Creating Customers – a distinct process
Creating Customers – a distinct process
Creation of a customer is a very different and separate process from that used when creating and pursuing opportunities. The process of creating a customer, as a carefully planned activity, helps you to build your customers’ understanding of the value of your proposition and the value of their relationship with your company. If you are not perceived in terms of value then you will be perceived as a commodity, a price and expendable.
Creating customers is the role of the selling operation in a company and if the latter is not working, the former will not happen. Sir John Harvey Jones observed; "Most British companies fail not in their attempts to be innovative or creative. Most fail because they undervalue the importance of professional selling".
Look at your "customer" list and ask yourself; "are these real customers or are they just people who happen to have bought something from us?" Many so called customer lists are nothing more than lists of "users". A real customer is an advocate and more importantly, someone who sees you and your company as an essential part of their business.
What is a Customer and why is it different from an Opportunity?
This may hurt but, most people that we call customers see us (if they see us at all) merely as a source of a quick fix, there is no relationship, just a transactional exchange convenient to them at that moment. The responsibility for building the relationship rests with the supplier and it is you who must take the blame if your customers are fickle, or spend their time focusing on price and what discount they can extract from you. If you are not perceived in terms of value then you will be perceived as a commodity, as a price, and expendable.
A real customer is an organisation who sees you and your company as an essential part of their business. When planning projects, and other activities, the customer will often contact suppliers before formal tendering starts to warn them there is an opportunity on the way. I have won many projects over the years where I could not meet the customer’s delivery timetable or where I have been more expensive than other bidders. On one occasion, I won some £22m of business over a three year period when my price was 35% higher than the next most expensive bidder and 52% higher than the lowest. My customer understood what they would get for the extra money by buying from me – they understood the value.
Building such understanding between supplier and buyer takes time and requires attention to detail and it is this that turns the prospect into the customer and eventually into an advocate for your business. They will evaluate you in terms of your ability to deliver, your reliability and the level of risk associated with using you.
Once a trusting supplier/customer relationship exists, you can work more effectively inside the customer both during the pursuit of opportunities and also between opportunities. In fact, much of the real customer creation work is done when there isn’t an opportunity to work on. Once accepted as a supplier, you will be able to build an internal network of contacts that will help you to move around inside the customer’s organisation, often in places unavailable to your competitors who are less well engaged.
Tips:
* The two perspectives; what you have and what customers might want, leads to the creation of two lists of characteristics which when cross matched provide a profile of an “ideal” customer. From these create the questions that you need to answer both through desk research and in conversation with the suspects and prospect.
* Create weightings enabling you to compare different organisations and quickly identify those organisations who are unlikely to become customers so you can easily qualify them out and move on to more valuable suspects and prospects.
Copyright © Performative plc 2001-2006. All rights reserved.
Creating Customers a distinct process - To learn more about this author, visit Phil Shipperlee's Website.
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Over 50 years ago, Peter Drucker said; "There is only one valid definition of business purpose: to create a customer".
Creation of a customer is a very different and separate process from that used when creating and pursuing opportunities. The process of creating a customer, as a carefully planned activity, helps you to build your customers’ understanding of the value of your proposition and the value of their relationship with your company. If you are not perceived in terms of value then you will be perceived as a commodity, a price and expendable.
Creating customers is the role of the selling operation in a company and if the latter is not working, the former will not happen. Sir John Harvey Jones observed; "Most British companies fail not in their attempts to be innovative or creative. Most fail because they undervalue the importance of professional selling".
Look at your "customer" list and ask yourself; "are these real customers or are they just people who happen to have bought something from us?" Many so called customer lists are nothing more than lists of "users". A real customer is an advocate and more importantly, someone who sees you and your company as an essential part of their business.
What is a Customer and why is it different from an Opportunity?
This may hurt but, most people that we call customers see us (if they see us at all) merely as a source of a quick fix, there is no relationship, just a transactional exchange convenient to them at that moment. The responsibility for building the relationship rests with the supplier and it is you who must take the blame if your customers are fickle, or spend their time focusing on price and what discount they can extract from you. If you are not perceived in terms of value then you will be perceived as a commodity, as a price, and expendable.
A real customer is an organisation who sees you and your company as an essential part of their business. When planning projects, and other activities, the customer will often contact suppliers before formal tendering starts to warn them there is an opportunity on the way. I have won many projects over the years where I could not meet the customer’s delivery timetable or where I have been more expensive than other bidders. On one occasion, I won some £22m of business over a three year period when my price was 35% higher than the next most expensive bidder and 52% higher than the lowest. My customer understood what they would get for the extra money by buying from me – they understood the value.
Building such understanding between supplier and buyer takes time and requires attention to detail and it is this that turns the prospect into the customer and eventually into an advocate for your business. They will evaluate you in terms of your ability to deliver, your reliability and the level of risk associated with using you.
Once a trusting supplier/customer relationship exists, you can work more effectively inside the customer both during the pursuit of opportunities and also between opportunities. In fact, much of the real customer creation work is done when there isn’t an opportunity to work on. Once accepted as a supplier, you will be able to build an internal network of contacts that will help you to move around inside the customer’s organisation, often in places unavailable to your competitors who are less well engaged.
Tips:
* The two perspectives; what you have and what customers might want, leads to the creation of two lists of characteristics which when cross matched provide a profile of an “ideal” customer. From these create the questions that you need to answer both through desk research and in conversation with the suspects and prospect.
* Create weightings enabling you to compare different organisations and quickly identify those organisations who are unlikely to become customers so you can easily qualify them out and move on to more valuable suspects and prospects.
Copyright © Performative plc 2001-2006. All rights reserved.
Creating Customers a distinct process - To learn more about this author, visit Phil Shipperlee's Website.
Like this article? Share it with your friends
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Kim CastleWith nearly two decades in the advertising and design business, with clients like Domino's Pizza, General Motors, Direct TV, Pedigree, Wolfgang Puck, Higher Octave Music, Hollywood Celebrity Products, Disney, and Paramount, as well as thousands of entrepreneurs around the world define, structure, communicate, and position their business for greater profits, BrandU(R) co-creators Kim Castle and W. Vito Montone discovered that entrepreneurs could experience the same power that big brands command for a fraction of the cost with the world's only process-based results-drive Integral approach to business creation. BrandU(R) is helping entrepreneurs grow with the power of extreme clarity from idea...to brand...to market(TM) and helping one million entrepreneurs become successful and whole so that they can make a difference in the world. Are you one of them? If you want to experience clarity all the way to the bank(TM), get started now at http://www.brandu.com. - Visit Kim Castle's Website |
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Dave KurlanDave Kurlan is the founder and CEO of Objective Management Group, Inc., the industry leader in sales assessments and sales force evaluations, and the CEO of David Kurlan & Associates, Inc., a consulting firm specializing in sales force development. Dave has been a top rated speaker at Inc. Magazine's Conference on Growing the Company, the Sales & Marketing Management Conference and the Gazelles Sales & Marketing Summit. He has been featured on radio and TV, including World Business Review with General Norman Schwarzkopf, in Inc. Magazine, Selling Power Magazine, Sales & Marketing Management Magazine and Incentive Magazine. He is the author of Mindless Selling and Baseline Selling – How to Become a Sales Superstar by Using What You Already Know about the Game of Baseball. He created and wrote STAR, a proprietary recruiting process for hiring great salespeople, and he writes Understanding the Sales Force, a popular business Blog and is a contributing author to The Death of 20th Century Selling and 101 Great Ways to Improve Your Life, Volume 2. - Visit Dave Kurlan's Website |
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Dianne CramptonDianne Crampton is an executive leadership coach, team culture consultant, author and president of TIGERS Success Series, Inc. Dianne has been helping CEO's and Executives connect their employees to their core values and goals for over 20 years using the trademarked TIGERS team culture process, which stands for trust, interdependence, genuineness, empathy, risk and success. To download a free white paper on behaviors that build strong teams and behaviors that will predictably tear them down go here. Dianne's contribution to the 2010 Pfeiffer Consulting Journal (an imprint of John Wiley and Sons Publishers) entitled TIGERS Hearted Teams is available in November 2009. Her new book TIGERS Among Us: 5 Winning Business Team Cultures And Why, Three Creeks Publishing will release in March 2010. To receive publishing discounts, subscribe to the free TigerTracks Newsletter here. - Visit Dianne Crampton's Website |
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Jay Kubassek(Jay's Full Bio: EvanCarmichael.com/jaykubassek) In five years, Canadian-born entrepreneur Jay Kubassek went from selling mufflers at a Midas franchise to revolutionizing Internet marketing with the 2004 launch of CarbonCopyPRO, a online marketing education company, now worth over $20 million with customers in over 160 countries.
As an independent film producer, his upstart film fund Aliquot Films is currently producing a films with Spike Lee and Abel Fererra (starring Ethan Hawke and Dennis Hopper.)
Jay's entrepreneurial spirit is irrepressible. He’s the owner of five companies, a professional speaker and trainer, international real estate developer/investor, extreme sport enthusiast and emerging philanthropist. Jay resides in NYC with his wife Jamie, son Milo and dog Cooper. Visit Jay's official website: www.JayKubassek.com - Visit Jay Kubassek's Website |
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Stephanie RobeyStephanie Robey is President and CoFounder of Pivot Positive, LLC - an Internet marketing business focused on helping people start work at home ventures. Previously, she was employed at The Search Agency with over 20 years experience in graphic design and 10 years experience in online marketing. She was responsible for launching the Conversion Path Optimization (CPO) unit where she and her team have conducted hundreds of optimization tests for online companies across multiple verticals. She is a successful entrepreneur having started and sold 2 companies and remains on the board of directors of the third, PhotoSpin.com Stephanie began her career in the direct marketing realm creating and producing direct mail for many of the major cable television companies and directly attributes her understanding of Internet marketing to those early offline experiences. Stephanie is a graduate of San Diego State University with a BFA in Graphic Arts and also holds an Executive MBA from the Graziadio School of Business and Management at Pepperdine University. Read Steph's Blog Meet Steph and Dave Sign up for our Free 7-Day BootCamp: Self Employed & Rich - Visit Stephanie Robey's Website |
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