How to Increase Your Business Success by Choosing the Right Customers.
Play to your strengths, work on your weaknesses and focus your efforts on the right customer.
You have passion for the work you do and you know your business. That’s why people hire you. They want your expertise and they expect you to facilitate the exchange not just of information, but of knowledge.
Employing your knowledge isn’t just about imparting the wisdom and learning you’ve gained from your experiences. It is about being aware of every piece in your arsenal; from the quality of your communications and the attitudes you hold, to going the extra mile for your clients in a way that is meaningful and valuable to them.
You need to be the full package and know when to use which tool from your armoury.
You can’t be everything to everyone; but you can be something to someone. To do that you need to really know your customer. Who are they? What do they want? What do they need? Think: how can I help them achieve this?
When you offer your services to a customer who falls outside of your target market it can be a costly mistake. If they have never used the type of service you provide, you have to go through a process of education.
That usually means spending time and absorbing the costs accordingly. Fine if you’re business is set up for this kind of higher volume, lower quality offering; or if that is specifically your market and you’ve streamlined this process accordingly.
Customers new to your industry can be a constant drain on your resources because it can be a continual sales process. Quite often they don’t know the true value of what you offer.
This situation presents a paradox. You want customers. You decide to choose work that comes your way without qualifying the lead. You spend time explaining your services, how it can help them, why your solution will work and why it is of value. You show them the proof, you put the testimonials and the statistical evidence right under their nose and even then you can still get reservations.
You spend valuable time that should be directed to the project in hand, delivering what you know needs to be delivered. Instead, every minute you hold hands, your hourly rate decreases, the quality of your output goes down and you betray your real customers and ultimately yourself.
Of course, everyone has an ‘ideal’ customer – we often aspire to perfection however impossible the dream. However, if we don’t try and stay close to the market we set out to serve, we will find ourselves losing our valuable customers to the competition.
Worse still, if we don’t know who we really want to be serving, we’ll never fulfil our true potential.
We always need to sell ourselves, even (and especially) to our ideal customer. If we have enabled our target market to help us to help them, we can focus our real creativity on quality solutions that get noticed, get remembered and build a great reputation.
Article writing, blogs, press releases and any medium that communicates the value of your service or products to potential customers will prove invaluable to your business success; it will save your time, educating people so you can dedicate yourself to the real work in hand.
Just make sure that you aren’t buttering up your customers for the competition; differentiate yourself and show why you are the first person/company they should speak with!