That’s right. The art of growing your customer base begins with help. And for many business owners, while this forms part of your service offering it’s something that only gets done once a sale has been made, not before, and therein lies your problem.
If your prospects have never bought from you, they don’t know how good your product or service is, and they are less inclined to make an immediate purchasing decision. You’ll have to work much harder to convince them to buy what you are selling.
Whereas when they know and like you, they’re far more willing to trust you, and sales will happen naturally. This is the point of helping prospects. Your goal should be to develop a relationship with your target audience because by doing so it becomes much easier to sell to them.
But what do I mean by help?
Educate and entertain
Seems simple enough and yet so many companies get this wrong. They think I need to be innovative or I need to focus on the key benefits and features of my product or service. It’s all me, me, me.
The most important advice I can share is that you need to stop focusing on yourself. People aren’t interested in how long you’ve been in business, how many products you’ve sold or what awards you’ve won. They don’t care. What they want to know is how you’re going to help them and why you’re the right choice.
The best way to do this is to demonstrate how good your product or service is, and you can by creating useful or engaging how-to videos, insightful blog articles, informative newsletters and much more. Let them get to know you, show a little personality and be real.
Humour is a fantastic way to grow your customer base. People want to be entertained, and they’ll stop what they’re doing to hear or read what you have to say. That’s incredibly powerful.
When we position ourselves as educators and deliver value, we’re seen as experts in our field and are more readily trusted.
Another great way is to reverse their risk. You can do this by offering a try before you buy (which could be a test drive or sample product, whatever) or a free consultation. The key is to get your prospect to experience what you are selling because it’s far easier to make a decision when we know that we like what we are buying and that it works.
Target the pain
What I mean by this is you need to become a problem solver. When people are in pain price doesn’t matter. They don’t care about shopping around. They just want the pain to go away.
So you need to figure out what your prospects pain point is. For example, as a restaurant owner who delivers 5-star cuisine, the quality of your food isn’t the pain point. It could be, however, transport to and from your restaurant. If they want to have a good time and enjoy the wine, someone either needs to arrange a cab or agree to be the designated driver.
A great workaround is to offer free transport to and from your restaurant for anyone who lives in a 10-mile radius — what a way to sweeten the deal. Now not only are they getting excellent service, but they’ll spend more because they can drink more, and they’ll come back time and time again.
You’ve just delivered a world-class experience and increased the lifetime value of your customer base.
Never intimidate
We’ve all come across an aggressive salesperson. It tends to be a rookie mistake and usually starts with an “Excuse me, have you heard about XYZ?” You politely decline interest in their product or service only to be confronted by a wave of hostility. At least if it’s a telesales person you can put the phone down, but in a shopping centre with a trolley full of goods what do you do, where do you go?
Getting a person to buy from you so that you’ll go away is a terrible strategy. If their initial experience of your product or service is a tense and unhappy one, they’ll always view it in a negative light. Not with fondness, but with irritation, anger, frustration or fear. And this can put them off for life.
So not only are you potentially losing that customer, but they will probably share their story with a close friend and family member or write a poor Google review which will cost you, future customers.
Aggression is a significant barrier to sales and should be avoided at all cost.
Don’t confuse
I have this saying, “If you confuse them, you’ll lose them.” Very often people don’t know what they want. They might have a vague idea, but they haven’t necessarily researched what they are looking for, and so they need a little help making the right purchasing decision.
Your goal should be to provide clarity. Unfortunately, there are times when we confuse our prospects, and the result is that they do nothing. They don’t buy from us because quite honestly they lack confidence. You’ll probably have heard them say I need to think about it or do a little more research to be sure that this is right for me. And at this point, you’ve lost the sale, and they’re probably going to look elsewhere, a potential competitor for example. You had a golden opportunity, and you messed up.
I experienced this recently when I decided to invest in an electric bicycle. I hadn’t done my due diligence, but I love cycling, and so I was ready and willing to shell out a large sum of cash. The problem was that the salesperson kept harping on about this bike’s performance and that one’s specs and yadda, yadda. He didn’t ask me the important questions, like what’s this for, what price range are you looking in, what do you want to get out of your bike? In the end, I left empty-handed.
So in closing, be clear and concise about what you are selling and make sure you understand what your prospect needs. You’ll never fully help someone if you don’t listen to what they have to say and offer a solution – and do it in a memorable way, something they can look back on with fondness. Make the decision to work with you or buy from you an easy one.
How are you helping your customers?
By Allan Dib
About the author
Allan is an Australian entrepreneurial success story. He’s started, grown and exited several companies including a telecommunications company which was named in 2011 in Business Review Weekly’s Fast 100 list. The 1-Page Marketing Plan is his first book. Through his company Successwise, he provides clear and simple marketing frameworks for success.
