford to keep investing and growing at an appropriate rate.
You need a ‘win/win’.
This is hard to do as a small business; most of the large brands that are successful today have grown by being supported by long-term capital that can afford to make a loss for a few (or even many) years, in order to grow a customer base that can then be exploited, or the company then sold to someone else because of the potential in its high customer numbers.
You need to be smarter than this.
The key is to see the ‘real opportunity’ in your marketplace:
- What frustrations are customers often having in this market?
- How could you make things routinely easier, better or more attractive for them?
- How can you be the most trusted in your market, so that you can charge a fair margin for your goods and services?
- How could you perhaps be so much more caring/attentive than the ‘normal’ in your market?
- What add-ons might customers pay well for because it’s so much easier or more convenient for them just to have one supplier?
*ACTION*:
- Ask a trusted customer what they REALLY want; if they could find the best supplier in the world in your business, what would this business look like and do?
Slow Selling is a UK based not for profit organisation for small business owners.
The aim is to help you grow your business through customer loyalty, reputation and referrals … without all the hype, hassle and nonsense.
To find out more, please contact us on our website
