a stock photo of someone who resembles your core customer.2 Most significant pain points – What does your core customer have the most difficulty in achieving?
3 Challenges – What are the roadblocks they have in overcoming their pain points?
4 Background–Describe their typical experience—how they’ve arrived at becoming your core customer.
5 Hobbies & interests – What topics are they passionate about?
6 Common objections – When presented with products or services similar to yours, what do they find objectionable?
7 Goals – What is your core customer hoping to achieve?
8 Demographics–Describe your core customer in demographic terms. If you market to businesses, these are called firmographics.
3 Robert Bloom, The Inside Advantage: The Strategy That Unlocks the Hidden Growth in Your Business, New York, McGraw-Hill Education, 2007.
Mistake #5
Not Focusing On Your Customers
I remember hearing the phrases, “The customer is king,” or “The customer is always right” as soon as I got into the business world. Having catch-phrases like these don’t mean that you are customer-focused; it’s a lot easier making these statements than doing them. Your small business needs to take it one step further and turn this focus into action.
How Small Businesses Lose Focus
There are several ways business owners let customers down. Here are four that I see regularly:
1 Not keeping promises – Many small businesses make guarantees to their customers in terms of faster service or quality products. A study done by the American Marketing Association showed that 35 percent of respondents said companies didn’t keep these promises to customers.
2 Poor service and communication – the failed promises could be as simple as poor service and unresponsiveness.
3 Not soliciting feedback – It’s hard to be customer-focused if you don’t ask customers how you’re doing. Top performing companies take advantage of customer feedback twice as much as lower-performing businesses. See mistake #15 for more.
4 Not focusing on employees – Companies that fail on promises to employees also fail on delivering to customers. The two are interdependent.
Focusing on Your Customers Is Essential
In a survey by 4Salesforce, “customer satisfaction” was the number one marketing metric for small businesses. When customers are satisfied, they buy again, and repeat sales are the lifeblood of small businesses. Your customers want you to alleviate their pain. When you’re able to do this, this focus leads to a clear differentiation with competitors. And that leads to repeat sales.
How to Focus on Your Customers
Focusing on your customers is an excellent first step, but it doesn’t stop there. You need to make your customers successful. There are a few things I like to do:
Think strategically about their business. Step back from your daily grind and think about how your customers and prospects spend their time. What problems do they have now and in the future?
Listen to your customers. Actively solicit your customers’ opinions on how you’re doing. Use a survey such as NPS (Net Promoter Score) to measure the customer experience.
Solve customer problems. Know enough about your customer’s business that you can find their pain and solve their problems.
Manage customer relationships. Managing your customer relationships requires a single, unified view of each customer or prospect so you can then reach out to them at the right time with the right message. You’ll probably need a CRM (customer relationship management) system to do this.
Go above and beyond. Excellent customer service is table stakes in today’s competitive environment. You must not settle for “good enough.” Instead, aspire to a level of service that is truly memorable.
Invest in employees. Invest in training for your employees. Look for ways to educate them about the industry and build their skills so they can better serve your customers.
Keep improving. Always be looking for product and service improvements. Encourage an open feedback loop with customers.
4 https://www.salesforce.com/
Mistake #6
Not Segmenting Your Customers
I often hear small business owners say, “I don’t need segmentation. I know exactly who my customers are.” Or, when I ask them what customers they focus on, they say “everyone.” Really?
Segmentation allows you to aim and utilize your scarce dollars more effectively. Segmentation helps you with:
1 Targeting – By breaking customers into smaller groups, it’s possible to determine which ones are a good fit and which ones aren’t.
2 Pricing – Different customer groups will value your product or service differently. Segmentation allows you to price based on different perceived values.
3 Positioning – Having different segments allows you to position yourself against various competitors in those segments.
4 Promotion – You can be more relevant to customers and prospects by changing how you pitch your product or service.
5 Product – Even your product features can be altered to fit different segments because each segment has various problems.
How Do You Segment?
After you’ve determined your core or primary customer (see mistake #4), there will be other groups of customers that need your focus. These are called segments. In business-to-business marketing, a company might segment customers according to factors such as industry, number of employees, products purchased, and location. In consumer marketing, segments usually involve demographics like age, gender, marital status, location (urban, rural), or life stage (single, married, retired, etc.).
Whatever characteristics you pick, they should help you understand and predict how your customers will act. Sometimes the criteria aren’t demographic or geographic; they’re behavioral. Have customers exhibited behavior that makes them more likely to buy your product? Finally, make sure the segments are large enough to target. If you’ve refined the target segment so precisely that you only have 13 people in it, it won’t do you much good.
Developing your segments usually requires research. You’ll need to gather specific information about customers and analyze them to see if any patterns can be used to create segments. Here are the typical ways of getting customer information:
Face-to-face interviews
Surveys
General
