With this knowledge, you will have identified your perfect customers into groups, which will enable you to target them based upon their needs and not your products. This means you offer solutions not stuff. Everything you do in terms of developing new products or services, delivering your message over various marketing channels and hiring the right staff in the right place will evolve around this identification. Let's be certain we are on the same page by coming to an understanding.
Being successful in business begins by identifying your target. I know this sounds incredibly elementary, but it is what we need to know, in order to build the business beyond where we are. Every organization has a typical customer and a consequential lifecycle. But few have a perfect customer, or groups thereof, they have absolutely identified outside of their own mind.
Building a profitable customer relationship requires an understanding of a two sided proposition. The two sides to this relationship are quite simply, your understanding of your customer's needs and the perception they have of you or your organization. Furthermore, it is critical to realize that quantity rarely trumps quality. You need to know what your customers' needs are, how they evolve, why they have chosen you and what those customers are contributing to the success of your company. Not knowing this in detail will be very expensive. It is great to know about our customer's family, outside influences and extracurricular interests but that isn't what I mean here.
Your perfect customer can first be broadly defined by answering these two questions:
· How does what you offer solve their problems and add to achieving their objectives?
· Why would they need, what you offer, from you and not your competitor?
Then you need to narrow that list by identifying exactly who fits this mold today:
· Where your customers are geographically located.
· What products or services does each of them, derived from the previous set of questions, buy from you now? How often do they repeat that purchase?
· What does it cost you to acquire a new and nearly duplicate copy?
· What are they worth to you on an annual basis?
Your newly identified or refined perfect customer needs to be listed as specific people or businesses. You must be able to identify them by such narrow target data as income level, occupation, gender, location, questions they typically ask and the benefits they seek for the problems you can solve.
Being successful in business begins by identifying your target. I know this sounds incredibly elementary, but it is what we need to know, in order to build the business beyond where we are. Every organization has a typical customer and a consequential lifecycle. But few have a perfect customer, or groups thereof, they have absolutely identified outside of their own mind.
Building a profitable customer relationship requires an understanding of a two sided proposition. The two sides to this relationship are quite simply, your understanding of your customer's needs and the perception they have of you or your organization. Furthermore, it is critical to realize that quantity rarely trumps quality. You need to know what your customers' needs are, how they evolve, why they have chosen you and what those customers are contributing to the success of your company. Not knowing this in detail will be very expensive. It is great to know about our customer's family, outside influences and extracurricular interests but that isn't what I mean here.
Your perfect customer can first be broadly defined by answering these two questions:
· How does what you offer solve their problems and add to achieving their objectives?
· Why would they need, what you offer, from you and not your competitor?
Then you need to narrow that list by identifying exactly who fits this mold today:
· Where your customers are geographically located.
· What products or services does each of them, derived from the previous set of questions, buy from you now? How often do they repeat that purchase?
· What does it cost you to acquire a new and nearly duplicate copy?
· What are they worth to you on an annual basis?
Your newly identified or refined perfect customer needs to be listed as specific people or businesses. You must be able to identify them by such narrow target data as income level, occupation, gender, location, questions they typically ask and the benefits they seek for the problems you can solve.