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The Ten Dumbest Marketing Mishaps - #05
Mishap 5: Failing to Determine & Address Your Customers’/Clients’/Prospects’ Needs
90% of the businesses I look at never precisely determine the needs, desires, or requirements of the people to whom they are trying to sell.
How can you expect to adequately fill someone’s needs if you never take the time to understand them? It would be laughable . . . if there wasn’t so much money at stake. But the fact is few companies seek to meet their customers’ needs.
Those companies that do understand their customers’ needs and attempt to satisfy those needs, seem to end up with more business than they can handle — a Good Thing.
You can end up with more business than you can handle, too – if you’ll take the time to learn what your customers need.
Let’s probe the problem a little.
To induce someone to favor you with their business, you normally have to offer them some need-filling advantage. Let’s review just a few of the possible needs people want filled:
- convenience
- better quality
- lasts longer
- saves time
- looks better
- performs more functions
- state-of-the-art
- saves you money
- makes life less difficult (saves effort)
- makes you more money
- more effective
What do your customers want or need most in the product or service you offer?
Do they want the convenience of knowing they can go down the block and get it from you, or the knowledge that your firm stocks or offers more items, or sizes, or products than any-other company?
Do they want the top-of-the-line product or service? (Or, do they want highly personalized service, attention, advice and instruction?)
Perhaps they merely want to acquire the kind of goods or services you sell at the lowest possible price. Or maybe price alone isn’t what they’re after. Maybe they want the best guarantee, service policy or service to support the sale.
I don’t know which need or which combination of needs your potential ‘customer seeks more than anything else. But that customer does seek fulfillment of some singular need or combination of needs, and sometimes the customer doesn’t even fully realize his need.
But once you find and fill that need, you will own that business niche.
If you don’t know what needs your customer most wants you to fill, start by recognizing that no one can be all things to all people. You dilute your image as a need-filler when you try to do that.
So, first determine which needs you can fill, consistent with who you are, what your business is and how you operate.
Then talk to clients, prospects, and customers, and have your salespeople do the same. Experiment with the image you convey in your advertising and promotion.
Monitor the consensus and gauge the feedback. Let your customers tell you which specific needs they most want filled, then determine which of these needs you can actually rill.
Then, don’t merely fill those needs silently. Make sure your customers, prospects, salespeople and your entire marketplace learn that your business listened and that you finally did something to satisfy the fulfilled needs of your customers.
Continuously (albeit tactfully) inform, educate and outright point out that your company is filling those needs for your customers.
Change your ads to feature these specific need-filling advantages. Have your website, your field/in-store salespeople point out what you are doing to serve your clients’ needs.
Send out emails and letters that do the same. Phone your customers and inform them that you’re prepared to fill their needs.
If you decide that service is the critical element, offer the best service, the fastest service, the most skilled service people, the most knowledgeable staff, etc.
If top quality is the need you decide to fill, don’t offer mediocre goods! If you claim to be the best quality business, make darned certain you’re a regular fuss-budget about what you sell.
If you promise the lowest price, keep that promise. Integrity requires it. If you don’t genuinely fill the needs you purport to fill, your customers will soon abandon you.
By Walter |
Topics: Client Top Secret, Marketing Mishaps |