Its time to start empathizing with your customers.
Start understanding what makes them tick. Start living and breathing customers like they're the oxygen in your lungs. Why? Because they may as well be. Without air, without customers, you'll be out of business and out of breath in five seconds flat. Those people that open their wallets for you are your GOD.
Did you ever get obsessed with someone in school, and you just couldn't stop thinking about them? Well, I want you to get OBSESSED with your customers!! When you're OBSESSED with someone, don't you want to find out everything about them, so that you can make them OBSESSED with you? Why not try and create this same effect with your own customers? Become a student of them and who they are and you'll enter into a long term relationship thats beneficial for both of you. And if you're lucky you'll get those obsessed customers running around town telling everyone who'll listen how great you are, they'll refer their friends, they'll communicate honestly with you, give you feedback, and even better, they'll keep buying from you!
If I haven't convinced you yet that your customers hold the key to your businesses future, slap yourself across the face three times and yell "Get to know your customers!" every time you catch each stinging face slap.
Ask yourself questions like:
What do they like to do from day to day? What kind of wage do they make? Where do they work? What are their hobbies? What do they love, hate, and put up with? Where do they hang out? Are they married? Are they divorced? Where'd they find you to begin with? What about you did --THEY-- thats right -- THEY -- like, and what caused them to buy from you? Where did they grow up? Where do they live now? Whats the weather like? What do they expect? What can I provide that they'd appreciate but DON'T expect? Keep asking yourself, "what questions are the most important for me to know", and then keep brainstorming until you start coming up with, "what's your favorite offal?" when you're selling vegan rice patties... by then you're likely out of good ideas.
Here's a list of ways to get to know your customers better:
- Come up with a survey offering prizes for participation. Ask all the questions you feel you can get away with, without being called a stalker. If you're a doctor you might be able to get away with asking more than if you're a real estate agent.
- Hold celebratory events and invite your customers. When they get there start talking to them and get a feel for who they are. Make sure your employees do the same -- but don't make it an interrogation!
- Speak to experts that deal with the same customers that you do, and speak to marketers and sales people that deal with them every day - pick their brains!
- If you're in a position to do so, pick a small handful of your best customers and put yourself on the line. Tell them exactly what you're trying to achieve by understanding your customers better and ask whether they'd be willing to talk to you. Just be sure to send them and their better half to a nice dinner on you afterwards.
- Read books that speak to your customers, if you're a personal trainer for example, read some weight loss books, if you sell baby clothes to parents read some parenting books... you get the idea.
- Get online and check out bloggers who communicate with your niche or market. What are they talking about? Whats making news right now?
- Another online opportunity is internet forums... people really hang out their feelings and thoughts for all to see and you can have the box office seat. And hey, you can even join the conversation and offer a solution that'll paint you in a rose colored light.
- Shop your own business. Even if you're the only person there, enlist a friend to shop your business. Or get a friend to arrange someone that you don't know to shop your business and take notes. What didn't work for them? What confused them? What turned them off?
- Join the groups they're part of. Are your fitness clients mainly joggers? Join a fun running group. Are your business clients concerned about the environment? Join a environmental group. Are your law clients generally divorced? Get divorced! I kid.
- Read trade journals that your clients read. Supply medical supplies to doctors? Read their trade journals... I think you're getting the picture.
- Check what keywords bring people to your website, and what keywords bring them to particular articles. Whats the bounce rate on those keywords? Is the keyword "Adelaide Tax" giving you browsers spending 20 seconds and leaving, while "Tax Accountant" is making browsers into 5 minute long multiple article viewing future customers? Can you make any connections between keywords people are using and their thought processes at that time?
- Become a customer of your competition if you can. What marketing messages are they sending out that can give you an insight into your niche? Just quickly: don't confuse this advice with "do what they're doing"!
- Become friends with your customers! Do you ever strike up particularly good conversations or relationships with long term clients? Become friends with them and really get the inside angle. And there's even an unstated bonus -- you get one friend, FREE!
- Ask questions of past clients. Why did they leave? Was it something you said? Did you offend them? Did you let them down? Or did they just learn to live without you (perhaps you're a life coach and you do a really good job)? Be nice about it -- just send out an email or letter asking for their feedback if they're willing to give it, and a small reward for doing so to get a better response (movie tickets always works).
All the best.
Jon.
Once you bag your perfect business client you'll want to try and keep that client for as long as possible, because...
- Obtaining new customers is the most expensive part of your marketing expenditure
- Selling to existing customers is the easiest and cheapest way to make more sales
- If you slack off and lose a customer, then that customer might not be too happy with you, and will probably tell a bunch of people
- Conversely, the longer a client stays with you, the longer the referral window stays open
So how do we keep our business relationships blissfully happy and productive? Its all about maintaining a positive mindset towards your customers, but before I talk about how you're going to treat your clients, let me touch on clients that just aren't a good match with you... so to speak.
When I say customer and client relationships that aren't a good match, I'm talking about problem clients. Clients who haggle over price, constantly drain your time with niggling unfounded complaints, and who generally drive you up the wall. If you haven't ever thought of dismissing a client before, then tell me what business you're in and I'll join you! Most of us have clients that take our time and energy away from more deserving clients, and you owe it to yourself to politely let your problem customer know they're no longer welcome.
Back to the customers you have rosy and warm relationships with -- we need to make sure we don't fall into the same traps that marriages seem to breed in our relationships. We don't want to:
- Take our customers for granted
- Neglect them
- Stop talking to them
- Stop serving them the way you said you would at the beginning
- Avoid them
- Talk rudely to them, and
- We simply don't want to give them a good reason to leave us
So to keep your clients, just take my list above and flip it.
Make sure your customers feel loved and appreciated, lavish them with attention (that you can afford), talk to them often about their fears, hopes, dreams, frustrations and concerns, serve them better than you said you would, keep in regular touch with them so they don't forget you, always talk politely and respectfully towards them, and find out every way you can to keep them enraptured and in love with you and your company.
There's a lot of common sense ways we can achieve that, and I'll clue you in on a few of those soon... but I'm sure you can come up with a few in the mean time, right?
