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What do you customers want?

Is your business growth starting to plateau or stagnate?

It’s easy to sit back, take the foot off the accelerator and watch the sales  roll in, especially if you’ve been satisfied with your recent performance. But  keep in mind that if you slack off too much, your competitors will soon catch up  and eventually put you out of business.  At some point you may even find that you have stopped providing what your customers want.

Take a look around – businesses (and your competitors) are closing their  doors due to the drop in consumer spending – which means MORE potential  customers for businesses like YOU, that do survive. Today is the best time to  take steps to revamp your marketing efforts and respond to the needs and the  pain of your target market.

In these tough times, it’s going to take more than “thinking outside the box”  and goodwill with existing customers to secure the survival of your  business.

I want you to STOP right now and make a list of everything that you (and your  competitors) do NOT do to make it easy for your prospects to buy from you. If  you want to succeed over the long term, you will take a good hard look at both  of these lists and find a way to do whatever it takes, for as long as it takes,  to win your customers and keep them.

Granted, this is not an easy task. Most businesses will continue to do what  they have always done – guess or assume what they think their customers need.  However, no matter how challenging it is to ask the hard questions and  re-engineer your strategy, I guarantee it will be a whole lot less painful and  stressful than going under.

I had a married couple come to me once for advice and coaching – both the  business they were in and their relationship were at the breaking point. The  husband turned and said to me “I don’t understand it. I do everything humanly  possible for my wife and she doesn’t appreciate me and I don’t think I can  possibly do anything more to satisfy my customers – they are never happy and  always want more. What can I possibly do?”

My answer to this age old dilemma applies to him, his marriage, and to you in  your business right now. “Sounds like you are doing a lot. Too bad it’s  everything BUT the very thing that your partner and customers need most.”

While this may sound harsh, I think you will agree that it is absolutely  true. It does you no good to work harder doing everything…instead of focusing  on the 1 thing that you customers actually need. Wouldn’t it be easier for you  to work smarter, not harder, if you knew with absolute certainty what that 1  thing is?

How can you take the lesson from my client and apply it to your own business  right now?

How could you go about figuring out what that 1 thing is?

I want you to do something really radical today and start asking both your  prospects and existing customers what they need. You need to find out:

• What is the biggest challenge your prospects are facing in their business?

• When your customer thinks of the product or service you provide, what is  THE most painful or difficult issue associated with acquiring it?

• What is  the most important criteria to your purchaser when evaluating a company like  you?

• What are some things that he/she thinks about or considers from a  financial perspective when selecting that product/service or a vendor?

• What  is the key strategic driver for you customer’s decision?

It doesn’t really matter what you have done up to this point or how hard you  are working. There is no prize for volume or quantity. What counts is quality  and relevance.  You need to do determine what your customers want…and give it to them.