Posts Tagged ‘shape’
Improve Your Business One Customer at a Time
This is part of a series of posts on what you can do to be more successful in your business this year. To get a free report full of success tips for your business, click here.
The advice I am about to give is dependent on two things already being in place in your business. First, you need to know what you love. Never veer your business too far from your passion. Second, you need to have a clear idea of who your ideal customer is. You should be worried about pleasing and serving this type of customer above all else.
With those two things in place, it is safe to follow this advice. Without them, you could derail your business. What is this advice, that is potentially so dangerous? Simply this, let your customer shape your business.
Customer Input
If you want a business that is loved by your customers, you need to be sure to pay attention to them. Proactively find out what they like and what they don’t like, and make adjustments accordingly.
Katharine Coles, of Mad Marketeer, is a strong advocate of this. She says:
Listen to your clients. If they complain that they don’t like something about your product or service, try to find ways to change to meet their needs. If they don’t like your customer service or they think you are not listening or being responsive enough, try to put new systems in place to address the issues. If they don’t understand your documentation or your contracts, make them clearer and easier to understand. One of the biggest mistakes that small businesses make is NOT LISTENING.
Adapting to fit the needs of your customers is an obvious move. Yet, sometimes business owners can get so caught up in what they know, they forget to find out what the customer knows. And if the customer knows something is too complicated, too slow, too out of date, they will move on.
Customer-Centric
By listening to each customer, finding out what their experience was working with your business, and making adjustments, you can create a business that is customer-centric. And when customers are happy, everyone is happy.
Don’t forget though, this can go horribly wrong. First, if you have a customer that doesn’t fit your ideal customer blueprint, you shouldn’t listen. That sounds harsh, I know. But what if your ideal customer is small grocery chains? Your business is flexible and serves these chains well. Now, maybe you have one sale with a larger grocery chain. Suddenly, this larger chain is making different demands on your business. If you change according to these demands, you know that it is going to hurt your smaller customers. What do you do? If you know beyond a shadow of a doubt that the small grocery chains are your ideal customer, you don’t kow-tow to the big guy. Always do what is best for your ideal customer first.
The same goes for doing what you love. Customers needs a lot of different things, even ideal customers. Some you can deliver with perfection and passion. Others you can’t. So, even if you see a need, it may not be your best move to fill it. Always run any new product or service pass the test of whether you are going to love doing it.
Listen and Change
If you keep those two things in line, you can safely play within the boundaries. Listening to ideal customers and adapting your business accordingly can be fun and very profitable. Focus on making the customer experience amazing. The only way to do this is to talk constantly to customers about it, listen to their suggestions, and make changes accordingly.
I’ll end with some advice from Iman Jalali, of Train Signal.
Listen to current and prospective customers and the communities around them. Listening to them is only part of being successful though. If you only listen and don’t react or adapt, listening does you no good. By utilizing tools like Twitter search you have access to millions of conversations, conversations that may be about your business. Conversations that may help shape how you conduct business and the future of your business.
The information you need to know is accessible to you, both through talking to your current customers and through your engagement with communities online and off. So stop making excuses, start listening and adapting. In the end, you win and your customers win.
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Follow Bradford Shimp on Twitter.
photo credit: Slack pics
Yourself As Client
This is part of a series of posts on what you can do to be more successful in your business this year. To get a free report full of success tips for your business, click here.
As 
a small business owner, it is very easy to shortchange your own business in favor of helping your clients. What I want to ask you is, “what if you were your next client?”
Taking time out to focus on your business is necessary. If you don’t get a handle on the details of your small business, things could easily spiral out of control. So do yourself a favor. Schedule in some time to focus on your business.
Do Your List
There are many things that you can do to improve things. This might include finally putting some procedures on paper. You probably have a whole list of things that you have been putting off. Get them done.
The Things You Can’t Do
There is another element to this, however. Say you run an HVAC company. If so, I bet your furnace is in tip-top shape for the winter. But how about your books? Your marketing? Not surprisingly, we tend to focus on our area of skill. This is actually a good thing. Too often, though, we don’t bring in other skills to help make our businesses better.
If you are a caterer, you probably don’t spend much time giving clients advice on their web site. If they need help, what would you do? I bet you would refer them to someone you know who does web sites. When you look at your own business as a client, maybe you’ll realize that it is time to refer in some other businesses and professionals to help.
Bring in the Professionals
You wouldn’t try to do things yourself that are out of your area of expertise for your valued clients. But for some reason, you have a tendency to suffer through your weak areas for your own business. Stop. Get some help. Bring in the professionals.
If you want to be the best business possible, you need the best help possible. This includes great help in accounting, legal, marketing, even systems development. Unless one of those is your own area of expertise, you need to be hiring out for those. Is it going to cost money? Sure it is. But it will also help you create a more solid business that will be much better at generating profit and cash flow. In other words, it is money well-invested.
If you were your client, you would treat yourself better. You would give yourself the same advice I am giving you. You would bring in the experts when you didn’t know how to fulfill a need. And in the end, you would have a tighter, more efficient, and more profitable business.
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Bradford Shimp builds web sites for small businesses at BroadRiverCreative.com. Follow Bradford on Twitter @bradfordshimp.
