Last week, we covered the first chapter of the “10 foundations of business success”, an excellent very practical book by my friend and colleague Guy Hamilton.
Today, we will go through the 2nd Chapter: Customer Needs. There is no business without customers, this chapter highlights how taking the time to understand, support and be there for your customer can make a difference, build relationships with customers and how you can provide a friendly approach to your sales tactic that is sure to win their business long term.
If you missed any of the articles in the topic, see links below.
Series Intro – 10 Foundations of Business Success
Chapter 1: Market Segmentation Part 1
Chapter 1: Market Segmentation Part 2 – The Steps
A good marketing and sales campaign is relevant to a target customer, with a compelling message and increases the target customer’s propensity to buy. Notice how it all centres on the customer? Making an offer customer-centric is based on properly identifying and understanding customer needs. Having a truly customer-centric business culture is about understanding what makes a customer want to buy your product or service; this is probably the most fundamental of business disciplines.
In summary:
– Positively identify the customer’s needs
– Make sure the features and benefits of the product or service meet these needs
– Make the product or service a compelling solution to their needs.
Most businesses claim they understand their customer needs – often intuitively – based on many years of experience in an industry or market. Small businesses, most are deluding themselves: they do not really understand their customer’s needs or preferences.
Rule 1: Understand both the rational and the emotional needs of a customer
As you build an understanding of your customers, try to clarify which of their desires are about the specifics of a product and which are associated with, but not core to, their buying decision.
Building a customer-centric business is one of the simplest disciplines to put in place, often involving no more than:
– Asking the customer what they need and want
– Regularly assessing how your business engages with customers
– Capturing both the rational emotional needs of your customers
Considering new ideas, processes or promotions from the customer’s viewpoint first, before considering internal processes and preferences.
Rule 2: Consider customer needs in the context of the wider activity they are engaged in.
Often, purchasing a single product or service is just part of a wider set of needs. The more you understand these needs, and can talk to them, the more relevant you become at a product sale level.
Rule 3: Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and walk through the experiences you intend them to go through.
Ask some simple questions:
– If I was buying this product, or receiving this service, what would matter to me? Is this process clear? Has the product or service been presented in a way that is relevant to me?
– Did this experience feel like it was orientated around me or like the businesses processes came first?
– Would the process come first?
By challenging yourself with these questions you put yourself firmly in the customer’s shoes and become customer-centric.
Rule 4: Keep up with customers’ changing expectations.
Customers’ core preferences may not change much, but the context (or emotional factors) within which they make their buying decision will. Make sure you regularly re-assess whether customer preferences have changed in line with an evolving market. Always revalidate whether your buying process and customer experiences have adapted to meet changed market conditions and expectations.
Rule 5: Ask the customer, ask the customer and ask the customer again.
Build into your business model a culture that seeks to understand and track customer preferences. If asked the right way, at a convenient time, customers are typically willing to provide some feedback on why they chose a business and what were the positive buying factors for them. If you offer a premium product or service, customers will tend to engage more than a commodity product.
Rule 6: Link any presentation of product features and benefits to customer needs or expectations.
Few customers are articulate in describing what exactly they are looking for and why. A good sales person will have a range of techniques to start a conversation with a customer and peel back generic comments to understand what they really want.
The Steps
So we have some basic rules covering the capture and understanding of customer needs and their preferences. What are some practical steps you can take to become more customer-centric?
- First recognize the value and importance of being customer centric. Build a business culture focused on understanding core customer needs and what they value in product features or service attributes.
- Reward customer-centric behaviour in your business. Do staff compensation schemes focus on building customer relationships and customer service standards, or are they more orientated to sales, operational processes and financial performance?
- Creating management time to critically review what customers are saying is possibly one of the hardest actions. To really listen to, and understand, customer feedback you need to take time away from day-to-day demands and think through what you are hearing.
- Most businesses focus too much on the product and what it might do for customer, thinking that they are addressing the customer’s underlying need, but do not link it back to the need in a way the customer understands.
If you take away one key theme from this chapter, it should be that it’s what your customers actually value and needs that matters the most to your success, and not what you think they might need. There is only one way to stay on top of this: listen to your customers.