As a young salesman, my sales manager taught me that ‘knowing anything about your customer is more important than knowing everything about your product or service’.
A philosophy I was able to embrace easily because from an even younger age I’d always been insatiably curious.
However, my early attempts at being curious about customers took me down plenty of blind alleys …
Because ‘anything’ is a bit vague – lol!
So, over the next few years, I quite literally studied customers – watching their behavior and ‘listening between the lines’ (… because what customers say they do or think and what they actually do or think are very often two completely different things!).
From those hundreds of observations, I was able to devise a questioning process I could use with customers that would routinely deliver unique insights that my clients could use to their competitive advantage.
For instance …
After speaking to the customers of a drape cleaning business I was able to advise the owner to stop running price promotion adverts as that wasn’t what was stimulating people to get their drapes cleaned.
From my conversations with his customers, I discovered that their ‘worst nightmare’ would be finding out that other women had been criticizing their housekeeping standards behind their back.
So, I advised the business owner to put his prices up and then run adverts that focused on his clients avoiding their worst nightmare. The headline on the advert simply said …
‘LADIES: will you be the last one to notice your curtains need cleaning?
Sales and profits were transformed overnight reversing months of decline.
Your customers have a ‘worst nightmare scenario’ too – figuring out what it is could transform your business too.